Australia not lagging. (Education).

The Organisation for European Cooperation and Development's latest survey comparing education expenditure across nearly 40 countries is called Education at a Glance. Commenting on aspects of it in a feature article in the Financial Review, John Roskam, executive director of the Menzies Research Centre, pointed out that on many indicators Australia is spending more on education than the OECD average. More importantly, the new report unambiguously says that levels of spending `cannot automatically be equated' with the quality of educational outcomes.

According to the most recent available data (1998), OECD countries, on average, spend on school education an amount equal to 3.5% of their gross domestic product. Our expenditure under that heading in 3.8%. Our spending on tertiary education is at exactly the OECD average. Australia's total education expenditure of about $30 billion a year is 5.5% of GDP, while the OECD average is 5.7%. `The reason for this difference can be attributed almost entirely to Canberra's less-than-average spending on preschool education,' writes John Roskam.

`What emerges from the survey is not a picture of a country lagging behind the world's best, but of a country doing much better than many commentators would have us believe. For example, Australia has one of the highest rates of science graduates in the youth labour force in the OECD, comparable with Finland and Ireland, and nearly double the rate of the US' (Financial Review, 19/6/01, p.62; Age, 28/6/01, p.17).