Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to thank the member for Bonner for bringing the motion to the House. Literacy and numeracy skills—and particularly financial literacy skills, as the member for Bonner has outlined in this motion—underpin a range of essential skills which will equip people throughout their lives. These are critically important. In the community that I represent in Logan, I see those in our community who have tremendous financial literacy skills and have gone on to great success in any number of areas or endeavours. But equally, sadly, I have seen those who have struggled with financial literacy skills, and for many, this has impacted on their ability to be involved in the workforce, with some finishing up in situations where they think they've got to take a chance gambling or finding other ways to try and make money because they've not been able to manage their financial circumstances properly.

I want to extend the member for Bonner's motion a little bit to include not just financial literacy and numeracy skills but literacy and numeracy more generally. We know that having proficiency in literacy and numeracy has a pivotal impact on people's social and health outcomes throughout their life. It impacts not just the parents who struggle with those basic skills but also the kids who are raised in those households. We see that transferred to the younger generation. Certainly, in my electorate of Forde and across the city of Logan, we see families that have struggled with the generational impact of a lack of literacy and numeracy skills. It provides an inability for young people to successfully engage in the workforce and it creates challenges, as the member for Bonner quite rightly touched on. It has an impact on people's mental health later in life, further discouraging them from participating meaningfully in society.

I would like to take this opportunity to give a shout-out to the Financial Literacy Action Group, which is based in Logan and seeks to help people in these very circumstances. It's a broad-ranging community organisation, a coalition of various groups that provides help and assistance to people in this situation.

What's important is how we start to deal with these issues for the longer term, and I believe that starts at school. If you look at the results from our education system, Australia's results in reading and mathematical literacy have declined sharply over the last 20 years. Unfortunately, the member for Dunkley sought to make a political point on this, but I would say that governments of all persuasions have presided over these results for a long period of time, and we in this place all need to accept responsibility for that, irrespective of what side of the chamber we are on. The solution to this problem is a bipartisan one. It's not a partisan solution; we need to work together to solve these problems, because they exist in communities right across the country.

When I talk to my school principals about the national curriculum, they say to me: 'It is so overcrowded that we genuinely don't have the time to focus in detail on these basic skills with the students who are struggling with them.' I had a meeting as late as last week with one of my school principals and I asked him whether he was in a position to have a differentiated curriculum for those students who are struggling with the standard curriculum in order to assist them to build on these basic skills and set them up for the future. He said he would love to do that; however, he's worried that, if he does start doing something different with the curriculum and different from what is allowed under the national curriculum, at an audit he might lose funding or have his funding reduced, so why would he take that risk? That's why I say that we need to have a broad-ranging discussion about a bipartisan solution.

We need to look at these basic skills, which the member for Bonner has well outlined in this motion. I think it's critically important for the future. (Time expired)

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