Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (Senator Vanstone) to a question without notice asked by Senator Allison today relating to school chaplains.

I rise to take note of the answer given—or not given—to my question about state school chaplains. It is really disappointing that, as she admitted, the minister had no brief for this question, given that it was spread across the papers over the weekend and seems to us to be a major issue. She could not even comment on whether or not this was something that she supported, when it was going to happen or any of the detail about this so-called proposal.

What we do know about it is that the minister has said that chaplains could be installed in government schools to:

... lift religious standards and provide mentoring for students.

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Ms Bishop said parents were “looking for choice in the education and values taught to their children”.

This whole values debate has been trotted out time and time again as a way of damaging our public education system—the whole concept that public schools, government schools, somehow do not impart values. That is an absolute nonsense. It is not only the churches who have ownership of the values debate. I would argue that many who have no religious convictions can demonstrate a far greater attachment to high-level values, if you can put it that way.

Tolerance and respect for diversity are values that I would like to see young people, old people and middle-aged people have. We know in this place that this government has absolutely no interest in respecting diversity—otherwise, we would not be so inhumane in our treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. We would not have had a debate where the Prime Minister constantly told us that Muslim people do not have the same values as we do and that they should go home. It was not that many weeks ago that the Prime Minister himself said that Muslim people who do not share our values—whatever those values are—should pack up and go back to the country from which they came.

The Democrats are extremely concerned about this latest measure, this idea backed by so many supporters. Victorian supporters named were Greg Hunt, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment and Heritage; Andrew Laming; Louise Markus; and David Fawcett. Mr Hunt, for instance, is quoted as saying that state schools are antireligious. In this country, the state school system is secular; it is not religious. We have religious schools, but we also have state schools and, in my view, there is no argument for them to suddenly become religious—to suddenly have chaplains conducting services and coercing young people into being in a particular religion.

What if there are Muslim or Hindu students in a particular school? Will they be told they should be Christian, Catholic, Anglican, Uniting Church or whatever is the case? Are we really suggesting that we should have chaplains pushing religions on young people? Would it not be better to use whatever money will be thrown at this exercise to get to the real problems in schools: literacy and young people with learning disabilities. They still have no right to additional assistance in schools. Would it not be better to have sex education in a way which reduces the huge number of teenage pregnancies in this country? Let’s start to broach some of the real issues in schools instead of making our state schools into copies of religious schools elsewhere.

In respect of simply saying to parents, ‘You need choice; you need values; your children need values,’ we all know children need values, but are they necessarily the values that come from the churches? I do not know. Some churches do not, quite frankly, have a very good history of respecting children. The inquiries into the abuse of children in institutions points the finger very firmly at many churches who have abused children over many years. Can we trust the churches to do this? Where would chaplains come from? Would they have police checks like teachers do? I would certainly hope so, because paedophiles move in circles where they get access to young people. That is the awful truth. If we are suddenly saying there need to be chaplains in every school, I want to know where they are coming from, because they could well be people who will prey on young people. We need to be tough about this. We need to make sure that they do not get access to our children. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.