Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens believe that governments should be investing in Indigenous education. We need a large amount of money invested across the board but what we see proposed in this bill are some small ad hoc funding pots, which Indigenous education needs less of rather than more. This bill shows the government’s lack of commitment to delivering social justice across the board for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. It delivers initiatives announced during the budget: extending tutorial assistance to year 9 Indigenous students; extending tutorial assistance to Indigenous vocational education training students; funding school based sporting academies; funding the Indigenous youth festival component of the Community Festivals for Health Promotion program; and funding an educational component for a substance abuse initiative aimed at discouraging petrol sniffing in remote communities.

Given that these proposals increase funding for Indigenous education, the Greens welcome them but, as the Greens pointed out at budget time, they are set in a context of poor funding directions from this government from whom we have seen a cut to Abstudy by $15 million and a failure to deliver a much-needed increase in core funding for Indigenous and public education across the board. Despite implementing promising programs, the states have also failed to give sufficient priority to public school investment in Indigenous education. The extension of the Indigenous Tutorial Assistance Scheme to year 9 students is of course welcome but, at the same time, it is worrying because it is in part a recognition that the education policies of both state and federal governments are still failing our Indigenous students.

The Greens continue to point out that over 90 per cent of Indigenous students are educated in the public school system and that, under the Howard government, federal funding to public schools has dropped from around 45 per cent of total Commonwealth schools funding to less than 26 per cent today. Had the Commonwealth taken the opportunity to invest in the infrastructure, the staffing and the resourcing of our public schools at this time of unprecedented prosperity in Australia then the statistics that show that Indigenous students continue to lag behind their non-Indigenous schoolmates would not be as bad as they are today.

The core message that the Greens bring to this debate is: we need to invest to improve educational outcomes for Indigenous students, and the best thing we can do to achieve this is to have a massive reinvestment into our public school system. More specifically, the Greens policy includes an annual investment of $380 million of federal funding for a disadvantaged schools program, a significant proportion of which would target Indigenous communities. We also call for the Commonwealth to negotiate a nation building agreement between it and the states to address the ongoing inequity of educational outcomes for Indigenous Australians combined with the poverty, health and work challenges that so many Indigenous communities face.

Any Indigenous education agreement between the states and the Commonwealth must include funding to deliver mandatory preservice teacher education in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture, and educational needs and professional development for all existing teachers. It must also include funding to deliver a capital investment in new schools and facilities; increased numbers of Aboriginal education assistants in public schools; the exploration of modes of public education that integrate preschool, primary, secondary and TAFE as well as the complete range of public health and welfare services and community development; and increased numbers of teachers in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literacy and numeracy programs. It is only with this kind of approach that the goals from the national strategy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education agreed by the state and Commonwealth ministers through the Ministerial Council for Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, or MCEETYA, can be achieved, and with this kind of investment, and they are a long way from being achieved at the moment.

In May last year, MCEETYA agreed that improving outcomes for Indigenous students is the top priority for the 2005-08 quadrennium. But in the budget following this announcement the federal government cut funding under the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act to Abstudy and the Questacon Indigenous outreach program. How can the positive objectives agreed to in the ministerial council directions paper for Indigenous education 2005-08 be achieved when, in the first budget after that, the government cuts funding for Indigenous education?

Amongst the many recommendations the ministers agreed to was to provide all Indigenous children with access to two years of high-quality early childhood education prior to participation in the first year of formal schooling. That is a recommendation the Greens support. We would like to see it delivered through the public system. Where is the bill to assist with this vital objective? Another objective that all the ministers from around the country agreed to was that supplementary measures supporting Indigenous students through pathways into training, employment and higher education are pivotal to improving post-school transitions and breaking intergenerational cycles of poverty and disadvantage. How does this sit with the cuts to Abstudy we saw in the budget just after state and federal ministers had agreed to these objectives?

The sad reality is that whilst the government agrees to these excellent objectives outlined by the ministerial council document it continually fails to come up with an investment of the size and depth that is needed to make a real difference in outcomes for Indigenous education. It is appalling and shameful that so many Aboriginal students are being left behind by this lack of commitment. The Aboriginal population is a young one—40 per cent of Indigenous Australians are under the age of 15. This cohort is growing faster than any other part of the Australian population. It could, then, be argued that there is no better area than Indigenous education in which to spend an extra education dollar. But still the federal government in particular continues to drag its feet in this area. What a tragedy this is when so many great programs being pioneered in public schools around Australia are desperately in need of more support from federal and state governments.

Recently, I travelled around New South Wales as education spokesperson for the Greens. I visited a number of public schools that are running fantastic programs in Aboriginal education. Each of the schools were struggling with the maze of funding programs they had to navigate their way through to get funding to support the students in their school. All of them urgently needed simpler, more reliable and more generous funding streams to allow them to continue the work they were doing.

I want to tell you about some of the schools I visited. Evans River school in northern New South Wales caters for students from kindergarten all the way through to year 12. It has 560 students, 15 per cent of whom are Indigenous. There are Indigenous students from kindergarten all the way through to high school. A number of Indigenous staff are employed at that school, including an Aboriginal deputy principal. They explained to me a great program they run to increase young Aboriginal people’s attendance at school, which is called ‘Race to the top’. It involves an opportunity for students to be involved in making go-karts for some of the time they are at school, in order to attract them to school. It is designed to motivate Indigenous kids to improve their attendance. It has been a successful pilot program that was running in Sydney, and it is now going to be run at Evans Head in the north of New South Wales.

But it has not been easy. In order to secure the funding, the Aboriginal teaching assistant in particular, and a number of other staff, have had to spend a lot of time out of the classroom writing and rewriting funding applications in order to try and get money from the Commonwealth to run the program—funding which, incidentally, will run out after six months. They have taken a tremendous amount of time to write applications to get the funding. The program is funded by a grant from the federal Department of Education, Science and Training. The school went through with me the approximately 20 programs they run for Indigenous education. The programs are funded by the federal government from different pots. Each has a different application regime and each has a different reporting regime. This uses up a tremendous amount of staff time which, therefore, is not spent educating Indigenous children in these schools. They also described to me how some of the federal government funding models punish them for their success. If they improve the language and literacy skills of the Aboriginal students, they do not get the funding any more, so they are back to square one in terms of being able to ensure that the Aboriginal students get the support and tuition they need.

Another school I went to in that area was the Cabbage Tree Island Public School. It has a small transition class—a pre-primary class—and primary classes up to year 6. They cater for the Aboriginal community on Cabbage Tree Island, which struggles with low economic opportunity and the usual social stresses that come with that. The staff have done a tremendous job in improving the school and the quality of the education provided there. The staff are predominantly Aboriginal. They are incredibly committed and all work beyond the call of duty to build a future for the students there. I watched the year 6 students’ dance class prepare for a festival at which they were to perform. The pride on the faces of those students when they were doing those dances and the excitement about being in a festival—I think it was the Croc Festival—was fantastic. That school also has had problems with the interaction between all the different pots of money they need to get funding from—some state and some federal. When they receive funding from one level of government they lose the funding they were receiving from the other level of government—as a result of trying to balance those two programs.

At that school they spoke about how they no longer bother to apply for some of the federal funding because the government has made the application process so difficult; that it takes up too much of staff and the parent’s time to make the applications. Each of these schools was providing fantastic programs and doing incredible work. I saw students really enjoying what they were doing. But these programs were often pilot programs with no ongoing funding. A tremendous amount of a teacher’s time out of the classroom is required to fill in the different application forms for each of the different funding pots from which they hope to get funding, in order to run the great programs they are running.

Another school I visited was Broulee Primary School, which has around 300 students. This school has a fantastic Indigenous language program. It is a pilot program with limited funding available. They are doing it through Sydney university. They have two Indigenous staff who have set up a program where they teach their local language to the kids in that area—a language that has been a living part of that community for 10,000 years. The teachers did the work to get the language program to a point where it could be taught in all the classrooms. I sat through a year 6 class where all the students sang for me. They sang common songs that we have all heard, but they sang in the local Aboriginal language from that community. Some of the elders were there to hear their language living in the community.

This school has a reasonably small proportion of Indigenous students. A lot of the students are from coastal communities involved in surfing. They sang for me in their Aboriginal language. The year 1 kids sang for me as well. It was incredible how much the elders enjoyed being involved. They were talking with the Aboriginal teachers about the importance of the language from the area. The teachers spoke to me afterwards and said that some of the students who had not excelled in other areas or other parts of the curriculum really found they could excel in the Aboriginal language. It created great opportunities for them to feel pride in the work they were doing at the school.

The program at that school will only run for 18 months because it is a pilot program. But that is exactly the sort of program that should be available in all public schools across the country, if they wanted to run it. There should be funding models at a federal level that allow schools to develop educational programs for Indigenous students that meet the needs of the local community and the Indigenous students and that allow easy access to the funding so that staff resources are not tied up in writing applications. That would bring enormous benefits to schools and local communities.

There are great things being done in public schools across this country for Indigenous education, and they need to be supported because, at the moment, the thing that frustrates all of these teachers I spoke to who are running Aboriginal education programs is that they have to spend so much time outside the classroom writing different application forms for different grant programs. They have to juggle the different grants and try to find which they can get on, how long they will last, how short term particular grants are and how the funding model has changed so they can change the way they do their applications. They want to just get on and teach the kids. They want to continue doing the great work that they do in the schools and we need to see that great work continue. We need to see an investment to achieve the outcomes that the ministerial council on education talks about wanting to achieve for Indigenous education. We need the investment so that the money is available and able to be accessed in such a way that staff can spend their time teaching, rather than spending their time on administrative duties and scrabbling around in every little pot of money to see what they might be able to do.

These are precisely the sorts of programs that the government should be supporting, and it should be providing across-the-board access to funding. This bill has more small, ad hoc pots of funding for which people will be able to make applications, rather than increasing the overall investment in our public schools—where 90 per cent of Indigenous students are—and ensuring that there is across-the-board access to funding for people who want to run great programs.

So I think it is time for the minister to visit some of these great public schools that are running these programs and to talk with the staff and the teachers about how they can be improved, how the minister can support these great programs and how these programs can continue in schools. We urge the minister to visit these schools, talk with these teachers and find ways to have long-term, uncomplicated funding available to support Indigenous education. Rather than seeing it as a problem area, it should be seen as a core element of education in Australia.

When you walk into a school of 300 students at a coastal community on the south coast of New South Wales and they all sing to you in the local Aboriginal language that they have learned from the local teachers who are Aboriginal and from that area, it is incredibly impressive. It was great to walk into the school and see the little signs around the playground in the local Aboriginal language—on the canteen with a sign for food and under the trees in the playground with signs describing the different parts of the school. It was a wonderful feeling to walk into a school like that and see how much that learning is contributing to the atmosphere in the school and in the whole of the local community, and to see people from the Aboriginal community involved in the process.

That is what we need to see and that is where we would like to see the government investing. They need to make sure that these kinds of programs become a normal part of the curriculum and are available across the board to not only Indigenous students but also non-Indigenous students, so they can engage in this exciting, living part of our culture and so that everyone can contribute to it, learn from it, enjoy it and be proud of it. That is what we would like to see the federal government and the state governments doing—investing in making these opportunities available for all students in public schools across the country.