Listening to Christopher Pyne trying to sell the Senate on paying more to go to university has been an education this week.

Life wasn't meant to be easy, as Mr Pyne found trying to touch base with Palmer United Party senator Glen Lazarus. "The Brick With Eyes" was never an easy man to tackle.

Meanwhile, the state's top infrastructure body has recommended NSW public schools start staggering starting times.

I immediately thought of schoolies when I heard this. I think it was the word "stagger". It certainly seemed like an idea you'd come up with after a week on the drink.

At the core of both plans is the push to squeeze more blood out of the stone. The stone being us. Which begs the question: Don't the Liberals want to stay elected?

As a humble consumer of political rhetoric, I don't know whether I'm a victim of the Labor Party education scare campaign, or the Team Australia Tony Abbott/Joe Hockey "leaner/lifter" austerity education scare campaign.

What I do know is that when I speak to a financial planner the world seems like a scary place where the only certainty is jobs will be sent offshore by nation builders who believe it's in the country's interest, or at least the shareholders, to put locals out of work.

That's a volatile formula for any politician to play with; one which could land them on the dole queue next election, along with their constituents. Talk to Denis Napthine about that.

Haven't the Libs worked out that we, the electorate, can't handle the truth from our politicians? It's the last thing we expect in fact.

We just want to be able to afford our unaffordable lives. So stop trying to tell us that putting up the price of education is a good idea, Christopher Pyne.

Hats off, though, to NSW Premier Mike Baird this week for his sudden passion for Aboriginal recognition under the constitution.

Nothing like a referendum on a worthy issue to take the focus off ICAC.

What chance a national security moment sometime soon to rescue Mr Abbott from his budget barnacles?

He's got a defence minister who wouldn't trust local contractors to build a canoe. An education minister who wants to make university unaffordable for all but the toffs (whom he so ably personifies). And no one seems to know what the Liberal Party position is on anything, except that cuts to the ABC and SBS were the leader's lie alone.

It was only yesterday we were bagging the Labor Party for being so dysfunctional.

Talk about staggering. Infrastructure NSW certainly has been in relation to school timetables. It reckons the innovation will mean "potentially increasing the number of classes taught per facility".

That's bean-counter speak for "why build new schools when you've got perfectly good ones sitting empty outside school hours because the stupid traditional school timetables enable people to have an unsustainable life".

The call for staggered starts in NSW schools comes after a study predicted that, in 2031, there will be a 23 per cent increase, or about 177,000 more students, attending school, mainly in Sydney.

The Education Department is preparing a long-term strategy to meet the forecast.

It's called "Holy Crap".

Staggered starts are already used at some schools to take advantage of students' greater capacity to learn in the morning and not drowse off in the afternoon, like they do in Parliament.

Breath testing for politicians may fix that, but NSW Teachers' Federation president Maurie Mulheron says staggered start times should not be about "piling more kids onto the site in order to stop investing in infrastructure at schools".

Tellingly, Education Minister Adrian Piccoli has not ruled that out. He can apparently see all sorts of educational benefits in abandoning traditional approaches to education, like building more schools as the population increase.

For one, staggered starts may ease traffic congestion in metropolitan Sydney. And we all know what a big issue that is outside of Sydney. If timetables are staggered, maybe we can delay the school traffic jams for an hour. After that, maybe we can delay building a better transport system in Sydney for who knows how long.

Once we head down that road, what's next? Perhaps educational shift work. Squeeze more productivity out of department assets, like buildings, and feckless teachers who have too many holidays anyhow.

Conceivably, doing doublers and triple shifts, kids could accelerate their progress through primary school and then maybe take up Gina Rinehart-sponsored scholarships in the Pilbara. Why not? Uni's out of the question.

Hey presto, offshore jobs start flowing back into the country as we undercut the Third World on cheap, uneducated labour. It's all about managing expectations.

Premier Baird has promised he'll deliver $1 billion worth of these education measures should the government be re-elected in March. Mainly to the private sector. Just so long as his $20 billion electricity sale proceeds as planned.

A light-bulb political moment, or will it lead to an electoral outage? When it comes to education and staying in power, we live and learn people.