Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I've only got two minutes to speak on this. Yes, every parent wants the best education for their child. Last year this chamber passed approximately $23 billion in funding for education, and they're still calling for more funding to go into it. How much is enough? I'll tell you now that it's not about more money being thrown at it; it's all about the quality of the teachers and the curriculum that's being taught to these kids. Go back to phonics. Start teaching kids how to pronounce words rather than look at words in the book. Another thing is calculators. No kid can do their tables. They wouldn't even know how to add up or do their times tables without being in front of a computer or a calculator, and they don't know how to respond to reading. We have the lowest of educational standards in the world.

I went to high school; I was in the class of '54. There was no problem with education. I actually topped the class. After I saw that I wasn't near the top—I was coming about fifth or sixth—I realised I needed to work harder to get top of the class. So we need to bring back placing in the classrooms.

We now have four-year-old preschoolers debating about getting the refugees off Nauru. These are teachers with their own socialist agendas, and they're pushing them onto four-year-olds who have no idea what this is all about, and they're saying it's all right to do it. It's absolutely ridiculous.

I'll tell you another thing. Years ago, when I was in parliament, I had two lecturers from a university come to tell me that they were being told how to teach—that, if they didn't follow the curriculum of the university and teach the kids as they were told to, they would lose their jobs. This has been happening in our educational system. I've been speaking to teachers who are trying to get their degree, and they're saying that, if they don't head down the path of the socialist agenda, they will not get their passes.

It's an absolute disgrace that some of these teachers we now have in our classrooms are able to teach kids. They don't even know English at their level. This is where we need to get back to actually ensuring that we have good teachers in our classrooms. It's not about throwing more money at it. We never had that years ago when we were growing up. There's been so much money wasted in the educational sphere. We need to get back to having capable teachers doing it. The older teachers are the ones that have got the educational levels. I'm not knocking all these young ones coming through—I think they have great intentions—but I'm in fear of those ones who have the socialist agenda and the way they teach our kids.

In our classrooms they're told how to head down a line of political correctness, what political party they should be voting for and who they should be supporting. I think it's disgraceful. Keep the politics out of the classrooms. Teachers should have no place in telling the kids what to do. Get back to phonics and the times tables. Get back to the basics. That's what One Nation is doing in New South Wales under the leadership of Mark Latham. He's saying that we should remove the political bias from the English curriculum. (Time expired)