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

I rise today to comment on this important matter brought before the Senate in relation to the planning, costing and implementation, in a timely manner, of the flagship election promise, the ‘education revolution’. Frankly, I am concerned that there is not going to be an education revolution in Australia but that we are actually going to see a reformation of where the Howard government has been and that this government is going to head in exactly the same direction. A revolution implies excitement; it implies a change. It implies something different, innovative, new—an energy in the sector.

I do congratulate the Rudd government for its undertaking to put computers in schools. That is a critically important bit of infrastructure that the Australian education community needs, but I note and take on board what has been said about how that has actually been rolled out, because it is absolutely true that schools are being short-changed in the rollout of computer programs. What is happening is that schools are being forced to buy cheaper laptops and spend up to 30 per cent of their grants on licensing and government fees. That is just the reality. I went to a school in north-eastern Tasmania where they are having to rewire whole sections of the school because they do not have the most basic wiring able to accommodate the equipment that is now required if they are actually going to deliver education in the way that they hope to.

According to a recent newspaper report, South Australian public schools are paying $250 for licensing fees for each new computer and a $40 state government administration fee. They pay $6 a student to cover existing licences, but replacement computers do not attract the $250 fee. In fact those schools which are the most disadvantaged, and therefore have the fewest computers and are now getting new computers, will pay the highest fees because they are not replacement computers and therefore they have to pay additional licensing fees. In some states—New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia—the state governments have agreed to absorb the licensing fees and pay the whole of the grant to the school, but in other states this is not the case.

New South Wales has stumped up the money to give schools wireless access and I think that is a good idea as well. But the South Australian Secondary Principals Association has said that allowing the states to administer the scheme has led to funding inequities. In South Australia, for example, they had hoped to be leading edge nationally, but that is not the case. If you are a disadvantaged school and have not been able to build up the number of computers, nearly all of the computers will be new and they will carry the $250 fee. Hallett Cove School in Adelaide’s south is paying more than $51,000 on Microsoft fees, administration costs and so on and so forth.

What we are finding is that, whilst in theory it is a good idea, in practice it has not rolled out smoothly or uniformly across the country. The other thing to point out is that the same arrangement was made for privileged schools and completely underprivileged schools and so it has not addressed the inequity in the system. That is the point I really wanted to address today in terms of the education revolution. You cannot have a revolution in education unless you fund it.

Giving people computers is not a revolution on its own. It is no use putting a computer in front of a young person if you do not have teaching staff who can actually help them to discern what is good and reliable information, what is information that might be suspect and how to negotiate the internet, because the information superhighway is not uniform in quality.

The issue of public school funding is a critical one, and I am concerned that we are shortly going to see a break with the past when the government introduces its new funding for the next quadrennium. What we are most likely going to see is the splitting off, for the first time, of funding for private schools from funding for public schools, and that the public school funding will not come until after the negotiations with the states later this year. What this means is that the private schools will get their certainty early—within the next few weeks—and the public schools are going to have to wait till much later in the year. Politically, it is quite a savvy tactic because it allows the private schools to get their money without the public schools being able to have a point of comparison and reference for some time. On the other hand it allows the government the opportunity to negotiate a much better deal with the state governments. If one were less cynical one would hope that the motivation may be for the government to at last sit down and negotiate with the states to get a real injection of funds into public education.

As we know, under the Howard government the share of Commonwealth funding to public education slipped backwards. We would need an investment of $1½ billion upfront now to bring public education up to the same share it had in 1996, when the Howard government took office. So let us not fail to remember that under the Howard government for a decade the share of Commonwealth funding for public schools in Australia slipped right back. For all those years we had Julia Gillard, now the Deputy Prime Minister, saying that when there was a problem in the education sector the Howard government looked around for someone to blame: generally in question time it was the education unions and then it was state Labor governments.

But I have to say that Minister Gillard is now doing exactly the same thing—she is looking around for people to blame and she is generally blaming teachers. I will not have it. I am not going to stand in this parliament and allow governments to blame teachers for educational performance. In fact, you need to have your best teachers in the most difficult schools if you are going to get the best outcomes and offer equitable education outcomes. By setting up systems where you reward people on the basis of the educational attainment of students in schools, you are setting up a system whereby you end up with your best teachers not necessarily wanting to be in those difficult schools, and therefore those difficult-to-staff schools.

I want to put a line in the sand here and say that it is time as a society we thought much more about the place of schools in our community and about how we value teachers in our community and the job that they do. The whole society must recognise the value of teachers and what they bring to the classrooms. Computers are one thing, but it is the human management skills and the human teaching skills that are critical. We need smaller class sizes. We need a policy whereby if we have inclusion of students with disabilities of any kind, whether they are physical or mental disabilities or learning problems, there are smaller class sizes. We have to support the inclusion policy with enough aids to be able to allow students in those circumstances to learn.

I would like to see the Rudd government go back and have a look at how the states have handled the rollout of computers in their schools. It should look at the fact that, because some state governments have subsidised it and others have not, students are not receiving the computers in the equitable way the government promised they would. The fact that it is costing so much for reconfiguration of classrooms, for rewiring, for licensing fees and so on, is also undermining the value of these computers. But computers alone will not do it. We have to fund education adequately and increase the share of public education funding as a matter of urgency.