Stephen Smith (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

investment in human capital is absolutely essential. In the course of question time and the sotto voce interjections from across the table by the Minister for Education, Science and Training, one thing is clear: they just don’t get it. They just do not get the fact that, in education, skills and training, as in so many other areas, we are now in an international competition. We are now in an international competition where how we perform is not judged on the old basis of how a state might perform against a state or a territory might perform against a territory; it is judged on how we as a nation-state perform against other nation-states in our region and in the world.

Across the board in our region we now find that the emerging economies of India and China, and the other smaller Asia-Pacific economies, are making far greater investments in education, skills and training than we are. That is why we now find our productivity falling behind. That is why we now find the OECD, in report after report, saying that when it comes to the international comparators we are falling behind—and that occurs at our risk and at our peril. That occurs at the long-term risk to our economic prosperity. That occurs at the long-term risk of our nation’s future.

That is why Labor made the point, at the beginning of this year, that education is not just a social policy issue. However important this point is, education is not just about individual Australians having the opportunity to maximise their potential and having the chance to get ahead. Education is not just about that; it is also about the economic approach to ensuring our nation’s ongoing prosperity. This is not just a social issue; it is an economic issue. This is not just a comparison between a state and a state, or a state and a territory; it is now a comparison between us, as a nation-state, and our international competitors.

Let us just have a look at some of the areas where we are falling behind when it comes to our productivity. Average annual multifactor productivity growth has more than halved, from 1.6 per cent last decade to just 0.7 per cent this decade, while labour productivity growth fell to 2.2 per cent in the five years to 2003-04 from an average annual 3.2 per cent in the previous five-year period. Benchmarked against the United States economy, Australia’s labour productivity fell back from a peak of 85 per cent to just 79 per cent between 1998 and 2005—almost completely losing the relative productivity gains of the 1990s.

Australia’s overall investment in education is 5.8 per cent of GDP. That is behind 17 OECD economies including Poland, Hungary and New Zealand. According to OECD calculations, in terms of GDP we spend on preschool education one-fifth of the average for OECD countries. OECD figures contained in the Education at a glance 2006 report show that our investment in tertiary education has gone backwards by seven per cent while other OECD countries have, on average, increased their funding by 48 per cent. That very same report concluded that a one-year increase in the average level of education of the workforce would boost economic growth by one per cent. All these things show the complacency and neglect of the Howard government, and that is why we are falling behind.

At the beginning of this year, when the Leader of the Opposition released the education revolution document, it made that point: education is about productivity and future economic prosperity. Since that time we have released three positive policy approaches which all go to this area. The first one was on early childhood learning; the second one was on encouraging young Australians to study and teach maths; and the third one, today, is our commitment and our plan for a national curriculum, particularly in the core discipline areas so important to our future economic prosperity: maths and the sciences, and English and history.

Let us look, very briefly, at the early childhood proposal. As I indicated when I referred to those OECD figures, we get the wooden spoon when it comes to investment in early childhood education. Why is this so worrying and why is it so important to make that early intervention? All of the economic research, all of the education research and all common sense tells you that the earlier you make an investment or an intervention in education the more chance you have of an ultimate positive, quality educational outcome. That is why you cannot just say, ‘Let’s get the kids when they’re going to university.’ You also have to say, ‘Let’s get the kids when they’re going to primary school and to pre-primary school.’ You have to make those early investments. Otherwise, for some individuals the prospect that they have for their ultimate educational outcome is not university, a TAFE or completion of secondary school; it is getting out of school before completion of secondary school and then running the risk in later years of ending up with no job, or a low-skilled or no-skilled job.

Labor’s positive plan in early education says that we will give all Australian four-year-olds the right to early childhood education. We will make that right to early learning a reality by enshrining it in a new Commonwealth early childhood education act. We will implement those reforms over a five-year period following the passage of that legislation, and our investment will be $450 million, giving all four-year-olds an entitlement to 15 hours of preschool or early learning per week for a minimum of 40 weeks per year, delivered by a quality teacher. To assist in that program we will fully fund 1,500 new university places in early childhood education at a cost of $34 million per year when fully implemented. We will also provide 50 per cent HECS remission for 10,000 early childhood graduates working in areas of need at a cost of $12 million a year. These new commitments show our absolute commitment to early education intervention and early childhood.

When the Prime Minister was asked about early childhood education during question time today, he was asked a question which reminded him that in 2003 a prime ministerial cabinet submission on work and the family recommended models for future directions of child care and early childhood education sectors. What have we seen from the government since then? Nothing! And that first example goes to the heart of the MPI: the government’s failure, over 10 long years, firstly to act and secondly to make the investments required.

A second area where we have put out a positive proposal is to encourage young Australians to study and teach maths and science. We released this because, when you look at how we lag behind in this very important area, the statistics are, frankly, alarming and appalling. A recent World Economic Forum annual report on global competitiveness ranked our maths and science education 29th in the world. Australia graduates less than half the OECD average number of students with a maths or statistics qualification. The national report on schooling found that between the year 2000 and 2005 there were 40,000 fewer year 12 students studying science and 17,000 fewer year 12 students studying maths subjects. Around a quarter of our science teachers do not have a science qualification and 25 per cent of maths teachers do not have a major in maths.

I put the question to the Prime Minister today: after years and years of talk and no action, what has the government done and what is the government proposing to do about the appalling state of science and maths teachers? He referred the question to the minister at the table. The minister said that our positive proposal was just a bandaid solution. This response was actually better than the remark she made on the first occasion we had an MPI on education in this place this year, on 8 February. When I went through those same stats—25 per cent of science teachers do not have a science qualification, 25 per cent of maths teachers do not have a major in maths and one in 12 maths teachers studied no maths at all—Minister Bishop said, ‘It has nothing to do with us.’

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