Back to school for Margaret

The New South Wales government (headed at the moment by Premier Morris Iemma) has a really rather insane policy of mailing to the parents of each school-age child a check (or cheque, depending on where you come from) for $50. To help with school expenses. I can't help thinking they'd get more bang for the buck if they took all those little $50s and pooled them to get some really cool resources for each school, or — as Houston suggests — used the money to cover the costs of books and/or field trips.

Predictably, this is also the time of year when we, like most other families in Australia, are school shopping. Margaret's new school mandates (as part of its uniform) sturdy, black shoes, which Margaret happened to need, and which were not cheap. (Nothing but the best for my kid.) When she found out this evening about the $50 check, she said, "Fifty dollars? Great. Now I can say that Morris Iemma bought me a shoe."