DOGS
I'd like to apologise to all you young people out there for my previous dose of spirituality. While I now wholeheartedly recommend dialectical materialism (look it up!) as the way to go, in hindsight my remorse rests primarily on my daily association with the Catholic education system.
As putty in the hands of a succession of nuns and brothers, young Dave was taught to believe the most outlandish things in the name of a religious education. That my parents thought that the syllabus was kosher is beside the point, whatever its features, you should not have paid for them.
Yes you! You tax-paying working people made it possible. The Catholic Church was the country's great privatiser. That's what they are called — private schools! And this was before there was a private Commonwealth Bank, a private Telstra, and private airports, roads and prisons.
So that now, after so many years of hard work by the Catholic Church, Australia can boast a private school system second to none. The church made subsidies to private enterprise schooling OK. It was the first to see the writing on the stock exchange wall. They put a crucifix above the dollar sign and called it religious education.
Of course, you fought back against the religious political industrial complex. One of the first alternative electoral parties in Australia was Defence of Government Schools — DOGS. But those battles in the early '70s were lost. Forget Catholic versus Protestant: this is free enterprise. Nowadays, it's private this and private that. It's the new religion.
Dominus vobiscum to you!
BY DAVE RILEY