Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Like two gangs turning up and looking to have a fight and realising there's actually nothing to fight over, everyone's scratching their head and asking whether it's someone's haircut or the footy team they support. We have fabulous schools across this nation. We have independent and state schools doing an incredible job. Today, we have managed to have a completely hypothetical debate over Labor Party exemptions—not just federal ones—in every state and territory that provide an exemption for religious schools to allow them to hire people who share their views. And today we find ourselves tied up in knots, detaining the great parliament of Australia to try and reverse a Labor exemption from 2013 as if something's changed in the last five years.

There's one thing I'm not going to let happen from this debate, and that is that our independent schools—faith based and non-faith based schools—will not be traduced and cast by the Labor Party as being places of bigotry and discrimination, because nothing could be further from the truth. There are a lot of MPs in this chamber who know nothing more about schools than when the next P&F meeting is, but, in reality, inside those schools are incredibly hardworking staff and they are teaching students they love. It has been made very clear in the last week that this is really about the Labor Party egging on a debate to make themselves look good with their minorities—that they're fighting to remove something that they introduced themselves as recently as five years ago.

I don't always find myself jumping in to defend the views of independent education, but I do need to read into Hansard the views of some of the most senior educators in this country, who are saying, 'Why on earth are we having this ridiculous debate?' The answer is that a report was leaked. We've got the results of the leak and those opposite need to desperately create some kind of debate to try and get the report released. The reality is that most people involved in education are not professional politicians. I can't think of a solitary example of someone being discriminated against in an Australian school based on their gender preference or their sexuality—not a single case. You're welcome to bring one forward. That might be a reason for the debate, but nothing has initiated this debate except a political gain from the other side.

The Uniting Church has said, 'Our current commitment'—like other churches—'is that we would not seek to discriminate except in key leadership roles'. It's absolutely self-evident, as Christian Schools Australia have said, that they want to be able to ensure that staff who share the values of their school and share the beliefs of their school teach in their school. One would think, if you listen to the Labor Party over there, that the whole game was about trying to find a single student that you could jam into a school that least wants them and use legal tactics to make sure the school has to take them. In reality, students of all different gender preferences, sexuality and backgrounds are being taken in by schools right across this country, and proudly so, and we're not going to let extremists in the Labor Party try and embarrass this great nation by claiming this is an endemic problem—'We just can't possibly protect all of the students who have gender and sexuality preferences and are fundamentally unsafe in independent schools.' That is a complete creation for Labor Party convenience.

In interviews, we've heard the most senior people in education saying, 'I cannot see any reason for expelling any student on the basis of sexual orientation.' They've said, 'I cannot even think of a particular example where it has ever happened.' Why are we having this ridiculous debate? I've got no problem with changing Labor Party exemptions from five years ago—no problem at all. I just don't want to allow this to ever turn into a debate where we corrode or erode the great achievements of independent education in this country, because you just don't find that quality of education in any other comparable OECD nation.

There are a few things we could be focusing on. We could be focusing on the school in my electorate that cannot find a grade 6 teacher. There have been five teachers for grade 6 because no-one will teach at that school, because the department cannot provide a qualified teacher. We could be talking about opportunities that simply aren't there or available to do postgraduate research as a teacher to get higher pay by doing an extra qualification or about ways to manage teachers that can't function within the system or are struggling and can be not paid increments automatically.

Lastly, we can't be the only nation where teachers hit, at the age of 29, the highest wage they'll ever get as a teacher. How will we ever retain great teachers with those issues? Instead, the Labor Party over here detains this parliament on this ridiculous debate.

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