Craig Thomson (Dobell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In last year’s election campaign, the education revolution featured very prominently. It now features in the contract that the now Prime Minister and all Labor candidates have with the voting public of Australia. The people of Australia, including those on the Central Coast, knew that our schools were not being properly or fairly resourced. They knew that the quality of education, whilst good, was not the best that it could be. They were fed up with our schools and our kids being used as political footballs in the corrosive blame game between federal and state governments. The now opposition has not learnt its lesson. The member for Sturt is still playing politics with our education system. The member for Sturt and the rest of the opposition are cynically trying to hold up important legislation that we are discussing today that will benefit our kids. They are deliberately misrepresenting the government’s position to scare non-government schools and divide the community.

The now opposition has a dismal record in relation to education reform when in government. Now in opposition, they are still trying to stop the government from getting on with the job. In 2007, we had a Liberal federal government that had raised its hands in surrender with regard to reform of our creaking education systems. They had come to the political realisation that it was a lot easier to write media releases blaming state governments than to embark on real reform in educational policy. We had a lot of talk through the years from the Howard government but precious little action on education direction. As a timely interjection in today’s question time pointed out, their great contribution to the education debate was flagpoles in schools.

The then government did not strike up a national conversation on how our schools would teach children in a digital world, on the fact that Australia was slipping substantially compared to world standards in maths and science and on funding that was not giving all Australian kids a fair go. In education, the only reforms the Liberals seemed interested in were the so-called culture war issues. Instead of addressing a brain drain that was seeing our brightest go overseas to add to other countries’ economies, instead of properly resourcing our tertiary education systems to give our kids a competitive advantage in a globalised world, the Liberals shirked these challenges and instead reverted to their obsessions from their Young Liberal days, like voluntary student unionism and ideological positioning on how history is taught. The last contribution that we just heard showed that this debate is still very much at the forefront of the Liberals’ thinking.

We see the opposition continue this ‘ideology before any actual change’ tradition. A Victorian Liberal senator is currently running in inquiry into educators’ personal politics in response to a Young Liberal campaign, a campaign copied and pasted from a right-wing think tank in the United States, a campaign preoccupied with boring and obstructionist culture war obsessions. This is what the opposition contributes to the debate in relation to education policy. In this inquiry, the former Prime Minister’s favourite historian, Keith Windschuttle, said:

As far as I can see, what this inquiry can accomplish is to simply express an opinion. I do not think you should actually do anything.

That is exactly what we have had from the Liberals on education policy for years. They have expressed opinions but have not actually done anything. Due to years of inaction, Australia was falling far behind world education standards. The former government did an incredible disservice to a generation of young people and to our nation. Their scorecard is nothing short of embarrassing. Look at what happened under the Liberals’ watch: we were ranked 18th in the OECD in percentage of GDP investment in education. Australian maths and science ranked 29th in the world. Public investment in universities fell by seven per cent compared with an OECD average of a 48 per cent increase.

Imagine for a second that we were talking about the Olympics rather than education. Imagine that, instead of winning the gold, silver and bronze, as our best swimmers were doing, we were ranking only 18th or 29th. Australians would be rightly outraged. At the last election, they were rightly outraged at the position that the Liberal Party took to that election, the position that they had for over 12 years in government and, as was seen in the debate today, the position that, sadly, they seem to continue to adopt. If this was the Olympics, we would demand that sports departments invest more in swimming programs from the earliest years. We would demand that our children be encouraged to become the best swimmers they could be as a matter of national pride. We would not allow ourselves to lose a competitive advantage and slip well behind in swimming behind the United States, China and—God forbid—the United Kingdom.

Similarly, Australians are not happy with the way things are in schools. It may not be because of statistics or because of any particular data, but, when I speak to the mums and dads on the Central Coast, they know that more can and must be done. The then opposition leader in 2007—the current Prime Minister—brought change to a debate that had become stale and too obsessed with ideological positions rather than what was in the best interests of our kids and our nation. The Labor Party gave the commonsense argument that there is an undeniable link between the strength of our economy and the strength of our educational systems.

Nowhere more than the Central Coast can we see that we need to have this educational revolution. Retention rates for the Wyong shire show that 44.3 per cent of students complete years 7-12. This is when the New South Wales average is 65.66 per cent. We are 20 per cent behind the state average in relation to retention rates. Not coincidentally, we have one of the highest unemployment rates in the state as well—in excess of 7½ per cent.

The Reserve Bank governor, Glenn Stevens, made the point earlier this year that there are capacity constraints in our economy because of the need to reskill. These warnings had been given to the former government on numerous occasions, but what did they do with education? They effectively cut funding. They did not look to the future. They did not say that there were going to be problems. Their approach was simply to slash and burn and look at reducing the federal contribution to universities and educational facilities.

On this side of the House, we believe in the education of the country. We believe in an education revolution. We believe that, in a time of great economic uncertainty and economic upheaval, Australia must make real reforms to our education systems. The Rudd government is committed to delivering an education revolution from high-quality and accessible early childhood education to quality schooling, from training and retraining our workforce to world-class higher education and research. Key priorities for the government include improving access to early childhood education and working cooperatively with states and territories. By doing this—and this is something that those on the other side still have not learnt; they still try and play the blame game—the Rudd government will ensure all four-year-olds have access to 15 hours of fun, play based early education a week for 40 weeks a year. The government will ensure our schools focus on achieving higher standards, greater accountability and better results. Delivering a high-quality national curriculum from kindergarten to year 12 will lift the standard of every one of our schools.

Having heard the contribution from the previous speaker, you would think that we were actually proposing some sort of Marxist revolution. The arguments that are coming from the other side are absurd when you consider the lack of contribution that they made in government and continue to make in relation to the education debate.

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