Brett Whiteley (Braddon, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great opportunity to speak on this motion concerning the results of the PISA 2012 survey, which sadly show that Australia has delivered the worst outcomes for us as a nation since testing began. I heard the previous speaker talk a lot about academics, school principals—as she herself is—the unions and teachers themselves. That is all good, but today I want to stand here as the representative for Braddon and ask what the parents of our children think and, more importantly, what the employers in my electorate are saying about the current education system.

We have survey of 65 countries, where 15,000 students—that is not a bad sample, I would have thought—from 775 schools were randomly picked to do a survey crossing mathematics, science and reading. The reality here is that, when it comes to mathematics, we are ranked 19th out of those 65 countries; when it comes to science, 16th; and reading, 13th. As I said before, these are the worst rankings that this country has produced since the testing began.

Sadly for our country, the average student in China is now two full years ahead of the average Australian student when it comes to science and 18 months ahead when it comes to mathematics and reading. These are our trading partners, these are our competitors and these are the people that are setting the pace across the globe. We hear so much from state education ministers and state premiers—as is the case in Tasmania at the moment, which I will get to in a moment—when they announce so boldly, proudly and enthusiastically that 'we have spent a record amount of money in education—how good are we?'

And yet standards have declined significantly. Parents tell me that every single day, and employers absolutely tell me that they are not getting from the education system the potential employees that they need. Funding is increasing but performances and standards are falling. Something is not right; something is fundamentally wrong.

When it comes to Tasmania, we have amongst the largest falls in educational outcomes of any state. We are the worst performing in Australia, second only to the Northern Territory. In all three categories my state of Tasmania is the worst ranked state. What a dismal performance, something that I am far from proud of. I would hope that in my time in this place, together with, hopefully, a new minister for education in the state of Tasmania, we can work together to increase those standards significantly. We have a lot of work to do and there will be a great deal of time required to deliver it, but we have had 16 years of a Tasmanian Labor government where we have failed our young people when it comes to education. It should be noted that the last four years were in fact with an education minister from the Greens coalition side of the equation when it came to the handing out of portfolios. Not only are Tasmanian children more likely to have below-average results in maths, science and reading but they are far less likely to remain at school for years 11 and 12. Retention and completion rates are the worst in the country, just 67 per cent of children going on to year 11 and 47 per cent going on to complete year 12.

There is much work to be done. The work can be done with a diligent new Liberal state government, hopefully, being elected on 15 March where we will provide an additional $45 million over four years towards extending 21 high schools in the state to year 12 in the first term of a new government. There is much work to be done but we are committed together, federal and state, to deliver better outcomes.

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