Deborah O'Neill (Robertson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

is actually going to change, significantly, the outcomes for those people who have been left behind in a system that was not adequately funded.

This bill will ensure that there is a base level of funding that we know is generally associated, with many, many students, with enabling their success. But there will be other critical dimensions for which there will be additional funding provided, particularly in the areas of kids who come from a low-socioeconomic background. And why does that matter? Because the reality is: when kids get to school they are all at different levels, and it is important that we attend to that difference.

In some of the classes in which I taught my students as they were getting ready to become teachers, I used to show them a video of students approaching their first day at kindergarten. There were two extremes shown in the video. One was of a young boy whose parents were highly educated professionals who lived in a city with access to lots and lots of educational material. He declared that one of the most fun things for him to do on the weekend was to go to a museum and explore and experience that museum. In contrast was another little boy, the same age, born in the same country. He was asked if he liked to read. He was an excited young boy, and he indicated that he wanted to read. But when he went to get his 'books', the things that he pulled out were actually the flyers that had been delivered to the letterbox. They were his books. They were his only books. And his attempts to read were very, very noble. But we cannot begin to think that those two young men were approaching school with the same level of capacity to engage with school—the same level of cultural capacity and cultural assets.

And the fact is: when teachers get those kids in their first year at school, they need the resources to be able to do the job. It makes my skin crawl to hear the teaching profession so maligned, with simplistic solutions: 'If we just raise the score', or 'If we just do this', or 'If we just do that', we will fix the whole problem; 'It is all the teachers' problem.' Many, many teachers—indeed, I would hazard to say, the majority of teachers—want to do a fantastic job but have been debilitated over many years by being unable to access the level of support that they need, the level of support they need for professional development, the level of resources they need to be able to deliver the type of curriculum that individual kids need, the type of resources they need to respond to the different levels of kids in their classrooms. At the earliest age, when you have not got those resources to interact with young people, you end up creating a completely inequitable system where the tail-end drags the whole thing down, and that is what we are seeing, sadly, in our results compared to our competitors internationally.

We are saying with this piece of legislation that where you go to school should not be a problem. The quality of education should not be limited by a school's location, particularly for those schools in regional Australia. This government understands that regional Australia has been overlooked for far too long, and certainly was during those sad years of the Howard government.

In terms of health, we can see statistics that show that people have been dying of cancer in the regions far more than they have been in the cities because of the failure of the coalition to invest in infrastructure to provide access to proper treatment. In the same way, kids in regional schools have not had access to what they need. In health, this government has put in 26 regional cancer clinics. And in this bill we seek to put in the remedy to the distress of students, parents, teachers and the whole community of people in regions who know that their kids deserve a fair go but they are just not getting it. We are ready to redress that. We are ready to put money on the table. We are ready to negotiate to ensure that every Australian has a fair go, a fair crack, at a good education, and those opposite are determined to oppose it. The shameful comments we have on the record so far this evening just indicate how low they will go in their efforts to prevent that equitable outcome.

We say in this piece of legislation that it is essential for Australian schooling to be of high quality and to be highly equitable in order to create a highly skilled and successful workforce, strengthen the economy, increase productivity and lead to greater prosperity for all, because you cannot tell which of those children in each of those classes who needs those extra resources could be the greatest leaders of our country in the fields of business, science, the arts, or political and civic engagement. Every kid needs a chance to have access to high-quality education, and where they are disadvantaged we understand that teachers need to be given more money, more resources and more capacity to pick up those kids where they are and lift that standard.

It is often said that really bright kids will do well wherever they are. However, Australia's statistics are showing that apart from that very top echelon of kids who are indeed doing very well, hugely by their own effort, the system is failing to respond to the students who are lower down. Sadly, I have to say that is particularly the case in the secondary setting. There are many challenges for us to face but we will not be able to fix them by continuing to blame teachers. We need to put money in and make the changes that have to be made.

This bill says that Australia is a prosperous nation with a high standard of living and that if we want to continue to have that we have to continuously improve school performance. This bill is directed to that end. We need students who have the capacity to engage with Australia's region. We do have a focus on Asia in this 21st century. This bill will enable that engagement. Future arrangements will be based on the needs of Australian schools and school students and on evidence of how to provide an excellent education for school students, building on the reforms that we have undertaken so that we can get a picture of where Australian students are. That picture needs to be fleshed out to become much, much richer; a dataset collected about really outstanding success for students in schools. But there is no point in attempting to fatten the pig by weighing it more often. We have to make sure we put in the money to allow the teaching professionals to get on and do the job, and enable our students to become more and more successful so that they can compete with the very best to be in the top five countries by 2025. That is our goal.

Schools are formed when we have partnerships between teachers, students and the community. These schools will change our nation. They will improve our nation, they will improve our productivity and they will improve our civic life if they get the chance to do the right thing. The reality is we are facing a great challenge with incredible cuts in education funding at state level and this is not going to be an easy bill to negotiate through with the states. Since September last year, significant progress has been made and, in the lead-up to COAG in April, I am confident that even the Liberal governments of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, who have cut so harshly into the education budgets at the state level, will see the vision that is offered by this piece of legislation, will buy into that vision and actually believe that there is a better future for Australian kids, and get on board and enable us to do that job for the future of our nation.

Mr Shorten interjecting—

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