Alex Hawke (Mitchell, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Schools Assistance Bill 2008 and the Education Legislation Amendment Bill 2008, a complementary piece of legislation. I want to note from the beginning that it is important in this debate that we do not engage in class warfare in education. Indeed, it would be a retrograde step to see measures contained within these bills ignite the class warfare that we have seen in previous education debates in this country. We are in the throes of an education revolution that was outlined by the government prior to the election, a revolution that is well underway at the moment. But in that revolution we do not see a return to pitting independent and private schools against public schools.

There are some sections of the proposed legislation before the House today about which there are some concerns in relation to that. I want to note that the member for Dobell mentioned the ‘Make education fair’ campaign. There is a sense that there is an ideological crusade that underpins a lot of the education reforms that the government is proposing. The ‘Make education fair’ campaign and the Senate inquiry that has been initiated are a response to educational bias within Australian. Noel McCoy, the President of the Federal Young Liberals, is to be commended for his attempt to inquire into educational bias within Australia.

When we look at the ideology that underpins a lot of what happens in education in Australia, it is interesting to note that the head of the Australian Education Union, who has been mentioned in this debate, Pat Byrne, said about education in Australia in 2005:

We have succeeded in influencing curriculum development in schools, education departments and universities. The conservatives have a lot of work to do to undo the progressive curriculum.

That quote underpins the ideological idea that is behind many of the measures contained within these bills. Indeed, the national curriculum will not be of benefit to people in Australia if it seeks to limit the choice of individuals in education and in educating their children. That kind of attitude is not helpful. There is a sense that some gloating is occurring. I do not think that we are achieving much in lauding our respective ideological positions in terms of educating children.

The independent and public schools that I visit within my electorate are all fine institutions. Indeed, I do not see a difference in the calibre of the people who are seeking to provide an education for children. They are all dedicated people. They are people who care deeply about the children within their care and who want to provide a high-quality education for them.

There are four major changes within these pieces of legislation that create some serious concerns that we need to discuss in this place and, if we can, remove them to ensure that the Schools Assistance Bill 2008 and the Education Legislation Amendment Bill 2008 are good pieces of legislation. Section 15 changes the grounds upon which the minister can elect to refuse or delay payments and makes it easier for the minister to do so. Section 22 requires school funding agreements to comply with the national curriculum by 2012, as specified in the regulations. Section 24, which I want to address in particular, alters the reporting requirements of schools, and includes new requirements relating to information about the financial viability and funding sources of school. Finally, there is section 100, which removes the previous government’s new non-government school establishment grants.

I think in some of these changes which the government is seeking to make—which were not advertised before the election, which were not part of the government’s election promises or commitments and which were not outlined in their program for improving education in Australia—we see some of the ideological attempts to reframe education in this country. At the moment, the government is preparing an inquiry into education that is to report by 2010, and some of the changes in this bill, it could be argued, are preparing a certain set of criteria, a framing and priming of the issues surrounding education, in such a way that the government will then seek to make further changes in the area of education.

The concerns that we have with this legislation are pretty simplistic and obvious in the sense that the government is setting up education for further reform which it has not advertised to the public. One of the concerns we have is that the public dissemination of all funding sources—be they simple school fetes, raffles that schools hold, parents’ donations or any other kinds of financial information—is a very interesting step to take. That is information that is superfluous to the allocation of funding through the SES. If you examine why you would seek to make that information public—examine what the real agenda is—I find that you come to a conclusion that, if you make that information public, you are going to be discouraging the flow of money, capital and donations into education. In today’s complex world, you see that there are many choices for parents to allocate their funds. They can expand their houses, they can spend it on gambling, they can entertain themselves, they can take the kids away and there are plenty of holidays they can take themselves on. Many parents, particularly at independent and private schools, seek to put their kids into better quality education. They make a sacrifice. Many of them donate money to their schools. Many of them spend a lot of their time, effort and hard earned capital in funding their children’s education to a better level than it otherwise would be. It is a sacrifice that they make.

I think this will be a weakening of our system in Australia. The public dissemination of all those funding sources will make it less attractive to people who do not want to have their donations disclosed to schools. The contention surely could not be that these people are seeking to do the wrong thing by donating money to schools and fundraising for their children’s schools, whether it be through fetes or raffles. Surely the government does not need to be involved with how much money every single school fete in every school around Australia is raising every day of the week. It is a very odd contention. Surely it is something that will be used to set up further arguments in the future. I think we are going to see a return of this section 24 in future education debates in this place. If a school is fortunate enough to have parents who donate or is able to seek or encourage parents to donate to that school their money and capital, be it in property, money or assets, that school is able to build up and use that for the betterment of the education of its students. That is something that ought to be lauded, congratulated, applauded and, above all, encouraged by government policy, because the more money that can be diverted from the private sector into education, the better.

The government is not seeking to fund that shortfall if this does discourage donations to the education sector. Seeking for the first time that all non-government schools be forced to make available for publication their sources of funding, however big or small, will certainly weaken the entire system. It is superfluous under the SES funding model, so I think it begs the question: what funding model is the Labor Party seeking to change it to? I note that the Labor Party promised to support the SES funding model before the election, and we know there is this inquiry underway at the moment, but even with that promise—an election commitment that they would support this funding model and we would not see a shift away from it without significant improvement—in place, it could signal a return under this government to the bad old days of the private school hit list. That, we saw, was a concerted campaign by opponents of the SES model that was designed to shut down the SES model and bring back the discredited education resource index. I come from an electorate which often is viewed as more affluent and which has a high average income. There is hidden disadvantage within my electorate that a one-size-fits-all, needs based model cannot take account of. We often have to look deeper than that to see where the disadvantage lies even in the affluent areas within our community.

Changes to the system of donations and recording donations and details such as school fetes do not seem to achieve a great deal in relation to this bill. Changes to the grounds upon which the minister can refuse or delay payment could be seen as reasonable to introduce to ensure the financial viability of a school, but the subsection involved appears to presume that if an audit statement is qualified then it necessarily signals that a school’s financial situation is precarious enough to warrant the minister refusing or delaying payment. A qualified audit report is too broad a basis for assessing the financial viability of a school. It may be the case that there are grounds for an auditor to qualify an audit that does not go to the financial viability but instead to a hesitation about a school model, whether a financial hesitation or otherwise, and the change would allow the minister to delay or refuse funding in spite of a recorded financial viability. I think this would be a weaker outcome. If it is demonstrated through a proper audit process that there is financial viability, it does not appear that there is a great need to allow a minister more latitude in delaying or refusing funding in that case.

The new requirement that schools comply with the national curriculum is another source of concern in relation to this legislation before the House. At this stage we do not have a great deal of idea what the national curriculum in critical areas like maths, science, history and English will look like. There have been some framing documents released in the last few days and we have not yet had time to absorb some of those, but the history curriculum, I want to note, is being overseen by Professor Stuart McIntyre, a former member of the Communist Party. I raise that here, for some of those members who were not here for the debate, because the member for Dobell sought to raise the fact that they were always under accusations of being Marxist and that somehow the members of the opposition here are more like the Marx Brothers in the sense that we always accuse members of the government of being Marxist.

But Professor McIntyre was a former Marxist. Indeed his major works include histories of Marxism in Britain and a history of the Australian Communist Party, which is one of my personal favourites. There is nothing wrong with having a view. There is nothing wrong with having a Marxist view, I might record, other than that you might be wrong about a few important points in history. But, if you have a bias, then there is the concern in our national curriculum development that we do not allow bias or indeed one-sided views of history to be represented in our national history curriculum, especially when we are seeking to form a curriculum that we are asking all schools to comply with and reducing the diversity and choice of curricula within the country. So there are some concerns in relation to who is developing our curricula, and I hope that the member for Dobell notes that there are some former Marxists involved in this process.

There is a lot to be concerned about in relation to where this national curriculum will head. We do not have many documents except for the initial advices on maths, history and science, and the final documents are not going to be available until, we are advised, some time in 2009. Yet the bill before the House today seeks to tie school funding to that curriculum’s acceptance and, to me, that seems to be a particularly poor framework—to ask for schools to tie their funding to their curriculum acceptance of this bill without understanding what these curricula are actually going to be in relation to different theories of education, and there are different theories of education and different models of education. There has to be room for some diversity and there has to be room for choice in some curriculum outcomes. So, with the initial advices at this stage, it does not appear to be suitable to force schools to tie their school funding to the curriculum’s acceptance. We certainly want to know more detail and, with people like Professor McIntyre designing the history curriculum, we want to have a look at the detail before we ask schools to accept the curriculum outcomes.

Even if there were no controversy in relation to the framing of the national curriculum, I think this clause does elicit some concerns. Section 31 of the previous legislation required schools to commit to the curriculum related activities, such as statements of learning in five areas: English, mathematics, science, civics and citizenship education, and information and communication technology, but not specific curriculum. To begin with, I think that the national curriculum will now cover only four disciplines. It is not yet clear how prescriptive the content and materials in these areas will be or whether it will be in a framework in which the schools can develop their own content. Again, I think this is another key point: if this is not clear in this legislation, it is a bad outcome for schools all around the country. We do need to define how much latitude in content and materials schools will have within these four key discipline areas. I think that is a weakness of the proposed legislation.

Schools offering alternative curricula may well be in a difficult situation in relation to this legislation. There are some difficult areas of alternative curriculum that do need to be thought out in terms of alternative educational philosophies, such as Steiner or Montessori schools, which will face great difficulties in meeting the requirements within the proposed clause before us. The schools offer specific curricula to meet the particular needs of their student cohort, and I do not see that as a bad outcome. There ought to be diversity and choice within Australian education. There is a requirement for an overarching national curriculum, but there has to be a good understanding between these institutions that seek to offer alternative education philosophies of how they will interact with the national curriculum and that their funding will be assured under the new system. Even individual education programs at special schools could be affected under a very strict interpretation of this clause, but of course no-one in this place would hope that there would be such a strict interpretation of it.

Legislation operating at a state level is also able to accommodate alternative curricula to the standard state curriculum. The Victorian legislation requires a commitment to the national goals for schooling for the 21st century implemented through the Victorian essential learning standards or other curricula deemed as broadly equivalent by the register’s school board. I think that highlights that we do need to clarify how an alternative school philosophy offering an alternative education would fit in with the national curriculum that is being proposed by this bill.

As discussed, the funding source is also a great concern but, overall, I think the goal of many of the clauses within this legislation is not stated quite clearly in the bill. I do think that the government are seeking to make further reforms that they did not discuss in the election campaign. I am very concerned that they are seeking changes to the SES model and that this bill is in some way in preparation for those changes, to establish a system where they can make an easier argument and a more coherent case for radically altering the SES funding system. I do not think it would be a positive outcome. If that is the change they are seeking, they ought to come forward and say, ‘We are going to break our election commitment to support the SES funding model’—which is the commitment they gave before the election—‘and these are the reasons we are seeking to break it.’ I do not think we should be supporting legislation here as a backdoor way of changing the SES funding model.

The final area of change is the removal of the new non-government schools establishment grants. Over the last decade we saw that the previous government saw merit in increasing the viability of the non-government sector—encouraging new schools where there was a community demand and a private sector interest which warranted the aspiration that we supported in terms of new non-government school establishment grants. I think that is a worthy thing to recognise. The aspiration to start a new non-government school ought to be recognised by the government and assisted. We ought to have choice in education within Australia.

The legislation which allowed for the minister to make these grants was in part 6 of the Schools Assistance (Learning Together—Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Act 2004, and the comparable section in this bill makes provision only for those schools approved in 2008 to receive grants in 2009. So, with the phasing out of these grants, which is going to happen immediately if this legislation is passed, Labor would appear to be returning to the position they took at the previous election—not the one that we have just had but the one before that—which was in their new schools policy, which was to make it more difficult to set up new non-government schools. Again, what is the agenda in relation to that? Why do we need to make it more difficult to set up new non-government schools? Why wouldn’t we continue what is a worthy program of allowing new non-government schools to establish themselves and offer choice of education within Australia? Again, that is not highlighted within this bill.

Overall, I do think there are some serious concerns in the four sections of this bill that I have outlined. There is a contention being made that this legislation is purely a funding mechanism. The bill does appropriate money, but there are a number of hidden barbs for the SES funding model in the amending bill that will be used in future education debates both outside and inside this place to radically alter the way we fund education in Australia. If that is the government’s agenda, they ought to come here and say so. If the government is seeking to make changes to the independent and non-government sector, they ought to come here and say so. I want to put on record my support for the independent and non-government schools in my electorate and across the country. We stand behind public and private—non-government and independent—education within Australia in the excellent job that they do.

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