Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I will commence by saying that the opposition will support the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority Bill 2008but not without some lingering doubts. For the last 12 months I have had to get my head around the idea that the Minister for Education, Ms Gillard, and Ms Gillard’s representative in the Senate, my good friend Senator Carr, are both economic conservatives. I am just starting, after 12 months, to get my head around this paradox, and now the new paradox is that Ms Gillard and my good friend Senator Carr will put the education of Australian students, young Australians, ahead of the teacher unions. That also I have had to grapple with. Interests sometimes clash between teacher unions and the education of our children. But they have said they are going to put the education of our young people first. It is another paradox, from past behaviour, but I am coming to terms with it.

We agree with the Labor government on the principle of this bill, but one of the concerns I have is about implementation. I have spoken—indeed many on the coalition side have spoken—much about the implementation of government policy over the last 12 months. In the sphere of education there has been much talk—much of it taken from New York and from Tony Blair’s website—but the implementation of policy has been third-rate. I speak of an issue I have raised many times in this chamber—the computers in schools policy in the Digital Education Revolution, and trade training centres. The policy is not necessarily bad; the implementation of the policy has been a shambles.

The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority Bill establishes a new Commonwealth body, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, ACARA, which will replace the interim National Curriculum Board. ACARA will develop and administer the new national curriculum and collect data, providing analysis and research to governments. Its main role, however, will be the development of a national curriculum. The opposition sincerely hopes that ACARA will develop a world-class curriculum free from ideological bias and with a strong foundation in the basics that have been neglected to the detriment of too many children in recent decades—a sad legacy of the infatuation of the education establishment in this country with trendy foreign ideas.

Another great paradox in this country is that so many public intellectuals say Australia suffers from a cultural cringe, yet the same people adopt often pathetic foreign educational fads uncritically, to the detriment of too many Australian students for too long. When I used to teach at university, nearly everyone was a postmodernist. They would talk about deconstructing the text; it was terrific stuff. But you have to be able to read before you can deconstruct. That has been the basic problem that we have seen over the last 20 years in this country.

I have said we are going to support the bill, and we do hope it works. But we will be carefully studying the progress in relation to issues such as the timing of the curriculum’s introduction and its connection with school funding, and the place in the system of existing curricula, such as those at the University of Cambridge International Examinations schools, the Montessori schools, the Steiner schools, the Christian schools, the Islamic schools and the Jewish schools. We will also pursue with great interest the issue of potential future additions to the four core curriculum subjects at the moment, such as languages and music. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the opposition will carefully study the final product to make sure that it serves students rather than some ideological agenda or some new intellectual fad.