Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I am asked what approaches are effective and what approaches are ineffective. Let me remind the House of the ineffective approaches of the former government. What did they do? They talked about teacher quality and did nothing. Indeed the Leader of the Opposition has been interjecting across the table, asking me, ‘Did you read my second reading speech when I was education minister?’ Well, frankly, who cares? Your second reading speech did not improve teacher quality, because you never got anything done. The last education minister of the Howard government, the current Deputy Leader of the Opposition, came up with what I suspect would make the list of one of the stupidest public policy ideas since Federation. Her idea about teacher performance pay was to correlate it with raw scores so that, if you were in an advantaged school, where kids were the easiest to teach, you would earn a fortune and, if you were in a disadvantaged school, you would miss out on the reward. She wanted to create a system which would move the best teachers to the schools where their skills were needed the least—one of the stupidest ideas ever floated in Australian public policy.

These ineffective approaches of the past have been discarded. The decade of talk and inaction is over. The Rudd Labor government is going to act on teacher quality. We are going to get something done. The fact that the Leader of the Opposition and the Deputy Leader of the Opposition got nothing done across six years should tell every Australian that the Liberal Party will never do anything about education that truly matters.

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