Unless Australia restores its education system to what it was, it is doomed to continue on the path of economic decline.

This should be associated with a campaign to eliminate the massive waste in government, starting with their pointless billion-dollar campaign pushing the climate catastrophism fraud.

As noted here last week, it is curious that most of the mainstream media and government have ignored or downplayed the advice of some of the world’s leading climate scientists in a recent and important US Department of Energy Report. As is so often the case, shouldn’t we just follow the money?

Then those wasted resources could be used to do what politicians refuse to do: defend and water the country and correct the scandalous mess in education.

Given the warning long ago by Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew that, without serious reform, Australians would end up the ‘ white trash of Asia’, it is useful to compare the paths our countries have travelled over the last 60 years.

In 1965, Australia’s per capita GDP was around 400 per cent of Singapore’s. Today, Singapore’s is in US-dollar terms 44 per cent higher than Australia’s, in cost-of-living terms 117 per cent.

To make matters worse, Australia’s per capita GDP is going backwards. This is because the Albanese government has, under the counter, set a real net overseas immigration target of one million every two years, far greater than the nation’s ability to house, educate and provide water and medical services. Contrast that with Singapore’s highly selective, carefully managed immigration policy, which prioritises attracting the talent it needs to fuel high-value industries, crucial to its higher per capita GDP growth.

Singapore does this with 99 politicians who efficiently spend only 10.6 per cent of GDP. On a proportionate basis, Australia has 14 times as many politicians as Singapore. Totalling about  6,270  (226 federal, 544 state and territory, and approximately 5,500 local), KPMG says they spend 28.5 per cent of GDP. Unlike Singapore, they ignore John Howard’s example and borrow money to spend, in total now $1.5 trillion, with interest forecast next year to be $60 billion, much more than Medicare.

We should not forget that the disaster that is education was enabled by a succession of activist judges and opportunistic politicians who breached the strict requirement that constitutional change can only be effected with the approval of the people in a referendum. The original constitutional intention remains, education is reserved as a state matter. Had that been honoured, the strength of true federalism – competition between the states – would have almost immediately exposed poor policy in any one state and forced a correction. That’s how true federations work and how ours was intended to function.

Instead, we have an unconstitutional, muddled system run chaotically by nine governments and nine bureaucracies, infiltrated by the far left, with the resulting serious weaknesses only revealed after international comparisons were made possible from international testing.

Although Canberra manifestly fails in delivering its most important function, defence, federal politicians are unable to resist trying to control matters constitutionally reserved to the states, such as education, building dams and planning mining.

Just on defence, with a little over a fifth of Australia’s population, Singapore has a defence force of about 300,000, over three times Australia’s.

They do this through that nation-building institution, conscription, and by spending 2.9 per cent of GDP rather than the Albanese government’s delinquent 1.9 per cent.

As to Australian education, much of this has been replaced by indoctrination. Take the ‘cross-curriculum requirements’ impregnating every subject. Accordingly, what the great Keith Windschuttle called the ‘fabrication of Australian  history’, as well as climate catastrophism, permeate what is taught in the schools and in every subject.

As to the economic importance of education, economists Eric A. Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann have marshalled the evidence in their rigorous analysis, The Knowledge of Nations, where they conclude that a country’s economic growth depends on the cognitive skills of its workforce, primarily literacy, numeracy and science, defined as ‘knowledge capital’. A more skilled workforce, they demonstrate, is more productive, more innovative and better equipped to adopt new technologies. They argue that having a  workforce  whose  cognitive skills are significantly better (‘one standard deviation higher’) than the average in international testing is invaluable. It is worth approximately two percentage points higher growth in its per capita GDP. For Australia, that would be ‘rolled gold’ indeed.

International testing is available in the   OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (Pisa), which measures literacy, numeracy, and science and also provides an index of disciplinary climate.

There, politicians have allowed Australian schools, ranked 70th out of 77 countries in 2018, to among the worst in the world. This, of course, is a major impediment to learning. Meanwhile, since Pisa’s inception, Australia’s mathematics score dropped from 524 in 2003 to 487 in 2022, a 37-point decrease equivalent to about 16 months of learning for a typical 15-year-old. Its reading score dropped from 528 in 2000 to 498 in 2022, a 30-point decrease equivalent to one year of learning. Australia’s science score dropped from 527 in 2006 to 507 in 2022, a 20-point decrease equivalent to about ten months of learning.

Consistently a global leader, Singapore is currently the world’s number one, with scores of 543 in reading, 575 in mathematics, and 561 in science.

In 2023, the Australian government body, the Australian Education Research Organisation, released a study with a title that identifies this nation’s fundamental problem: ‘One in five secondary students has not mastered basic skills: How do schools help them to catch up?’

The fact is that today a significant proportion of Australian students are effectively illiterate and innumerate, something once unknown in Australia. This fall is a disgraceful betrayal of the nation and especially the young.

The solution is not to amalgamate bureaucracies as Education Minister Clare proposes. It is to provide sound education, as was once the case  in Australia and is the case in Singapore today.