Peter Dutton has followed the DOGE playbook (we resent writing DOGE as much as you hate reading it) and has started in attacking the department of education.

This is not new for the Coalition – Alan Tudge’s final acts as a minister was to try and force a change to the school curriculum

Dutton took aim at the education department while speaking at a Sky After Dark event set up in his honour on Monday night, which you can see below, but to save you, here is the main part where he echoes the shadow US commander in chief, Elon Musk:

The Commonwealth Government doesn’t own or run a school, and which is why people ask why we’ve got a department of thousands and thousands of people in Canberra called the education department if we don’t have a school and don’t employ a teacher, but we do provide funding to the state governments, and we can condition that funding

As the SMH and others have pointed out, the federal education department DOESN’T employ thousands and thousands of people in Canberra. It employs 1,639 people.

And I mean, I know I only barely have a bachelor’s degree, but I am pretty sure that not everyone who works for the department of education is meant to be a teacher or work in a school. That’s because I learnt at my public school, that the federal government gives the funding and the states are responsible for the services. Like schools. And given that across Australia there are just under 10,000 schools, SOMEONE has to administer that funding. Because the ‘independent’ schools also receive funding, not just the state-run schools. And then there is the curriculum, which the federal department helps to create, training, processing of payments, IT departments, general administration – you know, all the things that happen in the backend which become very, very obvious when they are missing.