Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to clarify my background. My authority to speak about education comes not from the fact that my children went to school—I only have a three-year-old, and he has not gone to school yet. It comes from 11 years of teaching in private and state schools and five years of being a union organiser in private schools as well. In the interest of clarification to the member for Hinkler, I was a candidate in the 2004 election, so I did have a bit to do with the previous ALP education policy. I assure those opposite that if anyone is trying to blow the class war dog whistle it is not this side of politics. We have a very simple education policy which is about giving the best education to all students in Australia. We are not trying to revive a carcass that is long dead. With that background, I rise to speak in support of the Schools Assistance Bill 2008 and the Education Legislation Amendment Bill 2008. The former will secure funding for non-government schools until 2012, while the latter will help improve education outcomes for Indigenous students throughout Australia. I will address the Schools Assistance Bill first.

This bill provides $28 billion for recurrent and capital funding for the non-government school sector and, in doing so, honours the government’s election commitment to continuing the existing indexation arrangements known as socioeconomic status or the SES funding system. It was touched on by some of the previous speakers in that it utilises the CCDs, the census collection districts—the smallest data collection districts used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics—of the parents of the children enrolled at the school. It was interesting to hear the member for Hinkler outline how a school that he was connected with had deliberately targeted people with low socioeconomic status to artificially inflate the SES rating for that school. It is certainly something that I had heard rumours about, but it was interesting to hear the member for Hinkler say that it was a targeted activity in some schools.

Under that system, the higher a school’s SES score, the lower the per-student funding rate—in other words, the wealthier a school community, the less it received in government funding. That was seen to be a reasonably fair initiative; every fair minded person supports the aims of such a funding arrangement. I say the aims of it because, as I inappropriately interjected earlier when I was away from my place, the system did not quite work. So many schools, approximately 80 per cent or so, are funding maintained schools. Still, the aims of it—judging a school by the wealth of a parents—are something every fair minded person would support.

However, in the lead-up to the last election the Rudd government made a commitment to bringing about an education revolution in all Australian schools, public and private, Catholic and independent, city and country. We wanted an education revolution to take place in all of these schools. We were not interested in what the sign above the school said or what religious symbol was over the school entrance; we wanted to make an assessment of what was best for the school community irrespective of where students came from. Our education revolution is about raising the quality of teaching in our schools, ensuring that all students, especially those in disadvantaged areas, are benefiting from schooling. It is also about improving the transparency and accountability of schools. Transparency and accountability are not swearwords.

The legislation before the House establishes a platform to help meet these objectives in the non-government schooling sector. As a condition of funding, all schools will be required to sign up to the national curriculum by 2012. The National Curriculum Board is currently developing this curriculum. I was interested to read some comments from the member for Warringah in an article in the Australian from 13 October under the heading Call to study more British history. The article said:

OPPOSITION frontbencher Tony Abbott wants school students to study more British history, saying Britain has shaped the world and should get the credit for it.

The National Curriculum Board today will release a draft curriculum which places a greater focus on world events in history classes.

Mr Abbott said he was in favour of world history but said the focus should be on Britain.

“People have got to know where we came from, they’ve got to know about the ideas that shaped the modern world, and in a very significant sense, the modern world has been made in England,” he said in Canberra.

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“We are a product of western civilisation, in particular we are a product of English-speaking civilisation.”

It is certainly interesting to see the member for Warringah’s focus on understanding world history and the important role that the English, particularly, played in world history. He does talk about the British at one stage but he seems to focus on the English; that is no disrespect to the Welsh, the Scottish or the Irish. Unlike the member for Warringah, I believe that we should have a particular world focus. I was doing a bit of research for this and asked: why do we have a subject called English? Charles Dickens certainly did not study English. Shakespeare certainly did not study English. He spoke English but he never studied English; he might have had a bit of Latin and a bit of Greek and some of the other classics. But if we delve down into why we study a subject called English, one suggestion is that it might be from Thomas Macaulay’s speech back in 1835, ‘A minute on Indian education’, where he stated:

We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue.

He was talking about the fact that the British were colonisers. One of my former lecturers, Helen Tiffen, in her book The Empire Writes Back states:

The study of English has always been a densely political and cultural phenomenon, a practice in which language and literature have both been called into the service of a profound and embracing nationalism.

There is a suggestion from Batsleer’s work in 1985 that the:

... historical moment which saw the emergence of ‘English’ as an academic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonial form of imperialism.

Viswanathan suggests that:

British colonial administrators, provoked by missionaries on the one hand and fears of native insubordination on the other, discovered an ally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of the natives under the guise of a liberal education.

From this it can be seen that basically the colonial administrators of places like India saw that the culture, particularly the literature of England, was something that could be used to help control the natives, so to speak. That is why they came up with this suggestion: ‘Rather than teach Latin or Greek, why don’t we come up with a subject called English?’ So, back in the early 1800s, they turned to the professors at Oxford and Cambridge and said, ‘What should be the works in the canon? What are the significant works of literature that the good citizens of India should be studying?’ So the chairs of Oxford and Cambridge at the time—in the 1830s, 1840s or 1850s—said, ‘Obviously the poets we studied when we were young are very important.’ Who had they studied? Of course, they had studied the Romantic poets—Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth. That is why, in the schools of South Africa, Zimbabwe, the Caribbean, India, Pakistan or Australia, every student, certainly in the 1960s and 1970s, studied Wordsworth’s The Daffodils. Every student studied the same works of literature as deemed appropriate by the dons of Oxford and Cambridge in the 1800s. Of the schools of English, one was created in Oxford in 1893 and one at Cambridge in 1917. That is why we need to unpack the member for Warringah’s comment about why we need to focus on English. Obviously he was a loyal student of English history and maybe of English literature, I am not sure—I know his football team allegiances; I cannot speak for his literary allegiances—but we have moved on quite a bit since then. Unlike the member for Warringah, I believe in an Australian literature. That is why I am a strong supporter of the National Curriculum Board. It is a great way to look at the flavours of Australia, of our national dish. I think we have moved on a bit from roast beef. I think we now have some Australian flavours in our national dish.

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