Annette Ellis (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity this evening to speak on the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2006. This bill provides some welcome additional support for Indigenous students by providing an additional $43.6 million over 2006 to 2008. The concern is that it has still left some major gaps in relation to early literacy intervention and for parent-school partnerships. I will now discuss these particular issues in more detail.

Of course, Labor welcomes the provision of $14.5 million for extended tutorial assistance to year 9 Indigenous students and of $11.2 million for extended tutorial assistance to TAFE and vocational training and education students. Unfortunately, this additional funding will be offset by a tightening of eligibility requirements for Abstudy allowances for Indigenous students under 16 years of age. A further issue that the government fails to mention in relation to this funding is that it is restoring the support that was previously available under the Aboriginal Tutorial Assistance Scheme, which is not available under current guidelines. There are major concerns with the current guidelines for the Indigenous Tutorial Assistance Scheme, ITAS. Funding is not available for students in metropolitan areas that enrol fewer than 20 Indigenous students, for example. Of course, the result is that many students miss out on the assistance that they desperately need.

The funding guidelines also state that funding for students in remote locations will be given priority. Obviously, we agree that students in remote areas require that additional support, but that should not ignore the needs of students in metropolitan and other areas who also need assistance with their reading, writing and numeracy. I believe the government should not be deciding which group of disadvantaged Indigenous students will be missing out. It should, in fact, be helping students, wherever they are, based on their educational needs. This funding system is very different to the open-ended funding available under the Commonwealth General Recurrent Grants program, which provides automatic funding to all students. Shouldn’t we provide this type of funding system to disadvantaged Indigenous students?

I am also concerned that the bill is lacking in assistance for early primary students. I understand that students will have to wait until year 4 before they can receive tutorial assistance. This flies completely in the face of research showing that early intervention is essential in improving educational performance anywhere. Surely we should not wait until students have difficulty after their year 3 test before they get that additional support. Indigenous children need urgent support. On my travels around some of the remote communities in this country, that point is always made. It is made in places like this and whenever you have a discussion with people on these particular issues.

Part of the difficulty in some of these communities that we are talking about specifically here is how you engage and keep those students early on in their education before they have a chance to start missing out on the advantages that education can give them. I do not understand why these steps are taken only for year 4 and onwards. Why do they not come in as early as is required—I would suggest from the beginning of their education—to ensure that that connection will occur for the life education of these particular students?

This bill does not address concerns about the way in which the parent-school partnerships program operates. Many parents and community members are now excluded because of the bureaucracy in these programs. Parents do not understand the new processes, and this prevents them from being involved. Schools still have to undertake considerable work to access very modest funding and they complain that they spend more time in writing submissions for funding than in designing the best educational programs for their students. What really saddens me is the context of this bill. There is a chronic underspending of Commonwealth funding for Indigenous education. The department admitted in Senate estimates that there was an underspend of $126 million in 2004-05. This is just not acceptable. What a sorry state of affairs when you consider how great the need is to provide this assistance—good basic educational opportunity—to these Indigenous children. These concerns are the reason that I support my colleague the member for Jagajaga in moving a second reading amendment—and I want to repeat that amendment here:

... the House:

(1)

condemns the Government for:

(a)

failing to deliver urgently needed funding for Indigenous students by insisting on complex and bureaucratic administrative arrangements that prevent many schools and communities from benefiting from education programs;

(b)

causing a $126 million underspend in Indigenous Education Strategic Initiatives expenditure in 2004-05 through bureaucratic bungling;

(c)

imposing impenetrable red tape that has led to a decline in the involvement of Indigenous communities in the parent-school partnership initiative;

(d)

failing to provide sufficient resources for early intervention programs in schools to raise Indigenous children’s literacy standards;

(e)

reducing the number of Indigenous school children who access tutorial assistance by making eligibility requirements more restrictive and short-term; and

(f)

presiding over ten long years over continuing gaps in educational and training participation and performance between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students; and

(2)

calls on the Government to reform its funding criteria and guidelines so as to the address the above concerns and provide all Indigenous students with the opportunity to achieve quality schooling results”

What we are seeing these days, in current times here in this parliament, is the enormous temptation which the government has fallen to of finding someone else to blame for anything that it believes it needs to be addressing. We are hearing it again and again: ‘It’s the states’ problem, it’s the territories’ problem. It’s everybody’s problem but ours.’ I think that after 10½ years of being in government there is no right available to the government to fall on that excuse any longer. It is now becoming a little bit of a joke.

I happen to be a member of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs. For some months now we have been engaged in an inquiry looking at employment outcomes for Indigenous people in this country. It is as obvious as the nose on your face: everybody we speak to, everywhere we go, what is it they tell us? It is education, education and education. With regard to assistance being targeted through to Indigenous children, as I said a moment ago, why bring assistance in at year 4? Why do that? Why only allow it for remote communities? Why do that? Where we are looking into employment opportunities for our Indigenous people, it does not matter where we go on that committee, whether we are in Sydney, Melbourne or out the back of nowhere, the point is that the same issues arise in terms of connection, encouragement, support and belief—all bound up in education.

While I am pleased to see the expenditure of this money—as I said at the outset, of course I am pleased to see it—and pleased to see something being done, there are deficiencies in what is being done, and that has to be commented upon. I think back only two or three hours to question time today when I looked up from my seat here in the House to the public gallery opposite and saw two completely full rows of quite young, primary school aged children with very dark faces from a remote community in Central Australia. They were visiting here in the national capital on what I believe would be a wonderful, marvellous opportunity for them. I looked at them today and I thought about this bill. I thought about them and their colleagues, their peers, their friends all over the rest of the country, and I thought: what wonderful opportunities are we able to present to these youngsters in true, honest fashion? What is it we are really hoping to offer them for their future? How can we work constructively with them for their future? Nothing would make me happier than to believe that their future entails a full, supportive, engaging education, at the end of which they have opportunities that at the moment most of them sadly only dream of.

When I looked at those little black faces today, I really thought about this funding and I thought about this government. I thought about how easy it is for some politicians to just stand up and say: ‘The blame lies everywhere else—with the people themselves and with every other government but ours.’ Thank you to the government for putting this money in but, please, have a full, honest approach to this. Look carefully at what you are doing and do not draw restrictions around it. Make sure that initiatives like this are available to as many people as is needed. The word is ‘need’. Where there is a need, the money should be spent. Do not hold back $126 million next time. Make sure you are actually spending it properly, constructively and with all the right motives in mind so that all of those children in the future will have something that we know they would like to have: full participation in our community to the best of their advantage.

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