The New Liberal Candidate For Wentworth Is Under Fire For Saying Teachers Don’t Work Hard Enough

The new Liberal candidate for Malcolm Turnbull’s old electorate of Wentworth is already under fire for saying that teachers don’t work hard enough. Seriously.

Back in June, Dave Sharma penned an opinion piece for The Age where he had the gall to suggest that teachers are actually underworked, “working hours closer to three-quarters of a regular full-time job”. He appears to have based that assessment on the fact that the school day typically wraps up at 3pm, conveniently forgetting that teachers actually do a whole lot of work outside of class hours.

Suffice to say, people who actually understand the work teachers do are not impressed. “Instead of devaluing teachers, we should recognise their work and pay them properly,” Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi wrote on Twitter this morning, and she’s got a point.

Imagine thinking teachers were *underworked* https://t.co/MsikuVoeah

— Tim Lyons (@Picketer) September 16, 2018

Remember when the Liberal candidate for Wentworth said teachers "were underemployed" and working only three quarters of a full time job?

Instead of devaluing teachers, we should recognise their work and pay 👏🏽 them 👏🏽 properly 👏🏽https://t.co/ERtHZRifOW

— Mehreen Faruqi (@MehreenFaruqi) September 16, 2018

In which Dave Sharma, the new Liberal candidate for Wentworth, glibly asserts that teachers do “three quarters of a full-time job.” A gross insult. I am in awe of the devoted teachers at my son’s state public school. https://t.co/qSUbgQnS9C

— Mike Carlton (@MikeCarlton01) September 15, 2018

As for why Sharma was writing about teachers’ hours in the first place, his opinion piece more broadly was about how he feels schools’ resources aren’t being adequately utilised for as many hours as possible. “The school system in Australia should be ripe for disruption,” he wrote, before suggesting ways we could “disrupt” that system — including by starting school earlier, ending school later, and using school buildings and facilities to run school holiday programs for kids.

The idea behind all this was to make things easier for working parents, who Sharma rightly pointed out often struggle to balance work with early school pickups and long school holidays. Some of his ideas, if they increased the affordability of childcare and before and after school care, might actually help those parents. It’s just a pity he didn’t take the time to fact-check and leave teachers’ hours out of this.

Anyway, this is your potential new member for Wentworth (the new Malcolm Turnbull, if you will). If you live in the Sydney suburbs of Paddington, Bondi or the surrounding areas, make sure you’re enrolled to vote in the by-election on October 20.