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

Education systems are failing our children right across Australia, yet we have fundamental solutions, and I will get to these. Firstly, I want to thank Senator Tyrrell for her MPI today. Secondly, I want to define the problem.

Instead of focusing on the basics, children are forced to learn from the latest list of woke obsessions and distortions. That's no way to develop students and to guide students. Consider the fact that some schools consider Bruce Pascoe's book Dark Emu to satisfy the Indigenous history curriculum. Anthropologists have utterly debunked his fiction as cherry-picked nonsense, yet in many schools this is taught as history as if it's undisputed history.

A Sydney primary school has sparked debate after telling pupils to place their hands on the ground and repeat in unison, 'Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land,' before each assembly. That completely contradicts the High Court ruling. At some schools, allowing schoolchildren to identify as animals like cats and even providing litter boxes in classrooms is starting to become accepted. Can you see how this erodes respect for teachers? Boys and girls at a very young age know the difference between men and women and between cats and humans. Agreeing to their fancies is just nonsense. They know that, when a teacher says that girls can be boys, that's ridiculous. It completely undermines respect.

All of this is happening as Australia's education rankings are plummeting, and parents aren't stupid. They know that schools are not doing their job. They really woke up when children came home and started homeschooling and doing lessons over Zoom. That's when the parents realised that schools were not doing their job.

Parents know also that schools are more interested in ideological rubbish than the basics of reading, writing and numeracy. This plagues not only public schools but also some private schools. That's why the rate of homeschooling is exploding. Parents are taking responsibility for their children's education. Between 2019 and 2024, Queensland homeschool registrations surged by 229 per cent. They more than tripled.

While I support homeschooling, parents shouldn't have to take schooling into their own hands to give children what they need. They pay good money in the taxation system, and they should get what they need for their children. The basics of reading, writing and numeracy must be the No. 1 priority.

One Nation supports the concept of charter schools. At the very least, government funding should follow the child, not be doled out on conditional grants that suit some bureaucrat. If parents want to send their children to a particular school or a particular type of school, the funding should go there. It should follow the children. That would return control to principals and parents. This is a hallmark of schools that take responsibility and a hallmark of children who take responsibility in such schools.

We have a federal education department in our country costing $184 million each year in bureaucrat wages alone, and it doesn't operate a single school. Sure, it has some responsibilities for universities, but it doesn't operate a single school, yet it interferes in state school curriculums. So much for our federal systems of education and governance! We need to disband and shut down the federal education department and, while we're at it, the federal health department. We need to restore competitive federalism, because that's a marketplace in governance. States that are better run will see people coming to them.

I also want to call out Maria Montessori, the greatest studier of human behaviour and development. After a lifetime of writing books, reading and meticulous observations, she said, 'The critical years for the formation of both character and intellect are birth to six,' and she got it absolutely right, along with so many other observations that she had. Children go through sensitive periods. They need guides, not teachers. That's how people develop responsibility, and that's the key thing that comes out of Montessori schools. Having been on the board of a Montessori school, a parent at a Montessori school and on the International Montessori Council advisory board, I know she got it right. Get rid of the waste and get back to the basics of the four Rs: reading, writing, arithmetic and responsibility.