Another batch of Blackwell/Holt nonsense for The Glass House.
South Australian high school students now have a chance to do a subject which teaches them how to be a politican. Great. A high school full of Alexander Downers.
When kids are politicians, does that mean at election time they have to kiss themselves?
The Youth Parliament syllabus includes such topics as Branch Stacking, Doing Lunch and Pretending Election Losses are Victories.
The kids don’t get results, they just get a tax cut on their uni fees.
They learn namecalling, lunch-money embezzlement, being two-faced and sucking up- isn’t that just normal school?
The kids learn buck-passing, fence-sitting, floor-crossing, name-calling and doubletalk. And the best thing is the school holidays go for, like, six months!
They’re also thinking of offering classes if you want to be a Dictator, a Tyrant, or even a public servant.
When you lend the kids the car, watch out that they don’t say returning it in one piece was a non-core promise…
With so many kids now learning to be politicians, there is likely to be a glut of qualified politicians in twenty years. Question Time will never end…
It’s a good idea though. At least in the future our politicians will be trained in something.
The class is arranged like an actual parliament. The Year 10s and 11s introduce and debate bills, which are then passed on to the Upper House of Year 12s. Mostly they don’t both showing up, and when they do they fall asleep.
They’ve got a subject called “Passing Bills”. It’s easy to pass: to pass “Passing Bills”, you just need to pass a bill. Once you pass “Passing Bills”, your past bills get passed on to “Passed Bills”, which can be passed by passing the passed bills from the past. And if you can undertstand that sentence, you also get an A in “Writing Bills”.
They ease the kids into it. Eventually they get to pass bills, but they start out with Pass-the-Parcel.
These mini-politicians still lead go to parties, but they’re political parties, where you play games like Tax the Parcel, Pin the Blame on the Opposition and Superannuation Co-contribution Chasey.
