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

With considerable pride and pleasure, I rise to speak to the bill before the House, the Australian Education (Consequential and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2013. We have had some rather interesting contributions here this afternoon from my colleague the member for Moreton, who, like me, before entering parliament spent a period of time as a teacher. I spent considerably more time in the classroom, I think, than the member for Moreton. The member for Lingiari, who is sitting there as well, is another teacher. I have to say that being a teacher is a professional experience in my life of which I am incredibly proud. I am one of the hundreds of thousands of Australians who became members of that great profession because, once upon a time in this country—well over a century ago—a man with vision for the future of the country, Sir Henry Parkes, responded to an understanding that grew at that time around the world about the power of education to change lives, about the importance of it for society and about the challenge to liberate children, through education, to the possibilities of reaching their full potential.

Happily, we have had a very successful range of schools on offer for young Australians to become a part of; but the reality is that in the last 40 years, since the last major inquiry into the outcomes of schooling was undertaken through the Whitlam era, we have seen a degradation of funding of schools to a point that, when the Gonski review was undertaken recently, it was found that young people who had started school together 10 years ago—young Australians born into the same country—through their experience of going to different schools and born into different families, being far away from the city, being from an Indigenous family or being born with a language other than English spoken before they entered school, when they hit school were unable to get the type of resourcing and education opportunities they needed to build up the skills to enable them to be as successful at school as peers who were from non-Indigenous family backgrounds or living in the city.

Essentially, we have a system in Australia where there is a great inequity in the outcomes of schooling. We know that there is a basic amount of funding that each school student needs. We also know that we need to provide additional funding for those five critical areas in which we can transform people's learning. The reality is that we want a fair system. We want to make up the gap of a failure to invest over many years in this country and do it in a way that ensures a great future for every young Australian who shows up at the school gate in kindergarten, no matter which school they go to, no matter what state they live in and no matter what family background they may have. It is an indictment on our country that poor children are failing at school. We simply cannot allow that to continue.

This morning I was very pleased to make some points in the public place about my hope for the young children who were starting school in Victoria. I am pleased to say that in New South Wales the Premier of our state has seen the light with at least one policy area minister. He has signed up to the reforms that we are proposing here to give to our country an option for better schools and a chance for all of our young people to have a great education. Sadly, at this point in time kids south of the border in Victoria are looking at a leadership team in the conservative leader of that state and his Minister for Education, Martin Dixon, who are deliberately going out into the public place and claiming that some schools will be worse off under the plan that we are proposing. The reality is that every school in every sector will get increases in funding every single year.

The deliberate misrepresentation of the sorts of funding options that are available for every student in every school is really mischief-making in the extreme. It is one thing for people to make claims that might give them a short-term political advantage. That is always a dangerous path to take, in my view. I think the Australian people see through that and expect us to do better on both sides of the parliament. The reality is it is totally atrocious to play with the futures of children by declaring incorrect facts and making the parents of schoolchildren, teachers, school systems and the whole community think there is something wrong with investing an additional $4 billion in the education of their children. That is quite disgraceful.

I hope that as the week continues the Victorian education minister, Martin Dixon, will really take to heart his responsibility to ensure the young people of Victoria have the right and opportunity to see a future for their own education where they will receive the funding they need to be successful and the loadings we propose to add into the baseload of funding will provide the teachers with additional resources and the schools who need additional resources in the form of teachers and practical physical resources will get what they need to make sure it is possible for kids to learn.

I could best describe the reality through the experience of meeting a wonderful young woman in my electorate just over the weekend. She has a son who has struggled at school. He has been a part of the Reading Recovery program at his school. That is a renowned education program started by Marie Clay, and the outcomes for many children are absolutely life transforming. Kids who cannot read become readers. For her son, that program has not worked. He has now been withdrawn from that program; and, because there is no funding capacity for that school, there is now no special learning program for her son. This woman in particular understands why this is so vital. In her conversation with me she declared that she herself cannot read. She has survived her life and runs her own small business using her memory in an incredibly impressive way to manage the literacy demands of our community, but she more than anyone understands why her son needs the sort of program that this investment that we will put into schools—that this money that we will give to teachers and principals to do the right thing by kids—will pay for, but only under this Labor government.

Those opposite say the system is not broken. Those opposite say they do not need to put the money into schools. Those opposite say those children do not need those resources. The reality is that, while this debate is going on and many fine ideas can be put, every single parent who shows up with their kids at school every morning expects that they are going to be able to send them to school, whatever school they are at, and have adequate resources provided for teachers to do a great job.

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