Rod Sawford (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Prior to coming to Canberra I was involved in education in schools for almost 25 years as a primary school teacher, an education consultant in primary methodology, a school principal and a president of the Adelaide Metropolitan Principals Association. I can teach. I can run a school and I influence my peers to aspire to higher levels of performance. Unlike almost any other profession, everyone has an opinion on education, many declaring themselves experts based on only their own personal involvement. They are usually and consistently wrong.

During my educational and political career I have met, listened to and read the narrative of some of the most stupid people in Australia on educational issues—the pity being that so many of them hold such senior positions in education. Vying for top positions has heightened the educational idiocy of many in the educational faculties of our universities, of state education bureaucrats and their state political controllers and of the personnel of both houses in our national parliament. There are some common failings: a lack of a sound educational rationale, a lack of commonsense and a lack of an identifiable and coherent set of educational outcomes. I note with great sadness the void of national educational leadership in both the House and the Senate at the executive level of government and opposition for the last 20 years.

In this parliament, education requires, in the national interest, bipartisan support. As we slip ever further downward in OECD surveys and international comparisons, education flounders and splutters in an ever-increasing morass of confusion. The parliament, under the influence of its respective executives, treats education as an opportunity to divide, distract, divert, wedge, engage in pointless one-upmanship and generally act at a crass lowest-ever common denominator level. In almost 20 years I have never heard what would even be close to an inspirational speech on education in this place from a senior member of government or opposition. More often than not, the opposite is true. That is a national tragedy and that is the major reason why education in this country at all levels has slumped into a most unsatisfactory one-size-fits-all category.

Primary and secondary schools are deliberately disadvantaged in this country at both public and private levels. Public education is white-anted. Senior secondary schools and universities so jealously protect their undeserved privileges by comparison with primary and junior secondary schools that they deliberately opt out of leadership that could reform and return education in Australia to a fair, sensible and quality system.

There are some saving graces. There are the teachers and principals in our schools who quietly and effectively filter out the educational claptrap and get on with tried and proven educational programs. However, I get the impression that their numbers, particularly at the principal level, are diminishing. Secondly, there is the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Vocational Training, which, over the last 18 years, has been the only real forum for proper debate for education in this country. (Time expired)