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

Her whole point last Thursday was just so out of touch and so steeped in politics. It had nothing to do with the standard of education that is being delivered—for example, by the New South Wales Board of Education—and everything to do with politics. That is all the government are interested in these days. They are interested in politics and they are interested in making ridiculous statements like: ‘Themes in school curriculum coming from Chairman Mao.’ This minister for education has yet again been shown up today as being completely out of touch.

Following her extraordinary remarks, we had quite a lot of comment in the media about whether or not her criticisms bore any relationship to reality—is she so out of touch that she had no support from those who do understand what is happening to the standards of education in our schools? Unlike the minister for education, Professor Barry McGaw, architect of the New South Wales Higher School Certificate and former head of education in the OECD—that is, somebody who does actually know about standards in education—dismissed out of hand the education minister’s claims that literacy and numeracy standards are falling. In fact, he is quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald as saying:

“There has been a substantial attention to particularly literacy but also numeracy in recent years with state and national assessment programs and curriculum reform,” he said.

“The international comparison shows we are not doing too badly at all in those domains.”

So it is cheap politics—the only politics that this minister is interested in—just to get her a front page. Of course, she did get plenty of front pages that went to the issue: ‘Minister to seek federal curriculum takeover’, ‘Bishop wants same classes in all states’, ‘Demand for same classes nationwide’, ‘Canberra to seize syllabus’. All of these headlines came out of her search for Maoists on our Board of Studies. What she said in her speech that she distributed on Thursday night—

See this speech in context