Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

A few months ago I was speaking to a university student who told me about a midsemester assignment she had received for one of her courses. I took an interest in the assignment because the class was given a paper on families and told to write about a particular type of family and the advantages and benefits of it. The paper that was presented was a study asking the students to respond and endorse the fact that children of same-sex relationships were in a better parental situation than those of a heterosexual relationship. I found this entirely controversial. It is something that I certainly do not agree with, but it brings me to the first of two points that I would like to make today. The first of which is: why I am surprised that this sort of bias and presentation is made to our university students? For some time there has been concern that within Australian universities, and even in some secondary and primary schools, there is some behaviour and some endorsement of particular political views or other biases that really have no place in the educational system. Teachers, lecturers and the like are charged with a grave responsibility, and that is to educate young minds. It means they should present facts and information in a sensible, balanced and even-handed manner. Where there are controversial issues that need to be dealt with, they should present both sides of the issue, and I have no truck with that, as I am sure many parents do not. Then, after having been presented with both sides of the argument and the necessary information, it is for students to decide for themselves and ultimately form their own opinions about these matters.

In some instances where teachers are no longer presenting both sides of an argument, it appears that children and students are being indoctrinated with a particular bias. There are many examples where teachers are pushing their own opinions about politics or society in general onto students and are only allowing one side of an argument to be heard. Indeed, teachers have been known—and there has been some evidence about this presented to a Senate committee—to pressure students to reflect certain thoughts in assignments regardless of what the student actually believes or the merits of a student’s argument, leading some students to worry that if they do not reflect the opinions of their teacher they will actually be marked down. The assignment that I referred to in my opening remarks is a case in point. The young lady approached me about an assignment and said: ‘I don’t agree with it. I’d like to present a different argument.’ But she had been told by her lecturer that that was inappropriate and that she had to endorse the findings of the study.

There are a few other examples that have been given over the course of time both to me and to the Senate committee that had an inquiry into this. A third year university student stated:

I have … consistently felt intimidated that if I express views other than those—

of my—

tutors and lecturers … my marks will suffer.

He mentioned readings on ‘the immorality of the United States with no countervailing position’ and a lecturer who said:

… nobody in Australia supports John Howard and his crimes …

A year 12 student from the public system reported that a Your Rights at Work corflute was hung up in one of the school’s classrooms. An Australian Education Union media release from March 2003 reflected its members’ opposition to Australian involvement in the war in Iraq. While the media release states that members should respect the views of students and ‘their right to develop their own opinions’, it appears that these are empty words because it later asks teachers to ‘support students who take an anti-war stance’.

I am not getting into the merits of these particular positions. That is not what I intend to do today. Today is about asking why we are allowing or encouraging such bias to be presented to our students. If there is merit in an argument, let both sides of the debate be presented so students feel free to argue their case. There is, of course, other evidence in this regard. Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth was presented to students in some countries as if it were all fact. We know that it is not all fact and that it contains a great deal of fiction. It has been exposed as inaccurate and false, but very little rebuttal and very few opposing arguments have been allowed to be presented in academic settings. Why aren’t students allowed to see both sides of the issue and then be left to form their own opinions? I think that is a very reasonable question, but it is a question that remains unanswered.

A Catholic student group was recently banned from displaying posters about pregnancy counselling in its university because the university had a policy that only pro-choice materials were permitted on campus. How is that fair and equitable? In the supposedly tolerant environment of a university, where there is a great deal made of equality and rights, it seems that some rights are more equal than others. Some of the examples I have just given are from submissions to last year’s Senate inquiry into academic freedom. I note that no recommendations were made as a result of that. The inquiry basically said that it appears to concern only a very small proportion of the student population. The chair, Senator Marshall, said:

Even if it were true that the majority of academics have a broadly left liberal political stance, the question is whether this matters.

I think it does matter when academics are pushing a political view, be it Left or Right, on students without allowing students to hear a balancing counterview in a reasonable setting or to express a counterview without penalties attached to their academic transcripts or performance.

It goes to a broader concern that at some levels—and people have shared this with me—universities seem to have been caught up in social engineering and that they have forgotten to be open-minded educational institutions. They should be providing students with the tools to help them form their own opinions, not forming opinions for them. If you want to characterise it in a single phrase, it is possibly an abuse of trust. One of the submitters to the inquiry wrote:

Students are easily malleable, and … they trust the opinion of their teachers to a high degree. The teacher-student relationship has much to do with why teachers are so influential. Students are entrusted by their parents, and by the community, to these people to properly educate them.

I make the point that the responsibility of our learning centres is to properly educate students, not indoctrinate them. We do trust our teachers. We trust our learned people to help educate our children and to present them with facts and information. We do not want them to present our children with biased and sometimes incorrect information.

We need to make sure that the trust that parents and the community place in these places of learning is not abused. We need to make sure that teachers who have a personal view are not necessarily only talking about that perspective in their classrooms. They need to make sure that there is balance. So we have to have some changes. Students should be able to go to school or university to learn, free from individuals pushing their own particular perspective onto them. Students should not be scared to voice their own opinions for fear of reprisal, whether that reprisal be exclusion from a particular class or in the form of a downgrading of marks for not conforming to the latest orthodoxy.

I opened my contributions by saying a student was required to basically undermine the integrity of her belief in the traditional parental relationship of a man and a woman looking after children. The paper on family structures I mentioned went some way towards undermining what is a tolerant and generally open-minded society and I think it undermines the importance of the traditional family. I certainly recognise there are many different types of families today. Our society has changed over the years, our family structures have changed. Regardless of circumstances, we all want the best for our children. Research on family structures and their impacts on children has, at times, come up with conflicting results. Some research finds that the traditional family unit—married mother and father with children—is better for children. Some research finds that that is not necessarily the case. The paper that this student was asked to write about clearly reflected the latter view. One conclusion that the paper came to was:

… parenting practices and children’s outcomes in families parented by lesbian and gay parents are likely to be at least as favourable as those in families of heterosexual parents …

This is a well-researched paper and I make no condemnation of it at all. My concern and condemnation is that there was no ability in the university system to allow for any dissent from that view. I think that is a very reasonable concern to have because there are conflicting views on this and many other topics. As I acknowledged earlier, in late 2007, the British Office for National Statistics found that children who lived with their traditionally married parents were healthier and stayed in education for longer, irrespective of their economic background. So there are clearly differing opinions out there. The fact that there are differing opinions is something we should be celebrating in this country. We should be encouraging our scholars and those in our esteemed learning environments to put forward those differing opinions and to have a battle of ideas. This is what politics, and indeed social progress, is built on.

My personal view has been, and I hope always will be, that the traditional family unit is the most successful unit in society and we should be doing everything that we can to encourage it. I believe it is the best structure in which to raise children and it forms the very foundation of our society. Let me be very clear: I am not saying that it is the only way to raise children. It is not necessarily always going to produce a better outcome than any other type of family environment or arrangement but, on the whole, I believe it has been the best structure and will continue to be the best structure for our children.

The structure of our families of course should be regarded of importance to the Senate and everyone else because, in today’s society, family fragmentation is becoming more common than ever. There are myriad reasons for this. There are economic circumstances, higher incidences of de facto relationships and an increasing divorce rate among a number of other societal impacts. Back in 1998 it was conservatively estimated that marriage and relationship breakdowns cost almost $3 billion in government payments, court cases and the like as well as a great deal of stress for those involved. I would suggest that it is highly likely that this figure has increased over the last 10 years or so. Indeed, family breakdown when it happens on such a large scale can actually undermine and cripple entire communities.

In times where there are difficulties—and our society is already struggling; particularly with the impact of an economic slowdown and unemployment, there are pressures on families due to house prices and a range of other impacts—it is important that we do encourage strong, stable families. It has been said:

The natural family, cemented by marriage, is a mini-welfare state, education system, health care service and socialising institution.

The family for me is the very foundation of our society. It shapes the attitudes, the hopes, the ambitions and the values of the child more than any other force. Families teach patience and understanding; they share life’s best and worst moments with us. Children raised in strong families often go on to be successful, while also contributing to the strength of their communities.

I acknowledge and accept that today’s families do not always fit a traditional mould. We have any number of successful children raised in very different familial environments. Many children are raised in single parent families, some live with their grandparents and some may share a home with members of their extended family. It is vital that, in a society that features many different family structures and a constant battle with family breakdown, we do not let the importance of the traditional family unit fall by the wayside. Of everything that unites us, nothing is more powerful in my opinion than that the family and strong families equal a strong Australia. That is why we have to continue to allow strong families to have their place in society, including support in our academic institutions. (Time expired)