Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

Okay. I am foreshadowing that I am going to do that. I am foreshadowing that in this speech. That is fine. Why are these amendments so important? They are very important because the absurd situation in which the government has now placed the curriculum and the schools sector is that the non-government schools, under the act, are required to introduce the national curriculum by 31 January 2012, but the national curriculum is not ready for introduction, and the state governments have announced that they will not implement the national curriculum until 2013 at the earliest. So this minister is so inept and incompetent that he has a situation where the non-government schools are being required by law to implement a national curriculum that is not ready and, if this law is allowed to stay in place, the state government school systems will not implement the national curriculum until after the non-government school sector does.

You would think that the minister would fix that problem. You would think that he would move an amendment to his own bill. In fact, you would think he would have included it in the bill in the first place. Unfortunately, it takes the opposition to fix this minister’s absolute and sheer incompetence. On a daily basis we are trying to help this government and save it from itself, and today we have to foreshadow an amendment, which we will debate in the consideration in detail stage, to fix another government bill.

We could just let it go through. We could just allow the government to place the non-government sector in the absurd situation of having to introduce a national curriculum which is neither drafted nor completed while the government sector does not have to do so. But we in the opposition are bigger than that. We want to help the non-government school sector, so we will move these amendments. I hope that the crossbenchers and the government will support them. If they do support and adopt them, we will be very happy. With that, while the opposition will not of course oppose this bill since it extends our SES funding model, I do recommend my amendments to the House.

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