John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

No, I was just observing it. It is not their fault actually. Every time the issue has come up, in the case of New South Wales the state education minister has said, ‘Well, we’re not going to alter our curriculum because we think all the others are lousy.’ In the case of the other state education ministers, they have said, ‘We’re not going to have the federal government imposing their views on us.’ So it will be very interesting to see whether there are good national curricula and bad national curricula and whether the reaction of state education ministers will be the same to the proposal put forward by the Leader of the Opposition, which is essentially the same as that which has been advocated by the Commonwealth for a number of years. If in fact the state education ministers change their tune because the federal Labor Party have put up the proposal, it will demonstrate what we have believed for a long time: that they have been playing politics for a number of years.

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