Kerry Bartlett (Macquarie, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise again to express my concerns about the activities of the teachers unions peddling political propaganda in our public schools. They are doing this at the school gate by handing out political material. In some cases they are doing it in schools by putting the ‘Your Rights at Work’ posters up as well as other political information and, in some cases, by even spreading this material inside schools.

There are three fundamental problems with this. The first is that our teachers ought to be promoting critical thinking and presenting both sides of every argument, not taking a deliberately and blatantly party political line on any particular issue. They should not be using their position in the classroom or the schools to support the Labor Party or to push any political view. The second problem I have with it is that their activities are unfair to other teachers who are professionally doing the right thing, are committed to the education of their children and are not abusing their position in the classroom to push a particular political point of view.

The third and perhaps the greatest problem I have with this is that the campaign by the Teachers Federation, supported by the silence of the Labor Party, is blatantly dishonest. Their argument that the Australian government has somehow cut funding for public schools is blatantly and clearly wrong. The facts are these: in the last 11 years, the Howard government has increased direct government funding to state schools by 120 per cent—in real terms, by 70 per cent—despite an increase in student numbers of only 1.2 per cent. So there has been a real increase—70 per cent—in funding despite an increase in enrolments of only 1.2 per cent. The Australian government has increased direct funding for state public schools far faster than state governments have increased funding for their own schools. Look at the New South Wales budget in the last year alone. In the last year, the Australian government increased direct funding for state public schools by 10.7 per cent; the New South Wales government increased funding for its state schools by a miserable 3.9 per cent. If state governments had matched the rate of increase the Australian government has delivered, our schools would have a lot more funding than they currently have.

Where is Labor on all this? Have we heard Labor criticising the dishonesty of the Teachers Federation’s campaign? We ought to have. Have we heard the Labor members of parliament criticising Labor’s and the unions’ hit list of non-government schools? This government is committed to choice in education—it is committed to supporting our public schools as well as our non-government schools. The Teachers Federation and the Australian Education Union should be ashamed of themselves for politicising the schoolyard in the way that they are doing, and the Labor Party should be ashamed of their silence on this. (Time expired)

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