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

Despite being a strong advocate of pricing carbon I disagree with the statement that climate change is the moral challenge of our time. Instead, in my view, there is a bigger one. The real moral and economic challenge of our time is access and participation rates in Australian education, particularly the structural inequities for regional Australians, poor Australians and Indigenous Australians. Heather Ridout of the Australian Industry Group highlighted this problem when she reported on Q&A several weeks ago that over 40 per cent of Australian workers cannot read or comprehend the standard operating manual. This echoes reports that six million Australians are functionally illiterate or innumerate. This in anyone's language should be seen as a massive structural failure. I do not know how or why we got here but I am disgusted we are here. These figures are a shameful failure of the way education policy has interacted or not interacted with business and our broader community. We are all too comfortable leaving too many Australians out of full engagement in our society.

Australia is missing out on significant productivity gain waiting to happen through a ready made home-grown workforce waiting to be engaged if we seize the opportunity post-Bradley to shape the education options better than we have in the past. From the most recent figures available, we have more than a 25 per cent difference in the access and participation rates for metropolitan versus regional students, for Indigenous versus non-Indigenous students and for rich versus poor. Regional, poor and Indigenous being left behind—in my view, it is shameful.

I represent an electorate that is regional, Indigenous and poor and for that reason I am determined to do what I can to see this issue addressed. In the post-Bradley environment, while I acknowledge there are those who are nervous or fearful about certain aspects of a demand-driven system, from my perspective I am seeing much greater engagement between the higher education system and local communities such as the mid-North Coast of New South Wales.

I had previously never talked to a vice chancellor until late 2008. Now the conversations are detailed and many and there does seem to be a real desire to engage better with regions like the mid-North Coast than what has gone before. If Bradley has contributed to this then Bradley is working. The inequities in regional, Indigenous and poor access and participation figures in higher learning are now being acknowledged and the start of addressing these inequities, I hope, has begun. Culturally, this want to address the inequality in these three key areas is challenging many communities. If I am honest about my region, and I know it would be similar elsewhere, there is a certain level of comfort in being on the receiving end of inequity. It is easy to be left out or left behind because it is then someone else's fault.

Higher education has traditionally been positioned as something for the top three, maybe three or four, out of 10 students. There is a bit of a 'group think' from the others to make it okay that only the 'smart people' do higher learning. It is almost oxymoronic logic in my view that gets comfort from the fact that the smart go on to higher learning as an argument to justify why not to.

This cultural logic in Australia is now being challenged in my region and I hope in others. We are starting to reject the assumption that smart people do higher learning and instead we are insisting that higher learning helps make smart people. As I said in my first speech to this parliament in 2008, the motto I want engrained into the minds of young people from the mid-North Coast—and right around Australia—is study for a job, study for a job, study for a job. This is not a conversation about the three out of 10 who, wherever they are from, will succeed. They will be the post graduate engine room that keeps all universities viable into the future and go on to achieve wonderful things in their fields of interest around the world.

But in my view, the great challenge to overcome within Australia is the inequity of how to better engage the seven out of 10 students who do not have the cultural aspiration to engage. Many of these will be the very first in their families for generations to even think about higher learning. Many will cop grief from brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers for the mere thought that they could go to university, or to do higher learning generally. Many are not the top secondary students but many still have a glimmer of want to go further and are easily lost for a whole number of social and cultural reasons. Many face social realities that are vastly different from the top end of any town, whether Sydney or Melbourne, making an 'apple with apple' entry mark system into higher learning, for example, a further contributor to the inequity that we are already trying to overcome. In my view this is the challenge of the moment and the next step for reform considerations.

Post-Bradley, we have seen structural change to challenge the education system to better engage on this question of inequity. I am less worried than some about the uncapped, demand-driven implications of these changes, although I do listen to people, such as Jim Barber from the University of New England, who want to see some special loadings and support for regional universities, particularly those which may be challenged by an uncapped, demand-driven system. Generally, I think there are more opportunities for education and for regional education than there are threats posed.

What is an emerging concern, however, is the 'Bradley-readiness' of the broader communities where cultural change is being sought. As an example, only last month at one of my local land councils nine traineeships were on offer with guaranteed jobs at the end—good jobs—but the land council executive had to scout around the meeting room and around the community for ideas of who could fill these welcome places. It is not that potential candidates do not exist but that for a whole number of complex reasons there is a reluctance to take up the opportunity presented. There is a clear demand inequity in Indigenous communities, in the regions and for the poor, but the emerging concern and challenge is that we may be left with a supply problem unless we engage and empower communities much better than we have in the past. This is where our model of 'place based' learning becomes so critical, and is now in need of greater investment than ever before. Without more thought and more work I am not sure those who are being targeted through structural reform will be picked up and empowered by education options that we all want on their behalf.

The call today, therefore, is for government to do some more parallel work in aspiration-building in key communities. It is a huge step to be the first in the family to choose higher education and more guidance and support to make this happen is needed. If anyone needs to borrow a model to get started on this community capacity building, I am very proud that we have our own—I call it the mini-education revolution—on the mid-North Coast of New South Wales. We recognise this challenge and are actively looking to do what we can to assist and empower.

In 2008, when I was first elected, I found a very difficult local education environment. The secondary education streams were at war with each over the rollout of the technical colleges, the three secondary streams were hotly contesting everything that moved and there was very little engagement between the secondary and tertiary sectors, both public and private. Seventeen of us decided to do something about it and formed the Port Macquarie Education and Skills Forum. Its brief was to build as many seamless pathways as possible, with a student focus on collaboration, not duplication. The council led the charge and employed someone full time to put together a local access and participation in education strategy. The Education and Skills Forum adopted a 40 per cent or higher bachelor degree by 2025 as a local target, coming off a very low base of 12 per cent. We all knew it was aspirational but we chased the desire to participate. As meetings continued, it became increasingly obvious how little the various streams within the education had previously talked to or trusted each other. It was also obvious how powerful, at a local level, these talks and this trust can be when addressed.

As a consequence of this work and many issues now being sorted out locally I think we are positioning ourselves to be able to address inequality within our region and to be an example for others. Due to the success of the Port Macquarie model we have a similar one in the Manning Valley. The Manning Valley Education and Skills Forum is now up and running with the Macleay Education and Skills Forum hopefully coming soon. I am also pleased to hear that beyond my own electorate the wheat belt of Western Australia has picked up this model and is in the process of replicating it.

To conclude, reforms in education will not matter as much as they should unless key local communities are fully networked and empowered. There is work needed from government to assist in this regard. Unless local communities have greater ownership of this process, and are empowered through the place based model of thinking, then Canberra will struggle to achieve the desired outcomes we all want to see happen and we will have a lesser education reform agenda than we otherwise could have. From my perspective that would be a huge opportunity lost for dealing with the moral challenge of our time.