The Pigeonhole

By Winged Rodent 

While perusing today's letters to the Dominion Post we were taken with this particularly astute piece:

NZ often beats Australia

If New Zealand ever had occasion to set up a Truth Ministry, Business Roundtable chief Roger Kerr would surely have to be its first chief executive. 
Not content with regularly misrepresenting the operation of education vouchers in Sweden, he has now recast the results of international testing to put Australia typically ahead of New Zealand (Business Forum, July 20).

Not so. If anything it typical, it's that New Zealand more regularly beats Australia, but there can be reversals because the data is too complex to justify the drawing of simplistic win/lose statements from it.

Not that such misinformation concerns Kerr.
He follows it up with the outlandish claim that Australian educational success derives from its high number of private schools, presumably on the assumption that if one can write two bits of unconnected conflicting information in one sentence, they must be causally related.

If Kerr is genuine about wanting to lift our prosperity, rather than cynically pushing the privatisation barrow, he'll need to start by educating himself about the difference between self-interested ideology and the truth.

Bronwyn Cross (not her real name)