Maxine McKew (Bennelong, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last Saturday evening I discovered what Foxtel’s Kim Williams, RMIT Vice-Chancellor Margaret Gardner and Victorian opera supremo Richard Gill all have in common. It turns out this talented trio are all graduates of Marsden High School in my electorate of Bennelong. Last Saturday evening was a terrific night, with a reunion of students from across the decades. You could spot the ‘59ers and ‘69ers in a flash. They were the ones peering very closely at name tags—because after all at a reunion who wants to give away their age by wearing glasses? There were some great stories. It was a terrific trip down the time tunnel to a time when secondary education was about to explode and when ambitious families of modest means could see that education was the path to social mobility.

First, though, you had to actually locate your school. Gough Whitlam always reminds an audience that when he entered this federal parliament as the member for Werriwa in 1953 there was not a single high school in his electorate. It was not much different in the north-west of Sydney in my part of the world. Epping Boys, Cheltenham Girls and Marsden High were all built in a rush in the 1950s and when they opened students were participants in a new six-year high school curriculum known as the Wyndham scheme. But only a tiny elite completed six years of schooling, and of course Kim Williams was one of them. He took the only route then available to bright kids from modest backgrounds, a Commonwealth scholarship to Sydney university, and of course he had a stellar career in music and media.

It was very interesting talking to Kim Williams on Saturday night. He said, ‘Marsden’s motto in those days was, “We learn to serve.”‘ As Kim said, that had almost nothing to do with encouraging community activism but everything to do with knowing your place. To this day, this riles him. He said most of the boys were herded into metalwork and the girls into home economics.

If we fast forward to 2009 this has changed radically. The school motto is now, ‘Learning for life’, and the Principal, Greg Wann, is as proud as punch that Marsden now has students representing 46 different language groups. The point is this: in 2009 it is still a shock that our high school retention rate has plateaued at 80 per cent. The Rudd Labor government, like the Whitlam and Hawke governments before it, is committed to ensuring that the retention rate is much closer to something like 95 per cent. I am pleased to see that the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Jenny Macklin, this week has put stick into this commitment. For those in receipt of family tax benefit A, from January next year payments will be conditional on children aged 16 to 20 completing their final year of secondary schooling or an equivalent level of study. This is a big change, and a timely one, that I support.