Thank you for such a thorough response. I’ve heard somewhere in the distant past that Australia tends to run about 40 years behind the USA in terms of social norms. Whoever said that may have been totally uninformed for all I know, but I do tend to think of Australia as less advanced in a good way when it comes to leftist thought and practice.
I trust you are not unaware that public schools in the USA in certain places are obsessed with psychology at early ages as opposed to the more straightforward matters that should attend to an educated population. What I mean is, we have areas where it is impossible to fire teachers who think it is more important to know how to put a condom on a cucumber than it is to know who George Washington is, and what he stands for.
That was probably true once - it isn't anymore.
Whoever said that may have been totally uninformed for all I know, but I do tend to think of Australia as less advanced in a good way when it comes to leftist thought and practice.
I'd say the opposite in at least some ways - in Australia, a lot of your Democrats would be considered 'conservatives', and quite a few of our 'conservatives' would be well and truly in the Democrat party in the US. Tony Abbott, our current Prime Minister is a genuine Conservative - so was our last Prime Minister from his party, John Howard - but while he didn't win office and only served as opposition leader, the man between them as leader of the party, Malcolm Turnbull is not a conservative but a centrist - this is not intended as a slam on him, by the way - speaking as a conservative, I'm glad he isn't leading the party - but he's a good man in many ways. I'm just mentioning him because I think he illustrates the point, I'm trying to make.
In Australia, we've had openly socialist Prime Ministers - out of the last five Labor Prime Ministers, at least three of them wore that badge with open pride - Whitlam, Hawke, and Gillard. The political struggle at least in an electoral sense in this country is one between the left wing Labor party, and a coalition that includes the right and the centre - and while the right is currently dominant in that coalition, they don't have a lock on that.
Where I think we might have an edge over the US - and I say this with some hesitation on a forum like Freerepublic - is on two issues. First of all, I think most of our political leaders - even the left wing ones - are still genuine patriots. I may disagree with their ideas - I do - but I have little doubt that they are trying to do what they believe is best for this country. I'm not sure I see the same in large sections of the US left anymore. I also think there's somewhat less of an anti-religious movement in Australia - and that's very relevant when it comes to our education system - private schools here receive government funding under something that is a little bit like a pseudo-voucher system - less funding than government schools but its significant. Attempts to block such funding on constitutional grounds (Australia's constitution largely copied America's First Amendment when it came to religion) have consistently failed because our High Court has ruled a bit differently from your Supreme Court. What this has lead to is the fact that because it makes private schools cheaper than they are in the US, people have more ability to choose private education than they do in the US - a third of all Australian children attend private schools. This does seem to put some positive pressure on the government schools as well. I'm hoping the Charter School movement in the US will lead America towards the same type of situation - I firmly believe greater school choice is not only good for the kids who get to go to the new schools, but leads to improvement in the others as well.
And on this - while we certainly have some leftwing people who oppose it, we've also found a lot of allies on the left - people who have worked out that the best way to alleviate things like poverty is to improve education.