2 days ago
Progress thwarted by educational inequities
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WESTERN SUBURBS
Re ″ Young tradies like Dylan and western suburbs professionals have this in common ″, 15/8. Congratulations to Dylan D'Emanuele for his perseverance and determination to enter a trade, assisted by Youth Projects. It certainly shouldn't be so hard for young people to gain a foothold in their own society.
Two adverse factors have primary responsibility for this. First, the Victorian government lost the plot in closing around 120 technical secondary schools, expecting high schools to somehow cater for academic and non-academic students, and ″warehouse″ unemployed youth to keep them off the streets.
I'd previously observed teachers in a now-closed technical school in the inner-west, witnessing how engaged students were in mechanical, construction and myriad other tasks, supplemented by classes in basic skills.
The students who flourish in technical schools need those educational opportunities to learn skilled trades which can take them straight into work.
The second major factor disadvantaging today's youth is the exportation of entry level work to cheaper labour countries. Those jobs used to go to school-leavers after Year 10.
High levels of youth unemployment are inevitably detrimental to those young people and to the society as a whole.
Barbara Chapman, South Yarra
New insights needed
Accolades to The Age for co-presenting the upcoming 'West of Melbourne Summit', and its continuing advocacy by their journalists for people living in the west side of Melbourne.
The spoken word cannot be ignored. New insights are desperately needed. Both sides of Victorian parliament need to listen.
Addressing the various needs of people choosing to live and raise their children in the west could address problems facing the inner city Melbourne congestion.
Christine Baker, Rosanna
Melbourne infrastructure delays have history
My heart goes out to those folk in the west who pine for improved transport infrastructure. I can only hope they do better than their brethren in Doncaster.
Soon after World War II ended, it was proposed to extend tram route 48 from North Balwyn to Doncaster, thereby servicing the residents of housing replacing the fast-disappearing orchards.
Successive political parties seeking to retain or reclaim the state's treasury benches eagerly supported the proposal. As is the fate of certain current infrastructure proposals, once elected, assorted reasons for deferment were trotted out.
The latest is that the hill to Doncaster Shoppingtown is too steep to enable disabled access. Any suggestion that the route be extended further to Box Hill via Tram Road, thereby looping the city with a significant chunk of the eastern suburbs, can only be described as a figment in the imagination of those living there.
(By contrast, Australia's first electric tram service existed in Doncaster from 1889 to 1896 when Victoria was a colony!)
Jim Lamborn, Doncaster
THE FORUM
Buried report
As reported by The Age this week, the government has refused to make the outcome of the 2022 Property Market Review″ public. According to both Premier Jacinta Allan and Consumer Affairs Minister Nick Staikos, the review is 'a cabinet document from the last term of government' and therefore does not have to be made public. What nonsense!
Like many others, I responded to a personal invitation to provide a written submission to the review. My comprehensive submission subsequently included, again by invitation, a one-hour presentation to the Nous Group who were commissioned to conduct the review for the government.
My submission concentrated on the need for auction rules to be reformed to stamp out the insidious practice of underquoting. This can be achieved by introducing a simple, new, easily policed rule that would require agents to publish their vendors' reserve prices in all auction advertising.
The REIV this week has finally agreed, after 20 years' resistance and following exposure of underquoting by The Age, that vendors' reserve prices should be advertised before auctions and it has also called for the review to be made public.
There's something very concerning about why the review is not being made public. Why should anybody spend valuable hours of their time preparing well-researched submissions on important issues of wide public interest, only for their input to be buried?
John Keating, real estate agent and auctioneer, Woodend
Rebalance tax system
The articles ' We've worked hard ... but it's not enough ' (14/8) and ' Spender calls for new income tax system ' (14/8), highlight the gross unfairness of our tax system.
Work, not property investment, should be rewarded by governments. Current property investor tax breaks are inequitable and they elevate house prices, further disadvantaging prospective homeowners.
It's time for Labor to rebalance our tax system and give younger generations a fair go.
Lyn Shiells, Glen Iris
Bendigo festival no-show
Re: ″ Authors ditch Bendigo festival over freedom of speech concerns ″, (15/8). As a Bendigo resident, the Bendigo Writers Festival is an annual event on my calendar.
Claire Wright, Jess Hill, Thomas Mayo and Randa Abdel-Fattah are the very writers and thinkers I would be attending to hear, in expectation of respectful, intelligent, informed and balanced perspectives.
I congratulate them on taking such a principled stance in withdrawing from a public forum which curtails their ability to do this, even though it means no writers' festival in Bendigo for me this year.
Michelle Goldsmith, Eaglehawk
AI flooding zone
Two years ago, I was offered a free trial for one of the artificial intelligence (AI) content generation platforms. I tried it and immediately cancelled my subscription. Even then, I could see the dangers of this technology. The information delivered by the platform on the topic I gave it was just good enough to provide a viable alternative mechanism for busy professionals to generate documents. But it also contained numerous errors and pieces of misinformation.
My colleagues laughed at my concerns. 'People will check the content and correct any errors before they use it,' they told me.
And perhaps, initially they did. My concern was that after a while, everyone would just assume the information is correct and not bother to check any more. The content is so quickly and easily produced, it would eventually 'flood the zone' and drown out the work produced through careful research and due consideration.
Fast-forward two years and we read that defence lawyers filed error-filled AI-generated documents with the Victorian Supreme Court (15/8). The lawyers were too busy to check the materials before they filed them and the prosecutors didn't bother checking either.
Heaven help us if AI is the future of our society.
Donna Cohen, Southbank
