Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Teachers are not opposed to more training for teachers. When I heard that announcement, I thought, ‘That is a lovely announcement. Who is going to teach the kids when the teachers are off doing all this extra training? Where are the resources coming from for the extra teachers to cover the load?’

I thought the member for Jagajaga, in her contribution this morning, expressed it very well. She said, ‘These are the minister’s thought bubbles.’ The minister has a thought bubble and the states are threatened: ‘Unless you do what I say, your funding is going to be withdrawn.’ We see it with the history summit, we see it with reports, we see it this week with training and of course we see it with capital works.

The Commonwealth could be doing something constructive about the drift of students out of public education. Instead of saying, ‘We are going to fund private schools to a greater and greater degree’—of course I support funding for private schools—why don’t we have a summit about the future of public education in this country? Why don’t we say, ‘Let’s look at some innovative things to rejuvenate public schools’ so that we have a genuine competition—for want of a better word—between government funded and private schools? Through competition, we will get much better educational outcomes and parents and children will be the winners.

I am going to be a little bit controversial here and say that I think there needs to be a debate in this country about charter schools, about public schools having their own charter, about parents having more of a say in running public schools. I go to schools in my electorate and ask, ‘How is the P&C going?’ Some say, ‘It is going great—we have got lots of members and we are raising lots of money.’ Others say, ‘Actually, our P&C has closed down—we can’t get parents to come.’ If parents felt that going to the P&C meant they had a stake in running the school—if they had a say on who the principal was going to be, if they had a say on the values of the school—we might see more parent involvement and we might see public education becoming more attractive to people who are moving to private education because of its values.

The honourable member for Canning said, ‘On this side we believe in choice.’  Newsflash: there have been Catholic and private schools in Australia for 150 years or more.

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