Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Speaker has received a letter from the honourable member for Lyne proposing that a definite matter of public importance be submitted to the House for discussion, namely:

The national crisis that is the deterioration of regional and remote access of participation rates in education over the last five years.

I call upon those members who approve of the proposed discussion to rise in their places.

More than the number of members required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

Robert Oakeshott (Lyne, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and thank you to other members who have come back from various places to support the MPI. I start by noting the words of the Deputy Prime Minister in question time where she also pleasingly talked about some of the data in relation to rural and remote access and participation rates. My response to her is that I hope she is right because the reason for putting this MPI on the Notice Paper is a report which has flown under the radar in the last month released by her department, the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. The title of the study of participation rates in education is Regional participation: the role of socioeconomic status and access. I have not lightly used the words ‘national crisis’ in the wording of the MPI before the House. I note this is not one of the contentious issues about mining tax, an emissions trading scheme, a Henry tax review or a budget, but based on the words in this report this is an issue which is ‘a national crisis’ and worthy of a greater priority by all members in this chamber and more time and resources of this House and us as policymakers. I make this point based on one critical sentence in the introduction to this report:

Regional and remote access and participation rates, as measured by administrative data, have deteriorated over the last five years.

Anyone who knows the language that normally comes from government departments knows that language is normally ultra conservative in nature. The language used in this report is not that access and participation rates have slowed, have stalled or have slightly declined. The language used by what is normally a conservative process from a government department is ‘deteriorated’. That has significance of national crisis status. It has impacts on the mining industry, for example, arguably as great, if not greater than any tax reform debate. If we have a skills shortage in this country which is only going to get worse, if we have a quarter of the Australian population disengaging in education based on geography, then we have a national crisis on our hands. It is for that reason that I bring this MPI before the House—not so much because it has been noticed before as a matter of public importance in conversations around this chamber, but because it should be a matter of public importance by all members in this chamber. Once again, the report states:

Regional and remote access and participation rates, as measured by administrative data—

the government’s own data—

have deteriorated over the last five years.

There may be a political response from government that there is a lag in administrative data. So the question is: is this the period from 2005 to 2010 or is it an earlier period? I do not know. I would be interested in the feedback from government. What this report is highlighting is that we have a serious problem on our hands when regional and rural students and the regional and rural population are, for some reason, disengaging with the education pathway.

I say that in the broader context of recognising the work that is being done by government. I am in the camp of ‘vive le revolution’ in regard to education. I genuinely want to see reform and improvements in this area. I recognise the trade training centres and the role that they play and potentially will play in the future. I would ask that, in that context, the coalition reconsider their views on the important role that trade training centres play. The computers in schools program is being rolled out. It is a valuable contribution for engagement for regional and rural students. I would hope that regional and rural members of the opposition would certainly lobby the decision makers to reconsider their position.

I can fully get national curriculum and national teacher accreditation. What we are all watching now are reviews of funding and possible announcements soon around how funding is going to be distributed into the future. I get all that and think they are all very worthy contributions to the challenge before us, particularly for my electorate where we do not have a bricks and mortar campus for a university. I particularly get the work that is happening in the post Bradley environment and all those key words about ‘collaboration, not duplication’, ‘pathways’ and ‘pipelines’. I get the partnership that hopefully is now forming between some of my communities and the federal government to try and make it a seamless pathway through the certificate IIIs and IVs and into the diploma and bachelor and postgraduate degrees. I get all that and I support all that.

In that environment, for this report to have been dropped in the last couple of weeks and for this one particular sentence to jump out, it rings alarm bells. It rings huge alarm bells and should ring alarm bells, particularly for anyone who is representing a regional or rural electorate. The fact that we have seen a deterioration of engagement in this five-year period, as measured by the government’s own administrative data, is a huge concern. It does need some responses from government as to the time frame exactly. Is this 2005 to 2010 or is it some other time? Why have we seen that deterioration? What are the reasons, from a government perspective, that has happened?

The rhetoric from both the previous government and the current government is that they acknowledge and support regional Australia and regional students. The rhetoric is that they get the challenges. We saw a lot of that rhetoric shaped around the youth allowance debate. Yet, now we have administrative data saying something else, that the rhetoric is not matching the truth. The rhetoric is not matching the facts of what is happening in Australia today.

Yes, we are seeing greater engagement in low-SES areas. Yes, we are seeing greater engagement in Indigenous communities. But we can still shape a boundary based on geography. The regional and rural students, which are 27.9 per cent of the Australian population, are disengaging. Their engagement with higher education has deteriorated. We are a country at present that is firing on three cylinders. That is a quarter of the potential population who could engage in education, and then the country, hopefully, would get all the benefits of innovation, productivity and all the entrepreneurship and the inclusion that goes with that engagement in the education pathway. But for some reason the most recent DEEWR report says that it is not happening. We are a three-cylinder country at the moment and it is shaped around that issue of geography. I would hope by bringing this MPI before the House that we can get some answers over the time period in question. We need to get the exact reasons from government as to why in this five-year period—either 2005 to 2010 or sometime very recently—there has been this deterioration, this collapse, in engagement from regional and rural students.

We like to say we are the clever country. I do not think it is very clever at all to leave people behind. I do not think it is very clever at all to leave 27.9 per cent of potential opportunity for the country behind. I do not think it is very clever to be a two-tiered education system based on geography. I do not think it is very clever to increase urbanisation because of this issue of education. This brain drain continues to happen from regional and rural areas. The kids who do want to chase an education, hope or dream have no other option but to move to urban centres. I do not think it is the clever country to have a lack of engagement on education, which then leads to all sorts of issues. The Minister for Population is sitting at the table and there is the issue of 457 visas and skills shortages.

We are creating secondary issues for ourselves by not engaging a quarter of our education opportunity, which is students from regional and rural areas. So I certainly hope the government responds to these words and also responds in detail to this report. It is important that we see this issue become the matter of public importance it should be. It overrides in many ways the debate around mining taxes. We will not have the mining industry we want if we do not have people of good calibre with good skills to work in the mines. We can have all the debates on ETS and renewable energy that we want, but we must have people who understand what sustainability is, have skills as to sustainability and provide entrepreneurship as to sustainability for the future.

At a local level we have some huge challenges on the mid-North Coast. We want to engage with the federal government on many of their tertiary education targets. They are noble targets. Forty per cent having a bachelor degree or higher by 2025 is noble and a 20 per cent low-SES target in the same period is noble, so much so that one of the councils in my local area has set those same targets as its targets. We are coming off a much lower base with regard to a bachelor degree or higher. According to our current data, around 11 or 12 per cent of the Port Macquarie-Hastings population has a bachelor degree or higher, so for us to get to 40 per cent in the time frame in question is incredibly ambitious. We are going to give it a go as we think there is such a growing aspiration in the regions, including ours. We also think that some of the work that the federal government is doing in this space is assisting in achieving that. It is still not seamless as there are plenty of blockers in the system. The youth allowance mongrel hybrid, which was the end product of using some dot-connect system and drawing lines according to whatever the dirty deal was between the government and the opposition, is for regional areas, not so much for rural areas, a mess. It has people on different sides of the street having different sets of rules applying as to accessing youth allowance. We can do better. In the same time period some Senate inquiries identified a range of issues and they remain unaddressed. If we are serious about relocation issues and if we are serious about issues of proximity so that we can start to see an expansion of teaching and, ideally, bricks and mortar in regional locations so we see more university towns within Australia—and I know it is a dirty concept because no-one likes spending capital on bricks—we must acknowledge that proximity matters. Proximity is a driver in its own sense and it does encourage people to attend.

Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Hear, hear!

Robert Oakeshott (Lyne, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

And so the member for New England interjects. You only need to look at the figures coming out of Armidale to see comparatively what a university presence in a community does in engaging regional and rural students. The comparative figures tell the story. So we have to get over this issue that spending money on bricks is no good in regional and rural areas. Well, it actually drives some answers to many of the questions being raised in reports. So I hope these words are listened to, I hope this report is generally responded to and I hope we can see the revolution in education start to get into the regions, where obviously we have a problem that still remains unaddressed.

Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Employment) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Lyne for bringing forward this matter of public importance for debate in this House today and, more generally, the issue of education in regional and remote Australia. On that I make the point that the Learn. Earn. Legend! program is underway in parliament this week. It includes 100 Indigenous students that are doing work experience in the offices of different members of parliament. They include two who are in the chamber today sitting in the advisers’ box, Skye Bortoli from Port Stephens, who is 17, and Zari Hardie from Shepparton, who is 15. These two people are great young leaders who are learning about how the process works here in parliament but also they are two young people who come from regional Australia, two of the people like those mentioned by the member for Lyne, who understands the importance of education in building opportunities for young people, those from regional Australia not just those from the cities.

I have spent a bit of time working with the member for Lyne on this issue and I understand how seriously he takes this issue. He understands the direct link between education and employment opportunity. School retention rates on the mid-North Coast, the area that the member for Lyne represents, are lower than the national average. Unemployment is higher. I had a look at the data for the mid-North Coast this afternoon. For Bellingen the retention rate is about 50 per cent, for Gloucester it is 49 per cent, for Greater Taree, 55 per cent, for the Hastings area, 65 per cent, for Kempsey, 51 per cent, and for Nambucca, 47 per cent. The average across the mid-North Coast is 57.6 per cent. The national average is 77.5 per cent. Unemployment in the region that the honourable member represents is higher than the national average. Unemployment across the country is 5.2 per cent. On the North Coast it is now 6.9 per cent. This is the same story that I find working in all 20 employment priority areas across the country. Over the last 12 months I have been on the road with Bill Kelty and Lindsay Fox working in these areas, areas that have been hardest hit by the global recession. We have gone as far north as Cairns and as far south as Burnie. We have been to the northern suburbs of Adelaide and the south-western suburbs of Perth.

All these areas are very different and all have their own different challenges, but they have one thing in common: in every one of them, high school completion rates are lower than the national average and unemployment is higher. That is the common thread, and that is why what we do in education is so important. It is the key to boosting employment in electorates like that of the member for Lyne and in electorates like mine.

This is very important because the workforce is changing. In the future there will be more high-skilled jobs and fewer low-skilled and unskilled jobs. I was in Washington in January, and I spoke to some think tanks and employer groups there. They told me that three out of four jobs created in the next decade will require postsecondary skills. In other words, 75 per cent of new jobs created in the US over the next decade will require completion of high school and an extra qualification after that. Monash University has done the same research here in Australia, and it reached the same conclusion.

If most of the jobs of the future are going to require postsecondary qualifications, then we have to boost both retention rates in schools and the number of people who go on to get qualifications at TAFE or university. That is why the government has set the target of 90 per cent of students completing high school by 2015. We have also set the targets of halving the number of adults without a certificate III qualification or higher in the next 10 years and of increasing the number of 25- to 34-year-olds with a university degree to 40 per cent in the next 15 years. The government is already making progress. This year there are 44,495 more places at university than there were this time last year. That means that more young people from both the city and the regions are going to find it easier to get a place in university. Important in this debate is the point that the Deputy Prime Minister made in question time—that is, the biggest increase in those reaching university in the last 12 months has been among people from low SES backgrounds, and that is a good thing.

It is not enough just to increase retention rates nationally or increase the level of qualifications nationally. We have to do it in areas of greatest disadvantage, and many of those are in regional Australia. The Bradley review of higher education identified regional and remote students as one of three groups that remain significantly underrepresented in higher education. The others were students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and Indigenous students, and there are plenty of students from all three of these categories in the member for Lyne’s electorate. The member for Lyne spoke about the report recently prepared by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, entitled Regional participation: the role of socioeconomic status and access. This report says that university  participation among 19- to 21-year-olds from regional areas increased from 18 per cent in 1996 to 21 per cent in 2006. Interestingly, though, university participation amongst metropolitan students increased at a faster rate, from 28 per cent to 35 per cent. That confirms the findings of the Bradley review and also the point well made by the honourable member for Lyne in his contribution that regional students are falling behind their metropolitan counterparts. The Deputy Prime Minister and the government recognise this. The Deputy Prime Minister wrote about it in the Australian last week. She said:

If we are serious about building our national economy, strengthening regional communities and improving the lives of Australians, then we have to be serious about lifting the capacity and performance of Australia’s universities, especially those beyond our capital cities.

That is why we have created more than 150,000 new annual student start-up scholarships this year worth $2,128 or $1,300 in 2010 and why we are increasing the parental income test, which will benefit over 100,000 students. On top of this, we have created a new relocation scholarship worth $4,000 in the first year and $1,000 for each subsequent year in which a student is studying. Already there are around 18,000 of these scholarships, compared with 3,571 Commonwealth accommodation cost scholarships when this government came to power. I particularly thank the member for Lyne for supporting these reforms on student income support when they came before the parliament.

We are providing universities with $433 million over four years to enrol, engage and support students from low socioeconomic backgrounds through partnership funding focused on outreach. We are also providing a loading which will be worth $1,500 by 2012. I am sure the member for Lyne would agree this is a very important initiative, one that is important not just for students in regional parts of Australia but also for students in the sort of electorate that I represent where, as in the electorate of the member for Lyne, fewer students go on to finish high school and fewer students go on to university. I know that the member for Watson, the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry at the table, would understand that as well, because there are similar statistics for the area that he represents.

The loadings involved in the reforms we are undertaking represent 15 times the current equity program. Regional and outer metropolitan universities in particular will benefit from these new loadings, given their local student populations. The new loadings include $325 million to enable universities to provide intensive support to students from disadvantaged backgrounds and $108 million for a new partnerships program that will enable universities to work towards raising the aspirations of students of low socioeconomic status. The sector has already responded by increasing its effort to bring in more disadvantaged students. As I mentioned earlier, the figures already indicate that the greatest growth this calendar year in the number of students at university has been amongst low SES students, and that is good news. I also note that the government has begun a review of the system that provides additional financial support to regional universities. This review will design a more transparent and logical system and is due to report at the end of the year.

I encourage the House to compare this with the record of the Howard government. When the Howard government was in office, the number of students from regional Australia going to university actually fell. As we heard in question time today, the commitment that was made by the National Party at their conference on the weekend is not all that it appears to be. On the weekend, a commitment was made of a $1 billion regional education fund, but we heard that Senator Williams, when questioned about it on radio, said that it would not be $1 billion after all; it would only be the interest earned on that $1 billion. Significantly, that amount would be around $50 million.

We learned that what you get on one hand will be taken away on the other because, whilst you might get the interest on this fund, what members in this House should know is that their communities will lose the funding that they would otherwise have got—from computers in schools, from trade training centres or from the investment in teacher quality that this government has committed to—but that the opposition has said it will take away. The shadow finance minister, who is at the table now, knows this very well because he is the author of that decision to take money out of schools if the opposition were to be elected. That means that regional schools would no longer receive computers in schools and would no longer receive funding for trade training centres, and there would no longer be funding for teacher quality. So regional communities need to be aware, and the member for Lyne needs to be aware—all members of the House need to be aware—that were an Abbott government to be elected regional communities would be worse off. The coalition ignored education for more than 11 years and now they are trying to cut funding in areas like computers in schools, trade training centres and teacher quality.

I have spoken about universities. It is not just tackling disadvantage in universities that is the key; we also have to tackle it in our schools. I know that the member for New England will talk about this in some detail. I will use the time remaining to me to talk about the importance of tackling disadvantage in our primary schools. The program called smarter schools that the government has initiated is very important. It will fund extra classroom teachers, so primary school classes can break into smaller groups and practise reading, writing and maths. It will also fund extra assistance for children who fall behind, and extra pay for our best teachers to come and work in places like my electorate and like the electorate of the member for Lyne. In my electorate, that means $62 million for 42 schools. In the member for Lyne’s electorate, it will mean $23 million for 22 schools. This is really good public policy in action. It is not just allocating the money to any electorate irrespective of the disadvantage or the need; it is allocating money to schools on the basis of need. You can see that through the schools falling behind on the MySchool website. They are the schools that get that extra funding and support to break kids into smaller classes and help them to catch up with reading, writing and maths. It is good public policy. Schools in my electorate, and I suspect schools in the member for Lyne’s electorate, have never seen funding like this before from a federal government. It would never have happened under the Liberal Party, and it will never happen under the National Party. They had 12 years to do something and they never did anything. In fact, and the shadow minister knows this, part of this program would be cut if the Leader of the Opposition were to be elected Prime Minister.

I will finish on the point of apprenticeships. It is about universities, it is about schools, and it is also about preparing young people for work. I was in the member’s electorate recently and we were talking to two young people who had recently got apprenticeships as part of the Apprentice Kickstart program. One, Jessica, who is an apprentice chef, and another, Jesse, who is an apprentice mechanic, are two of 227 young trade apprentices who got an apprenticeship over summer on the mid-North Coast through the Apprentice Kickstart program—a great initiative and a good practical example of what government can do to make a difference in a region like the member’s electorate. You just have to look at the data to see what has been achieved there. In the summer of 2008, the number of apprentices put on on the mid-North Coast is 188, the global recession hits and it drops to 144, we take action and we boost it back to 227—more than before the global recession. That is what has happened all across the country. We are now recruiting more apprentices today than we did before the global recession. It is a good example of government taking action in a practical way to really make a difference for regions like the member for Lyne’s and all across the country. It is these things that we are doing in education and training that will help us to build a stronger economy and a fairer country.

Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I congratulate the member for Lyne for bringing forward this matter of public importance on education. One of the most important things parliamentarians can be involved in is the education of their children. I am very pleased to see the Minister for Population here today because education directly relates to any population research that we enter for policy for the future. There is significant empirical evidence that suggests that the previous government and the current government have failed the lower socioeconomic groups, and particularly rural and remote areas, in relation to participation in education.

We have just heard the Parliamentary Secretary for Employment talk about research that has been conducted in the United States and in Australia on the training needs of our future population. The report that the member for Lyne referred to, Regional participation: the role of socioeconomic status and access, suggests to me that the previous government failed in that focus and the incumbent government, even though it has not been in power terribly long, should be seeing that report as a flashing red light—it is running the risk of not addressing the substantive issue being raised by its own bureaucracy, and that is the deterioration in participation in and access to education for rural and remote students. I am pleased that this matter has been brought on for discussion because it does deserve concentrated debate. As I made the point a moment ago, it directly relates to the focus of population into the future.

There are a number of ways in which these issues can be addressed. I am pleased that the parliamentary secretary suggested towards the end of his speech that this is not only about education at university, and I am pleased that he mentioned the TAFE sector. The TAFE sector is very important if we are to achieve the skill levels we need. It is critical. This is also about our young people at primary school. If we allow that deterioration to occur at that very early stage, when our young people are at infant school and primary school, it is almost irrelevant to them as individuals whether they can access university—irrespective of how many places are made available. It is absolutely critical that this parliament address those issues at an early age.

I have spoken before—and the Parliamentary Secretary for Employment is aware of this, as is the minister—about some of the intervention services that are available within our schools. I would particularly like to take the opportunity to refer again to the QuickSmart program. I have raised this on a number of occasions in the past, and the government has funded the QuickSmart program. Given the number of schools that are keen to take up this program on the basis of empirical evidence and success, I urge the government to have a very close look at this because there are solutions to the deterioration problem that the member for Lyne refers to. I will explain a little about the QuickSmart program. It is different to the Kickstart program, which the parliamentary secretary referred to; the QuickSmart program is about assisting young students who are having difficulties with numeracy and literacy. It is a concentrated 30-week program conducted one on one that is aimed at building the confidence of students. I think we are all well aware as individuals that, as you gain confidence in anything, your capacity to pick up and run with other skills is enhanced. The QuickSmart program has been in place for about nine years and was developed at the New England University by the National Centre of Science, Information and Communication Technology, and Mathematics Education for Rural and Regional Education—the very level of rural education that the member for Lyne’s motion refers to. It has primarily been developed by Professor John Pegg, ably assisted by Associate Professor Lorraine Graham and a team of people who give far beyond what they are paid for.

I will quote from examples of some of the successes that have occurred. One student said:

When I am in QuickSmart I really feel smart—like I am not dumb any more. When I wasn’t doing QuickSmart I felt dumb. I didn’t really know how to do maths but it helped me in a lot of ways, like how to do problems and teaching me all my times tables. If it wasn’t for QuickSmart I don’t know where I would be right now. I love QuickSmart.

I have looked at videos of students in this one-to-one process and you can actually see the confidence building in them, because the education is tailored to the level of the student. The centre’s view is that any student can improve, irrespective of the level they are starting at. They go to the starting point and improve that student’s capacity and, in doing so, improve their confidence levels.

There are a number of things I could read out from various parents and students, but time will not allow that. I would like to highlight a critical point in relation to this program. It has been going for so long now that empirical evidence can be established. They are revisiting the schools many years after and retracing the steps of the students to see whether this 30-week program has actually lasted longer than the 30 weeks. The evidence has suggested very, very strongly that it is putting people on a trajectory which lasts. Part of that is based on the confidence that these students gain through the attention they are given in the one-on-one process. There are a myriad of programs out there and I am sure that a lot of them are very well intentioned, but there is very little empirical evidence where the success rates of these programs have been revisited to see whether they have had a lasting effect or whether they have just been able to lobby effectively to get the ear of the minister of the day and convince them to spend money. So I would ask the Minister for Population—because, as I said, it is very important in relation to that area as well—and the Minister for Education to look very seriously at this program again and assist where possible.

In conclusion I will cite an incident at Orara High School at Coffs Harbour:

Forty-two of the 44 Orara High School students, at Coffs Harbour, who undertook the QuickSmart program in 2006 were above benchmark on the 2008 national NAPLAN test in year 9. The two students who performed below benchmark were diagnosed as IM students in year 7. Each of these students, however, managed above-average growth for the period 2006-08.

This is the very group of students we are all trying to get to in different ways. Here comes the rub:

Interestingly enough, the principal of the school was so enthusiastic about the program that he put 44 students on it to bring them forward—not the top students, but students who were behind. The next year the school lost its disadvantaged schools money because it had lifted its results. It makes me wonder what we are trying to achieve with some of the programs we have put in place.

It is absolutely critical that, when we start to get some success from these programs, we do not penalise the schools for being successful. The same thing applies to some people within the teaching profession. I agree with the coalition in relation to some of the policies that they are developing on this. We do have to encourage the better teachers and not dumb everybody down to a particular level. If nothing else comes from this matter of public importance, we have to understand that there is deterioration and that we can do something about it. (Time expired)

Craig Thomson (Dobell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this matter of public importance and acknowledge the member for Lyne for bringing this matter on and the contribution of the member for New England. The member for New England comes from a university town. I grew up in Bathurst, which is also a university town, and know the benefits that having a university in town brings.

This matter of public importance is about participation rates and access to education. What we all know on this side of the House—and I know, from the contributions of the member for Lyne and the member for New England, that they also believe this—is that access to education is so important for anyone in securing a job in the future and progressing in life. This MPI is about making sure those of us who live in regional or rural Australia have access to education at all levels. The member for New England made the point that it is not just about a university education; it has to start much earlier than that. It is a point that the Minister for Education, the Deputy Prime Minister, has made on many occasions. It is important to start as early as we can, to make sure there are resources going into education and that resources are also made available to regional and rural Australia so that there is equal opportunity for all Australians to pursue an education and hence a career.

I want to use the seat of Dobell to show not only the difficulties that we have at the moment but also the programs this government has put in place to assist students. Dobell has the lowest average family household income in New South Wales. It is a poor area. Dobell has the fastest growth rate of Indigenous Australians—around three per cent a year. What we also have is very poor retention rates in our schools. Some of our schools have retention rates of below 40 per cent but, on average, the rate is below 50 per cent in all of our high schools. This is very much below the national average retention rate. This is reflected in figures referred to earlier by the Parliamentary Secretary for Employment, where unemployment in my electorate on the Central Coast is over one per cent higher than the national average.

The real problem for us on the Central Coast is youth unemployment. Youth unemployment is in excess of 40 per cent on the Central Coast. You can see the direct parallel between the retention rates that we have at our schools, under 40 per cent, and youth unemployment, over 40 per cent. What is frustrating for many job seekers on the Central Coast—and this is typical of many areas—is that there are jobs on the Central Coast, but they often require skills that the education system does not provide them with. We see people coming from Sydney and Newcastle for these better-paying jobs on the Central Coast, because we have not been equipping our local young people with the skills to be able to take these jobs.

These are very real issues for me and very real issues for everyone on the Central Coast. What are we doing about it? There is a whole range of programs that we have put in place, starting with the Building the Education Revolution. Bricks and mortar are important for education—making sure that kids have access to proper facilities does assist in their educational outcomes. It also makes sure that kids go to school and enjoy school more because of the surroundings. I was at Wyong Grove Public School the other day, where a new hall is being built. Wyong Grove Public School is a very disadvantaged school. A little six-year-old came up to me and I asked him what he thought of the new hall. He said, ‘I get up every morning excited to come to school because of the activities that we do in this hall.’ That shows, directly, the effect that this is going to have. This child is going to school, participating, being retained in the school system and getting an education—because of the Building the Education Revolution. This six-year-old nailed it better than any of us could—the importance of these new buildings, this investment in infrastructure at these schools. It is an important lesson that we should all remember. There are over 106 schools on the Central Coast that are either just completed or in the construction phase and we are seeing lots of stories like the one of this six-year-old from Wyong Grove.

The computers in schools program is absolutely vital. I have a letter from Mr Andrew Newman, who is the Deputy President of the New South Wales Secondary Principals Council. He is also the Principal of Tuggerah Lakes Secondary College, which has three campuses in my electorate, with over 1,500 secondary school students. He wrote to me saying that the Digital Education Revolution in New South Wales has been an outstanding success in government schools. Careful planning that involves secondary principals has seen all year 9 students in 2009 receive a laptop. He said ‘We are well on the way to completing a second phase this year, with 14,000 laptops being rolled out per week to the current year 9 students.’

He goes on to say that they have put state-of-the-art software on the machines, which allows every student to be innovative. Additionally, technical support officers were appointed to all secondary schools to support the rollout, along with a wireless network with laptops to work on. Money was set aside for professional development of teachers so that there could be real changes in the classroom, and this is changing the way many teachers now teach. Classrooms reflect 21st century best practice.

This shows the importance of the computers in schools program. It ensures that kids in regional and rural areas right around Australia get the same chance as kids in the big cities. This is a program that rolls out right across Australia. It is absolutely vital that this program continues so that kids right across Australia get the advantage of this education and are not hamstrung. This program ensures that it is not just schools in the major metropolitan areas that have more money that are able to provide this type of education, which gives an advantage to children. We need to make sure that kids in regional and rural areas have the same base starting point. The computers in schools program is a vital program in relation to that.

Another very important program that we have in place is the Trade Training Centres in Schools Program. In my electorate, we have a $13 million promise so that four schools working together will be able to provide trade training at school. When you have only 40 per cent retention rates in your schools, you need to make sure that you are not just training kids at school for university, because many of them are not going to go to university. You need to make sure that you are training them for the jobs that are available in the area and jobs that they are going to be interested in—jobs that are not going to turn them off education. That is why it is so important that trade training is part of the curriculum in our schools. It needs to be part of what we do there. It is an absolute travesty that if the Abbott opposition is elected this program—the $13 million that is promised for my electorate—will simply not go ahead. We need to make sure that kids right around Australia get the opportunity for trade training.

In conclusion, I would also like to talk about the KickStart program and the success that it has had, building on the comments made by the Parliamentary Secretary for Employment. In the year before the global financial crisis, 303 apprenticeships were attained in my area. In the year of the global financial crisis, we lost over a third of those and there were just over 200 apprenticeships. In 2010, with KickStart the number went back up to 334—more than what we had before. This is an important program. This is the government acting to make sure that there are opportunities for education for all Australians. It is vital that rural and regional kids get the same chance as other kids. That is why this government is putting in place so many programs as part of the education revolution.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Unfortunately, I represent Urandangi, Doomadgee, Mornington, Yarrabah, Normanton and Camooweal, which are six of the worst 10 schools. Charters Towers and Croydon make it eight out of the worst 20 schools. We say that school attendance is terrible, but I find the kids at Yarrabah the happiest kids that I have seen in all of Queensland. They are kicking footballs around; they are riding horses. I would prefer our kids to be happy, quite frankly, than well educated. I say that after a lot of forethought. I am a person who had the privilege of having parents who were reasonably well off and I had as good an education as it is possible to provide for your children.

Having said those things, the Kennedy electorate of North Queensland is the most certainly the eye of the storm. These are the worst performances in Australia. At Atherton Primary School, year 5 have been told that they have to find $2,000 for laptops. The government told us that everyone was going to have a laptop. That is not the case at the Atherton State Primary School. The proposed removal of PCAP funding will leave St Anthony’s at Dimbulah, St Therese’s at Ravenshoe, Mount St Bernard at Herberton and other state schools off the table. To a lesser extent, this funding was used by St Anthony’s at Dimbulah to allow kids to travel 160 kilometres to Cairns, the nearest regional centre. That costs $2 a kilometre if you are not going under PCAP.

Moving on very swiftly in the limited time available to me, this next point is rather interesting. The government said that the problem was alcohol and they are trying to stop people from drinking. How utterly stupid. I do not know how many deaths we are up to in Queensland now, but I would hazard a guess that there would be at least a dozen deaths attributable to the state government’s efforts to ban alcohol. Has prohibition worked anywhere in the world? Why should the first Australians be treated as second-class citizens? It is impossible to say that all are treated equally when any of the 40,000 people living in the communities in Queensland are not allowed alcohol. It was always part of our upbringing as young people. I was a person who did not drink much, but a lot of my friends did. I cannot think of any evils that emanated from drink that affected the young people who I mixed with.

They are now saying that, if the kids do not attend school in all of the centres whose names I have reeled off, they will not get welfare payments. Does the government really think that they can force people to do things—force them not to drink? I am sorry, you cannot. Human beings have drunk since time immemorial. Read your Bible to find that out or read your archaeological books to find that out. Every race on earth figured out how to ferment alcohol. The pygmies in the Congo and the people on obscure islands in the South Pacific all figured out how to ferment alcohol. It is verified that we are up to our third death now from what they call ‘the brew’, which is a fermentation of vegemite. What is the state government going to do in Queensland, ban vegemite? That will be their next move.

You have to go to the root causes. I have canvassed those root causes many times in this place. It gives me no great joy—it causes me great suffering—to go bed of a night knowing that this place has not taken any notice of a single one of those recommendations, with the exception of the last minister for aboriginal affairs in the last government, who made some efforts in the Northern Territory. They are now saying that if you do not have your kid attending school then they will take away welfare payments. What are people going to do, starve to death? How are they going to live without welfare payments? The parents cannot discipline their kids. I imagine that other members of parliament have had people in their office who have tried to discipline their children and the thought control police have taken their children off them. How unfair. (Time expired)

Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak on this matter of public importance placed on the Notice Paper by the member for Lyne. I realised, as I was closely reading the topic and listening to the member for Kennedy, that I had probably misunderstood a little bit the exact nature of the issue that he was talking about. I asked the Deputy Prime Minister in question time today about participation in higher education, which led me to thinking about it along that track. But I can see that the issue is actually much broader than that. Having said that, the government is well aware of the breadth of this issue and is working right across the education sector—in primary, secondary, VET and higher education—to deal with participation rates of students in regional and rural areas.

One of the great things, if we start with the primary and secondary area, that I am finding as I go around to inspect and open Building the Education Revolution projects around my electorate is just how they have transformed these schools and transformed the way the teachers see their role in their school and the scope they have for innovation, for taking initiative, for seeing the possibility of engaging with students in a whole new way. And the students are responding to these new facilities and to that new attitude of the teachers by really becoming much more engaged in education.

There is also a mood in my electorate very much due to the reforms that the government has foreshadowed in higher education funding and policy. Coupled at the same time with a new vice-chancellor at our local university, Central Queensland University, a much stronger relationship is starting to form between the university and our local schools. The university is looking to take on that leadership role and engage with schools in communities in my electorate to build the aspirations of students and to make university and higher education something that is real, something that they can touch and see in front of them. An example of that is the Glenmore educational precinct, which involves a number of both primary and secondary schools and our local Central Queensland University looking at how those institutions can work together to improve teacher quality, to improve professional development for teachers and, through that, to get better educational outcomes for the students—always with the university sitting in the background wanting to show those students that they can contemplate higher education at the end of their secondary schooling. The people involved in that, I know, will make a great success of that precinct concept. Again, the Building the Education Revolution facilities really do boost all of the efforts that are going on within those precinct activities.

The other thing that is happening, again involving the university, is a much stronger partnership with our local TAFE. The university is strongly seeking to formalise that partnership with our local TAFE. The university has also put up its hand to host the trades training centre up in Mackay, which, again, is a Rudd government initiative.

Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time allotted for this discussion has now expired.