Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

As the minister said in her speech that she distributed on Thursday night—of course the ‘Maoist’ reference had gone by Friday, because she could not find any of them:

We need to take school curriculum out of the hands of ideologues—

which of the ideologues in the New South Wales Board of Studies, of course, she has not been able to identify—

in the State and Territory education bureaucracies and give it to … a national board of studies …

That was Thursday night, and on Friday she said that the minister for education in the Howard government will decide what is taught in our classrooms. That is the position that we have from the minister for education: the minister for education in the Howard government will decide what is taught in our classrooms and the context in which it is taught.

Of course, her tough stance did not last very long. The minister for education realised that this was a bit over the top, so by Sunday she had done a complete backflip. By Sunday she was saying:

I am not talking about a Commonwealth takeover.

Hang on a minute. What were those headlines again? What were those headlines that said, ‘Canberra to seize syllabus’, ‘Canberra takeover’? By Sunday the minister was saying:

I am not talking about a Commonwealth takeover. My concern is raising standards, about greater national consistency in schooling …

Let us go a little bit further into this to see what this minister is really on about and see if we can discover what it is that this minister really believes. I thank the member for Fremantle for this. Back in 1998, when the minister first came into the parliament, in her first speech she said:

Our democracy depends upon the dispersal of power that state parliaments inherently provide as a counterweight to the federal parliament.

…     …         …

… federalism … ensures diversity and flexibility.

Extraordinary, isn’t it? She went on:

It is more responsive to local communities and allows for a greater sense of involvement and participation.

That was back in 1998, when the minister first came into the parliament. In July 2006 the minister told Meet the Press, after she had met with the state ministers:

I wasn’t pushing a national curriculum, I was pushing nationally consistent, high standards.

But by last week it was a national curriculum. So it was a national curriculum on Friday, back in July it was not a national curriculum and by Sunday it was not a national curriculum again. What does this minister believe in? What does she believe in? There are so many different positions just on this one issue. What we have had is an outburst of ideological language attacking the state boards of education, calling them Maoist one minute and then using that to justify a centralised takeover of curriculum by the Howard government. This is a very, very confused minister for education—a heck of a lot of politics, but nothing to do with what it should really be all about, and that is the standard of education for children in our schools.

I thought Maralyn Parker in the Daily Telegraph really pinged it today. Maralyn Parker actually follows these issues, and she said:

Be surprised we already have nationally agreed statements for English and maths.

Did that get mentioned last week? No, that did not get mentioned last week. Maralyn Parker went on to say:

This is where the Minister should be focusing—on what has already been agreed to and working on further agreements, not reviving Mao to terrorise us all.

However, it is the spectre of a national board set up and run by people such as Kevin Donnelly, who has the nickname among some academics of the court jester (based on a perceived penchant for pleasing the Howard Government) that is stirring everyone up.

Just recently he accused Australia of having dumbed-down and politically correct curriculums—

I seem to have heard that from the minister for education—

but then exhorted us to follow US-style curriculum development.

No doubt we will get that from the minister for education too. The article went on:

Meanwhile, Australian students beat the socks off US students in every subject in all national comparisons and consistently produce much higher academic standards.

Once again, the minister for education is extraordinarily out of touch.

Now we see the minister copping some pretty hefty incoming from her own side. I thought there were some pretty to-the-point criticisms in the West Australian newspaper today. The West Australian today quoted Peter Collier, the Western Australian Liberal education spokesman and, until today, I understand, a staunch ally of the minister:

“To suggest that the Federal Government has the panacea for success in education is naive in the extreme. If the Federal Government wants to have a fight over State issues, I’ll just say bring it on.”

So we are going to have a good fight between a Western Australian federal minister for education and her state opposition counterpart.

Another senior Liberal from Western Australia, Norman Moore, also hit out at the education minister’s plan for a national curriculum, labelling it—and I think this guy got it right—an exercise in ‘greed and power’. On Monday, Jeff Kennett warned that we could end up with the ‘lowest common denominator’ if we have a single national curriculum. Former National Party senator John Stone said he was against this thing being centralised in Canberra. He said, ‘I think that would be an absolute bloody disaster.’ So we have had some extraordinary incoming from the minister’s own side.

It does not seem that it is only in this area of national curriculum, though, that this minister for education is confused. In fact, there was a comment from the Minister for Health and Ageing, Tony Abbott, in today’s Sydney Morning Herald. It was buried a bit, but I thought I would draw it to people’s attention in this matter of public importance debate. It really does, once again, humiliate the minister for education. The minister for health said:

... the (history) summit’s recommendation that students should develop their understanding of Australian society “by pursuing a series of open-ended questions” sounds like more of the fact-free “thematic stew” that has so dismayed narrative historians.

That was the minister for health on the minister for education’s history summit. The core of this humiliation from the health minister is his very deliberate use of the Prime Minister’s primary insult—thematic stew—in describing the outcomes of her summit.

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