Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I want to say thank you very much to Senator Tyrrell for bringing on this motion. I know that Senator Tyrrell values education and takes a keen interest in this area, and I appreciate the advocacy that she does on behalf of our young people both in Tasmania and across the country. Furthermore, this motion deals with two issues that I care deeply about—that is, how we alleviate poverty and help people who are in a cost-of-living crisis, and primary and secondary education. I agree wholeheartedly with Senator Tyrrell that we are in a cost-of-living crisis, but I would go one step further and say that the cost-of-living crisis is actually impacting our ability to provide a quality education for our young people and to improve their literacy and numeracy, and it's doing that in two ways.

The first way is the impact that the cost-of-living crisis is having on our school communities. At the moment we have young people coming to our public schools who are housing insecure—and, let's be real, the majority of young people who are either in housing stress or experiencing other forms of poverty and insecurity are, by and large, attending our public schools. So we have young people coming to our public schools who are housing insecure. That impacts their ability to learn. I've taught senior students who were couch surfing. It's really hard to get your assignments done if you don't know where you're going to be sleeping that night.

Yet the government could take steps to tackle that. They could freeze rents and they could put a cap on rents, and that would help more people into secure housing. They could also increase the build of public, affordable, good-quality housing. The government used to build one in four homes. We don't do that anymore. That would be a concrete and substantive way that we could make a meaningful difference to the lives of the families and young people that form our public school communities that would enable students to engage in their learning and to do better in their literacy and numeracy.

We could make supermarket price gouging illegal. I'm certain there won't be a public-school teacher in the country who didn't have a young person in their classroom today who was hungry—who either came to school without having breakfast or didn't bring lunch or had neither. I remember talking to a young person in the playground one day. They were walking down the steps with a can of soft drink in their hand, and I made the comment, 'Is that the best thing that you should be having for lunch?' They told me how grateful they were that someone had given it to them because they hadn't had breakfast or lunch that week, and it was Friday. Try getting a young person to engage in what's going on in a classroom to improve their literacy and numeracy if they're starving. If the government took action to tackle grocery prices, that would make a huge difference for the young people who are coming into our schools.

We could raise the rate of income support. Before we even started the cost-of-living crisis, one in six young people in this country was living in poverty. That was before we saw the massive increases in the cost of living. Those are the young people who come to a classroom who don't have a notebook or a pen and whose parents haven't got a hope of buying them a laptop or an iPad. Once upon a time governments and schools provided the technology and the resources that kids needed to learn, and now we just cost-shift all of that onto families. If you're a family that is struggling with the cost of living and your young person attends a public school and you don't have all those resources provided for you, it's hardly surprising that it's a challenge for you to engage in the curriculum and do the things that you need to do to improve your literacy and numeracy. Let's not forget teachers, who are making up the shortfall in our public schools in terms of the lack of funding and resources and who, on average, spend $800 to $1,000 per year out of their own pockets to resource those schools. Now they're experiencing a cost-of-living crisis, so the people who were filling in the gaps and plugging the holes are less able to do so. The government can take action on both these things. They can tackle the cost of living, and they can fully fund public education. They really need to get on with the job.