Rod Sawford (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a basic truth of the human condition that the majority of people, indeed groups of people, revert to type. This is particularly true when making a current assessment of this government’s May 2006 budget. The American term ‘Groundhog Day’ comes immediately to mind. After the significance of the post World War II reconstruction, the Menzies government priorities were totally consumed by a reliance on a quarry like mentality to the sale of commodities. The harder but more productive task of creating a high-wage, high-skill economy played second fiddle to the sale of resources and an overreliance on immigration.

Then, as now, there existed total government ignorance of the urgent need to invest in the human and social capital of the nation. Yet in the 1950s and 1960s there was a compensating factor, and that was the then educational leadership in all the various sectors of education in this country. The sixties began a whole series of educational innovations that focused not only national but international interest. In stark contrast to the lack of political leadership, educational leaders were hungry for new ideas. A South Australian director of education of that era, John Walker—short in tenure but long in impact—made an outstanding yet little understood contribution to the educational and national debate of this nation. He sent his directors all over the world to seek new ideas and source innovative approaches. It was he who began the golden age of public education in Australia—a system noted for its diversity and appeal, and endorsed by parents, particularly at the secondary level.

He created and promoted highly successful primary schools, an outstanding demonstration school system, excellent academic high schools, more than competitive technical high schools funded at a higher level, streamed high and technical high schools, boys schools, girls schools, agricultural schools and country area schools. As you would realise, it was a very strong, diverse system that met the varying needs of South Australian students and parents. The variety of secondary schools provided real choices based on educational differences, not financial means. What is more important, they had the confidence of the public. Technical schools were, rightly, funded at a rate 25 per cent higher than that of high schools—funding according to need. It was not perfect. Retention rates were too low. But compensating that to some degree was a more successful scheme of transition from school to work.

One of the most telling points in comparing today with then is the number of students studying higher mathematics at a tertiary or similar level. In 1975 100,000 young Australians were studying pure or higher mathematics. These people, of course, formed the basis of our future scientific, medical, engineering, architectural, education and manufacturing operatives and leaders in a highly skilled workforce. However, in just 30 years the number of 100,000 studying higher mathematics has fallen by 85 per cent to just 15,000. That is a national disgrace. That is a failure of monumental proportions. This time it was not only a lack of political leadership; it was also a time of poor educational leadership at all levels of education, particularly from academia.

There have been other failures, too, in developing the human and social capital of our nation. Particularly acute at this time are child care, Indigenous communities, disadvantaged youth, the mentally ill, parts of particular ethnic groups and youth in provincial and regional areas. I will come to these a little later. However, the key to that growing overall malaise was a lack of will from political educational leadership and misguided policies, no matter how well intended, that go back over the last 30 years.

The abandonment of technical high schools in Australia was a huge mistake. The strength and diversity of the public education secondary system was diminished by the setting up of singularly focused comprehensive high schools, a one-stop educational shop. It was wrongly assessed that technical schools were second rate. They were not. Most in South Australia were far superior to their neighbouring high schools. Comprehensive high schools were set up for the right reasons of opportunity for all, egalitarianism, antielitism and a fair go for all. Comprehensive high schools were also set up for the wrong reasons: envy and resentment of higher funding for technical high schools and their successes were right up there as the reason for the change, though seldom admitted to in any commentary of that era.

Unfortunately, in the secondary school system the strength of diversity and public acceptance was undervalued, and the policies that evolved were too often misguided. If I were a Machiavellian educational bureaucrat in the 1970s and I wanted to permanently damage public secondary education and its acceptance by the public, I would take its great credibility, strength and diversity, and replace it with a weakness—sameness. I am not suggesting that was the rationale for the change, but it could have been, and it was the result. The richness of choice in public secondary education diminished. Vocational education offerings diminished. So did the credibility of public secondary education. For thousands of young Australians attending secondary school the curriculum being offered became irrelevant.

What was also unforgivable then, as is now, was the total ignorance of important statistical information. To ignore those statistics that confirm balance and appropriateness in Australian public secondary schools and push poll a one-sided view of education was misguided in the extreme. Those statistics were available to everybody, and they were the Commonwealth department of education statistics of 1981.

Although few people want to acknowledge it, one aspect of the one-sided view was the feminisation of education as it applied to children and students. As it applied to the accessibility and opportunity for adults, it was right and the proper thing to do. To spell that out to the committee, let me compare gender balance in our schools in 1981 as it applied to students. In 1981 the differentials between the attainment levels of boys and girls at senior secondary level was less than one per cent. Today the differentials are up to 20 per cent in favour of females. How can that be when it is obvious that the intrinsic intellectual qualities of boys and girls are basically the same? In 1981 there existed a gender balance, as there should be, in the entry of boys and girls to universities. Today the differential is 20 per cent in favour of females. How can that be?

It is certainly true that in the 1950s and 1960s, when I attended schools, curricula and attitudes largely favoured boys and disadvantaged girls—there is no doubt that was the case. What the politicians, academics and feminists overlooked is that the school educational communities—for all the right reasons and in spite of political and academic ignorance, unheralded by anyone, including themselves—achieved the rectification of much of the discrimination against girls, and the national statistics of 1981 prove that to be the case.

The gender balance in attained levels and entry to university was simply ignored. As a consequence, the majority of boys—not all—have been disadvantaged, as well as a minority of girls. Much of the dubious research on gender equity—on which feminisation of education as far as students were concerned was based—is now discredited, still leaving a significant problem from which good schools have disentangled and are disentangling themselves.

But feminisation of the curriculum offerings was not the only negative. Other negatives have occurred over the last 25 years. The status of teaching is falling alarmingly. The remuneration of teachers compared with that of other occupations has fallen by 20 per cent. Men are discouraged from teaching young children. The cohort for mathematics and science has fallen so low that it will be impossible to staff our schools and universities in the very near future.

The curriculum is one-sided and unbalanced. Collaboration is in; competition is out—no wonder our young are getting obese. Synthesis of courses is in; analysis is out. Presentation is everything. Comprehension, understanding and substance are ignored—knowledge in; understanding out. Expressing one’s feelings is encouraged, self-reliance is overlooked. Verbal is favoured over visual, essays over exams, passive over active and so on.

Good schools use all the above attributes to create balanced educational programs. They always have. But many that have so slavishly followed the fashions and the political correctness of the day still do. This one-sided view of education has disadvantaged and angered many boys, none more so than in the deprived areas where parenting and support goes missing. Examples are found everywhere that socially and geographically isolated youth are found—poor areas, Indigenous communities, ethnic communities and provincial, regional and rural Australia.

The community may not be able to articulate what they see and hear, but they know and they bloody well act. Many transfer, if they have the financial means, to the private system. But that is not an option for most, nor indeed a resolution. From a national interest and skills perspective, this transition simply acts as a smokescreen to the underlying problems besetting education in this country. It is a failure to advance balance in education. It is a failure to invest. It is a failure to pay attention to the special needs of disadvantaged groups.

In the meantime our international competitors around the globe are seriously raising the status of and investment in education. This is happening not only in the developed world but in the developing world in our region. We are not investing—it is as simple as that. And what investment there is is wrongly focussed. We, I fear, will pay a huge cost for that neglect in our lack of future international competitiveness. Last year China graduated 1,100,000 engineers and 10,000 lawyers. Now, that is a statistic of a country serious about its future economic prosperity. The ratio is about right too, isn’t it? That failure to invest in our people starts right from the very beginning of life.

Take child care, for example. The whole framework and rationale of child care in this country is not working. The rationale on which child care is based is delusional. The rationale is not child care; it is parent respite. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with parent respite. It is in both young parents’ and the national interest that we maximise participation in the workforce for those who want to and must do. But planning parent respite and calling it child care has diminished it and created an inferior structured set of frameworks and organisations. If you cannot get the purpose and rationale right, you will not get anything else right. At least Labor has recognised aspects of this discrepancy and rightly suggested that child-care facilities should, for philosophical administrative and safety reasons, be attached to primary schools.

There are many success stories in the mainstreaming of people suffering disabilities and/or mental illness. Unfortunately, there are too many failures, with inadequate support in inappropriate locations. There is a need for institutions. As in education, the singly focussed policy of mainstreaming without support does not work. The failure to look after the disabled and the mentally ill has placed unnecessary hardships on parents, in particular health and welfare institutions and staff. A visit to any public emergency facility in a public hospital will provide ample evidence of dysfunctionality. I saw it yesterday when the member for Franklin was admitted to hospital. It is here in Canberra. Expectations on the health system to accommodate mental and drug related health problems, and the false economics of tying up hospital staff, security staff, ambulance officers and police is totally unproductive and a smokescreen to the depth of a failure to look after vulnerable people.

In Indigenous affairs there have been remarkable advances and changes of attitude, but as with mental health there are too many failures. There is too little variety in public policy. The failures are not acceptable in a contemporary democratic society. The administration of Indigenous affairs over the last 30 years has too often been timid, weak and focused on reaching a single solution. As in all of life, there is no single solution. Applying a victim mentality in Indigenous affairs can have only one result, and that result will be drowned in failure, negativity, blame allocation and consumption of guilt.

Policies for self-reliance and self-determination need to be multidimensional—different stokes for different folks—and suited to the individuals and communities they serve. Of course, there has to be no tolerance of child abuse, physical violence and substance abuse, but that has to be balanced with opportunities to educate, heal, house, sustain and employ. A dangerous public policy practice has emerged over the last 30 years, and that is the virtual abandonment of disadvantaged youth from deprived areas in cities and from regional, provincial and rural areas. Australia ignores the real needs of those cohorts of our young at our future peril. If we as a nation fail them and refuse to include their needs in our goals for a productive future, we will create, and are creating, a bitter, resentful and angry underclass in our population, ripe for enlistment in crime, violence and terrorism. They are doing, and will continue to do, great damage to this country. Only the blind cannot see.

Governments in this country are swimming in taxation receipts, but, conversely, the nation is slowly drowning in a lack of political leadership and the will to invest in its best asset: its people—a very small population in a large country. The wasteful policies and reliance on resources in the fifties and the sixties under Menzies led to a failure to insulate our country from the economic shocks of the 1970s and the 1980s, not to mention the loss of international competitiveness, particularly in our manufacturing industries. This budget, groundhog day, repeats that failure of vision. There is huge foreign debt; huge credit debt; a dangerously high current account deficit; little or no investment in public housing; token investments in environment, infrastructure and communications; a failure to take education and health seriously; and a rewarding of corporate and business Australia for all the wrong reasons, abdicating leadership and positive influence in both those sectors.

A refusal to acknowledge that government investment should have positive employment, national interest, environmental, economic and social dividends is poor policy. Simply playing the media game of managing and entertaining a manipulative democracy, based on spin and spear throwing, protecting vested interests and refusing to be a representative democracy by actively representing the legitimate aspirations of the overwhelming majority of Australians will—as certain as night follows day—leave a legacy that fails to insulate our nation from future uncertain economic times. The Labor Party ought to pay attention to that, just as much as the government.

However, the real colours and intentions of this government, other than strategies for low-skill, low-pay, low-investment in human capital and abandonment of the vulnerable, particularly the young, are on display in the government’s malevolent industrial relations policies. If the economy, as is claimed by this government, is so well managed, why would you introduce such a set of lowest common denominator policies to make Australian workers less secure, with diminished remuneration and conditions?

There are clauses in the workplace laws which suggest that no-one is safe from the sack. That is not raising the bar; that is lowering the bar. There are half a million businesses in Australia with fewer than 100 workers, employing four million people. Those people can be sacked without a fair reason. Childhood illnesses, family bereavements and commitments by workers would provide conditions for the sack. Fair penalty rates no longer become an option. The safety net, based on a no disadvantage test when moving from job to job, is abolished. Collective bargaining will not be an option for millions of Australian workers. Desperate for work, many Australian workers will be forced to sign low-pay contracts with lesser conditions. Of course, when the economy falters—and it will—these situations will be exacerbated.

The take-it-or-leave-it attitude to Australian workers is about a government that operates at the lowest common denominator level. While an economy is going well, it is certainly difficult for us to get the message through to the Australian electorate, but that situation is changing. To the horror of some government members in marginal seats, the industrial relations information campaign is beginning to bite. The economy is showing signs of frailty and the attention given to Spotlight’s AWA is having an impact. The Prime Minister, as Treasurer to Malcolm Fraser, has past form in this regard, but he will be gone before the end of the year. Groundhog day has ramifications for all, but no more so than for the current coalition government as they make the transition to a new leader.

No doubt the May budget in 2007 will set the electoral parameters for next year’s election. The pressure on the government will be considerable, as upward movement of interest rates (real) inflation (real) and unemployment become more likely. The faith of the electorate will be sorely tested. Make no mistake: federal Labor will be competitive, whatever the circumstances—and I await the challenge with greatly heightened anticipation.

See this speech in context