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

But there is one brave soul in the Labor Party, the new member for Perth, who is not afraid to split with her Labor colleagues on this issue and is prepared to call a spade a spade. She did so in very strong terms. She said—and I quote her column in The Australian on Thursday, 24 October:

To me, it is immoral to allow so many Australian children to be victims of a failed educational fad. We are not just failing to teach these kids to read—we are destroying their confidence as learners. We teach them to hate school.

It was a very strong quote, and unfortunately I agree with it, because education should not be in that terrible state after years of successive Labor governments.

But we are fixing Labor's mess. We will fix Labor's mess. We have a $22 million fund that we will soon announce the details of to establish orthodox teaching methods in remote schools around Australia—things like direct instruction, explicit instruction, Jolly Phonics and MultiLit. We want our children to be able to read. We are not going to be hidebound by the ideological fights of the last two decades in education. We want to put students first.

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