Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Earlier this year I hosted a dozen MPs from all sides of politics in a session with Code Club Australia, a nationwide not-for-profit group that is teaching our children the language of the 21st century: coding. For an hour before question time the pollies hunched over their laptops, ready to learn the basics of how to give instructions to a computer. Watching these pollies at the time reminded me of the classroom of coders in Altona Primary School in my electorate. They also have a code club teaching exactly the same thing.

What they were learning was not just a new language; it was a new way of thinking, a new way of solving problems and a new skill set for the future. I tell you: if MPs can learn this in half an hour, every 10-year-old in the country can do so too—

Mr Pasin interjecting—

other than the member for Barker, possibly!

The problem is that, at the moment, not enough Australian kids are getting the chance to learn this new way of thinking in our schools. Code Club Australia was founded by Annie Parker because of a problem that she was continually confronting in her day job as the co-founder of muru-D, Telstra's start-up accelerator. There were simply not enough Australians leaving our schools and universities with skills in coding and computational thinking, so she set up a not-for-profit designed to fix a problem that this government is refusing to address.

This skills void is a real problem for Australian businesses and Australians in general, who are being set up to miss out on the opportunities of the jobs of the future. Digitalisation and connectivity mean that even today every company, no matter what the industry, must be a software company. As many have noted, software is eating the world, and understanding the basics of how to solve problems in this new world is crucial for everyone in the workforce even if they never write a line of code themselves.

The rest of the world is already getting this message. Over 12 European countries already have coding as part of their school curriculum, with another seven countries including Singapore and New Zealand in the process of implementing it. To thrive in the modern economy, Australians need more than just to be passive users of technology; they need to understand how to use technology to innovate. People in the IT sector—the sector that I worked in before coming to this place—describe the difference as being the difference between being able to ride a tricycle and ride a bicycle: anyone can ride a tricycle within seconds of seeing one, but it is those who learn the extra skills necessary to ride a bike who can get to more places. In Australia, unfortunately, we are leaving the bike in the shed. This year the Harvard Business Review ranked Australia's digital capacity as 'stalling out'. Only 32 per cent of Australian students have the opportunity of learning to code in school as either a curriculum subject or an extracurricular activity.

We are also falling behind in science, technology, engineering and mathematics—the STEM skills. From 1991 to 2007, the percentage of Australian students studying chemistry fell from 23.3 per cent to 18 per cent and physics fell from 20.9 per cent to 14.6 per cent. The numbers of students studying tertiary ICT courses have plummeted, falling by 52 per cent in the decade from 2003 to 2013. The percentage of students in tertiary mathematics degrees in Australia is just 0.5 per cent, less than half of the OECD average. Seventy-five per cent of the fastest growing jobs in Australia require STEM skills. We have to start making choices about the future of work in Australia, and we cannot ignore the writing on the wall that is telling us that at the moment we need a new approach to take full advantage of the skills of the future.

That is where Bill Shorten and Labor have articulated a clear plan and a vision for the future. It is not just a luxury for those who can afford it as private extracurricular tutoring; Labor are committed to ensuring that coding is taught in both primary and secondary schools across the country. We are also committed to upskilling primary and secondary school teachers and writing off the HECS debts of 100,000 STEM university graduates. That is right—not creating $100,000 degrees but rather 100,000 STEM graduates. This stands in stark contrast to the Abbott government's attitude to the teaching of STEM in our schools and universities. It explicitly stated that ICT studies do not need to be taught in primary school and only need to be studied as an elective in secondary school. That was the Minister for Education and Training's brilliance in appointing Kevin Donnelly to run an inquiry about the skills that our nation will need in the future.

The reality is that if we are only allowing kids to learn coding in secondary school we have already missed the boat. David Cameron gets this. The Estonian government gets this. Why don't the Prime Minister and the minister for education? If we are serious about taking advantage of the digital revolution and preparing for the jobs of the future, we must act now. The lead times are long.

In his budget reply speech, the Leader of the Opposition said:

A budget should match the priorities of the nation.

Preparing Australia for the jobs of the future must be a national priority for all of us in this place. The complete absence of any discussion of the future of our nation in the government's budget speech is a gaping hole in the middle of the government's economic agenda and it is one that the opposition are ready to fill when we come to government.

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