Mike Carlton SMH 24 May 2014: Our five-year-old son came home from school the other day with a lurid drawing of a Mutant Ninja Turtle in full cry. Apparently they are a craze again. I did it in Scripture, he announced proudly. He didnt, actually. He did it in whatever class they send you to when your parents dont want you to do Scripture. His state public school, otherwise excellent in every way, does not have the teaching resources to provide him with a proper alternative to god-bothering. So the non-Scripture children – who seem to be most of them – sit there drawing aimlessly. This annoys me a lot. I resent it because this budget has $245 million to fritter away on putting chaplains into schools even as it slashes education funding for the states and territories and prepares to throw the Gonski reforms overboard in a couple of years. It is a wrongful sop to the Christian lobby, and no mistake. Although to be fair, its not just a Tory sop. To her discredit, Julia Gillard got in on the act as well, forking out $222 million for school chaplains in her 2011 budget, more than double the money John Howard had provided. At least under Labor schools were also permitted to hire qualified youth counsellors, not just parsons and preachers, but the Abbott government has kyboshed that. I know all the arguments. We are a society based on Judaeo-Christian values. I accept any literate person should have at least an acquaintance with the Bible, if only for the splendour of its language. But if you want to be a believing Christian, there are places you can do it. They are called churches, and there is one near you. In 2012, a Queensland father of six, Ron Williams, won a High Court challenge to the chaplaincy program. Labor swiftly fiddled the law to get around that, but Williams is now having another run at it. The best of luck to him.
Posted on: Sat, 24 May 2014 08:45:26 +0000
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