Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Service Economy, Small Business and Independent Contractors) Share this | Hansard source

It would be worth while for the next speaker, the member for Macquarie, who has just interjected, to have a good look at the Hansard of the minister alleging that Labor is obsessed with training and that young people should just go straight into the workforce. This was the debate over withdrawing the pensioner education supplement for a selected category of disability support pensioners. Why on earth would you withdraw the pensioner education supplement for disability support pensioners? I thought the government was arguing that more disability support pensioners should go back into or participate in the workforce. Okay, if that is the argument, fine, give them the capacity to do so by giving them a little bit of support—and remember the pensioner education supplement is a small amount of money—to allow them to get the skills to re-enter the workforce or enter it for the first time. But we have had the Minister for Workforce Participation saying that the pensioner education supplement should be denied to such people and Labor should be supporting disability support pensioners going into the workforce but not acquiring the necessary skills to make them attractive and competitive in the workforce. The member for Macquarie would do very well to have a look at that particular exchange.

The fact is that education is the greatest investment that we can possibly make. I note here again in relation to another part of this legislation that there is an amendment to provide around $9½ million for the Literacy, Numeracy and Special Learning Needs Program to continue funding for the program in 2008. Previously no funds were allocated for 2008. Of course, Labor supports that. We have said so many times that the key to dealing with disadvantage in this country is to improve the literacy and numeracy of young people—disadvantaged young people whose parents perhaps may not have had the same literacy and numeracy training that others have had and so you get this cycle. As a result of that the child may not get the tuition at home and therefore needs early childhood development and early intervention to help them with literacy and numeracy.

Labor fully supports that and that is why Labor Leader Kevin Rudd announced in January a range of initiatives under the heading of ‘the education revolution’. Kevin Rudd understands the importance of these measures in breaking that cycle of dependency. Labor fully supports any measures to improve literacy and numeracy in this country. In fact, I can indicate that the Reading Recovery program was implemented in Queensland. People ask, ‘What happened under Kevin Rudd when he was in the cabinet office in Queensland?’ I can tell you something very good that happened under Kevin Rudd when he was in the cabinet office in Queensland: the Goss Labor government implemented the Reading Recovery program, which has proved very effective in identifying young people, through the year 2 and then the year 5 diagnostic net, at a very early age who are experiencing difficulty with literacy and numeracy. Those children who are caught in the net are identified and then given extra remedial support.

So we do not need any lectures from this government about the value of literacy and numeracy support. What we do need, however, is to ensure that our teachers are fully capable of providing the best education possible to our young people. I pay tribute to the teaching profession, because it is a profession that overwhelmingly is full of dedicated people—dedicated to improving education opportunities for young people.

There is a debate going on at the moment about merit based pay arrangements for teachers. It has long been our contention that we should be trying to locate the best teachers in the most disadvantaged schools, because that is where they can do the most good. The education minister, of course, has been saying that there should be a performance based pay system and that that system should be partially funded by the Commonwealth. That is something that in principle we can find some comfort in, but the Treasurer of this country finds no comfort in it at all, because he has rebuffed the education minister, saying that the states can handle all that. So it is back onto the blame game: if we do not have the best teachers in the most disadvantaged schools, it is all the fault of the states.

The education minister and the Treasurer are going to have to sort this out. I fear that the Treasurer is going to prevail, because he controls the purse strings, but it is a very good idea that we do everything we can to ensure that the most disadvantaged in our community benefit from having the best teachers. If that involves some sort of merit based pay system, then I am all for it. There is no perfect system of merit based pay; that is generally acknowledged. If you base it, for example, on the marks that kids get at school, intuitively that seems a bit appealing, but then of course you can find a situation where a teacher teaches the test in order to get the kids’ marks up in order to get the merit based pay. Another proposal is for the principal to decide the merit based pay of various teachers within a particular school. Again, at first glance, that seems to be a pretty good idea. It does, however, raise issues of tensions within the school as some get merit based pay and others do not. It is not a perfect system either. Another possibility that has been mooted is that parents and students decide which teachers should get extra remuneration for their performance. You can see again that there would be some appeal to that but also some pitfalls.

The point I am making is that there is no perfect system of merit based pay, but it is an argument that we should have. It is a debate that we should have in this country, because otherwise we have a system of teaching where the only basis of getting extra pay is years of experience rather than actual performance or merit. I think that that is a debate whose time has come, but it is a debate which has been stifled on the government side by the Treasurer’s proclamation that there will be no federal support—no Commonwealth support at all—for a merit based pay system of teaching in this country. That is a great pity.

I will finish where I began in terms of support for the Investing in Our Schools Program, but I also want to point to the dramatic differences between the attitudes of the coalition government and the Labor opposition toward education and completing year 12. The OECD released a major report last year, as it does every year, called Education at a glance. It is a very large document that compares the performance of various OECD member countries, but it had a special section, as these reports tend to do. The special section in the 2006 edition is about the importance of finishing high school. That OECD report said that the completion of high school is now the minimum education requirement for young people to participate in the workforce through their working lives. What the OECD is really telling us is that everyone is moving forward at different paces, but the problem is that a lot of countries that were behind us are moving forward at a much faster pace than Australia and the consequence will be that, while this government is sitting around playing the blame game in the federal parliament, other countries are going to whiz by us. There are already about eight countries that have high school completion rates above 90 per cent. Australia’s high school completion rate is around 70 per cent—maybe 75 per cent, depending on which measures you use—but the problem is it is falling. The Prime Minister thinks that is good. Let us understand this: the Prime Minister thinks it is good that young people drop out of school early because he says, ‘They’ll get a trade.’

I released some statistics from the ABS which confirmed that young people who go to university get paid much more through their lifetime than young people who do not finish year 12 and drop out early. Their lifetime prospects are so much better. This is the great divide between us and the coalition, which does not have its heart in investing in education. I acknowledge the value of this particular program, but only through the election of a Labor government will we truly have an education revolution in this country.

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