Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to say that, consistent with my remarks last week, the Greens will not be supporting the opposition’s amendment that they have foreshadowed in relation to making funding a sanction for not doing as the government says. But the point that I wanted to make tonight is precisely the same point that the opposition has made. At the very time I was on my feet last week welcoming the end of the Howard government mentality of sanctions and punishment for universities if they did not do what the Howard government said and congratulating the Rudd government for getting rid of that principle, the Prime Minister was delivering his speech on the education revolution in which he was talking about doing to our schools exactly what the Howard government did to universities. That was the very thing that horrified me.

At these two levels, there are totally inconsistent policy positions. For example, the minister, Julia Gillard, in her second reading speech on this bill said:

This bill is about getting the heavy foot of the Liberal Party off the throat of our universities.

Frankly, what the Prime Minister was doing last week was putting the heavy foot of the Labor Party on the throat of our schools. Ms Gillard, the minister, said that this was about removing unwarranted bullying and government interference in our universities and in other higher education providers. Now we have the Prime Minister doing just the same.

Last week, he threatened the states and the education unions by declaring that future education funding would be conditional on information about the performance of individual schools being made available to parents. He demanded that the states agree to a new national system of school transparency by December. He went on to say that it would be a non-negotiable condition of the four-year Commonwealth-state education funding agreement to come into effect in January. Exactly the thing that the government have said that they wanted to get rid of regarding university funding they have now done regarding school funding.

They have said that every child in Australia, no matter where they live, how much money their parents earn or what language they speak, is entitled to a good education. I could not agree more with that statement. Every child is entitled to leave school able to read and write and to be given the opportunity to achieve the best they can at school and afterwards. Every school has a responsibility to give children that opportunity. And they have to be funded to do so. That is the point. Unless you fund public education, you are not going to get those outcomes.

What is so wrong and wrongheaded with the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister saying to principals, ‘We’ll pay you more and you get those results or you’ll get sacked,’ is the assumption that every child going into every school approaches school with the same social capital. That is not the case. Instead of taking this bullying approach, which the government has said it is repudiating for universities—instead of replicating that in schools, we need a national conversation about an education revolution. The whole community has to think about the social capital it provides to kids as they are growing up and getting ready for school.

You have to accept that in some areas you are going to have students presenting for school and being hungry. Are you going to sack a principal because some of their kids come to school hungry and cannot learn because they cannot concentrate? In Tasmania, we have breakfast clubs in several schools. Communities are raising money to provide Milo and toast so that students can eat something before they start the school day.

The same thing is happening in other areas. Students turn up to school not necessarily even having been home the night before because they have stayed, in all sorts of circumstances, elsewhere. There are some homes in which there are no books to read, there are some homes where people do not even talk to their kids and some homes where kids do not even get to the point of being able to count 1 to 10 or to know anything about the ABC before they go to school. There are others where parents have invested huge amounts in getting their children ready for school. To say, ‘You will perform here as this principal and every child will achieve to this level in this school or you will be rated down in some sort of league table’ absolutely denies the reality that is the case in the Australian community.

We need to fund schools to be able to educate children appropriately and to the best level that they can achieve, and that means funding schools and having programs for special needs children that are appropriately funded. I just cannot believe the inconsistency of the government policy here. Of course I am going to support the government’s legislation and I am going to repudiate the coalition’s amendment, which is saying that you should tie funding to universities based on this draconian idea that you will bully the universities into governing themselves in a one-size-fits-all or else you do not get your funding. At the same time, I would like to hear from the government why that is a terrible thing when it comes to universities but it is an appropriate thing when it comes to schools education. As a principal, it is a very bad idea and it is appalling for education.

Putting computers in schools and taking a sanctions view of education, saying, ‘We will pay you and sack you if you do not get the outcomes’ is so wrong-headed. It is not collaborative, it is not understanding of societal needs and it is even refusing to realise that public schools in Australia are educating some of the most difficult children to educate and some of the kids with very special needs, and that requires adequate funding and support. If you are going to have inclusion of special needs children you have to have appropriately funded schools so that you have aides who can assist them in their learning. You have to have class sizes that are small enough to allow students to be able to achieve to their full potential.

The government is adopting a demanding attitude and is talking in terms of ‘failing schools’. The Prime Minister is saying, ‘Kids out there going to average schools deserve every opportunity that kids at flash schools have.’ What is an average school? What is a flash school? I assume that that is the difference between a public school and a private school, because that is how it would have been under the Howard government, and what we are seeing replicated here are Howard government policies.

The fact of the matter is that public education is the backbone of our society. It is the reason we have got the democracy that we have, which has allowed people, on the basis of merit, to be able to make their way in Australian society, and we have been proud of that. One of the things we have been most upset about in the last 10 years is the increasing gap between the rich and the poor, and that is what I thought the Rudd government were about addressing. They certainly have said they are about addressing that. But you are not going to get that unless you fund public education. What we have seen in this decision to duck public education funding in terms of the formula, for another four years, is to see public education falling further behind in the funding stakes. The Prime Minister then says, ‘We are not going to fund you adequately, but if you do not perform we are going to sack you and we are going to shift responsibility for literacy and numeracy and performance solely onto teachers and principals. We are not going to have a general conversation in the community about why we have got so many people in Australia today who have difficulties with literacy and numeracy.’ Isn’t it time we started to look at broader societal ways of addressing that?

If you have got a parent between 15 and 30 who cannot read and who struggles with numeracy, then the children they have are also going to struggle with that and are going to be significantly disadvantaged when they go to school. From the moment they reach school they are going to know that, compared with others in their class, their sense of self-worth will be diminished, and it will not be their own fault. How are we going to deal with the fact that we have a large number of disadvantaged adults in our community? We have to raise the whole idea of lifelong learning. We have to take away the stigma associated with the people in our community who cannot read and write as well as they need to but would like to, and we need to help them to be able to do so.

To take the appalling attitude that the Howard government took to governance in universities, tying it to funding and having a sanctions and punishment regime, and to shift that to schools is inexplicable and it is not going to get us anywhere. It is so far from an education revolution. You cannot have a revolution that is not funded. You cannot have a revolution just by putting computers in schools and giving them equally across the government and non-government system without addressing the current inequity of funding between public and private education. We have to fund public schools in order to be able to do what they need to do to get this society to a point where we can take advantage of a knowledge and information based future.

I would appreciate from the government an explanation as to how it is that the Minister for Education can stand up in relation to this bill and say:

Our higher education providers were expected to run things the Howard-Costello way—or face severe financial penalties that reduced core funding for teaching and learning.

The Minister for Education said that in relation to higher education and the very next week she said the complete opposite when it comes to schools. I am sure I speak for a number of people in the Senate who would appreciate some understanding of the inconsistency in this philosophical position.