Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

I seek leave to have the second reading speech incorporated in Hansard.

Leave granted.

The speech read as follows—

Mr President, I move that the bill now be read a second time.

Yesterday marked a significant moment in Australia’s history, with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offering an apology to the stolen generations as the first act of business of the 42nd Parliament.

The historic act of saying sorry after decades of division and despair heralds the opportunity for a new beginning for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians to reconcile and move forward as one nation.

Saying sorry is an important and symbolic act of recognition of the past hurts and mistreatment suffered by the stolen generations, but as the Prime Minister acknowledged yesterday, it is an act that must now be followed through with practical measures to overcome the extreme disadvantage faced by Indigenous Australians.

This is an issue that is beyond partisan politics.

Yesterday the Prime Minister reached out to the Leader of the Opposition to form a new partnership across party lines, to form a joint policy commission, to start work on closing the gap in housing, an offer which was accepted in true bipartisan spirit.

We must set practical targets and act on them urgently.

We must close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia.

The Prime Minister yesterday made a commitment to close the gap in life expectancy, in educational achievement and in employment opportunities.

A commitment to halve the gap in literacy, numeracy and employment outcomes and opportunities for Indigenous Australians within a decade.

A commitment to halve the gap in infant mortality rates and life expectancy within a generation.

Education is the foundation upon which every individual builds his or her participation in society, builds their capacity to work and their ability to lead a healthy and active life.

There is much work to be done to close the gap in education.

Despite the fact that all the evidence shows us that if you finish school you improve your chances of getting a further qualification, getting a job and increasing your lifetime earnings, only four in 10 Indigenous students stay at school until Year 12.

This is 35 per cent lower than the 75 per cent of non-Indigenous students who stay at school.

The most recent national literacy and numeracy benchmark data shows that in all areas across Australia, the percentage of Indigenous students meeting the benchmarks is significantly lower than for non-Indigenous students.

Most concerning are the results for Indigenous students in Year 7 numeracy. Less than half, only 48 per cent of Indigenous students met the benchmark in 2006.

The gap between Indigenous and all students in the 2006 benchmarks ranged from 13 percentage points in year 3 reading to 32 percentage points in year 7 numeracy.

We will focus strongly on improving literacy and numeracy outcomes for Indigenous children and close these unacceptable gaps between the achievement and opportunities of our Indigenous children and non-Indigenous children.

This bill is a small, but an important, first step. 

There are an estimated 10,000 school aged children in the Indigenous communities that are part of the Northern Territory Emergency Response measures.  Of these, best estimates are that only some 8,000 are enrolled at school, leaving up to 2,000 school-aged children not enrolled at all.  A further 2,500 enrolled students do not attend school regularly enough to benefit from their educational experience.

If we are to encourage these young Indigenous people to come to school, we need to have enough teachers ready to teach them.

The Rudd Labor government is therefore committed to providing funding for an additional 200 teachers in the Northern Territory over the next four years.

The government is determined to play its part with practical measures such as this and to work with Indigenous people and NT education providers to ensure that these young people receive the education they need and deserve.

This bill amends the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000 by appropriating additional funding of $7.162 million over the 2008 school year for the recruitment of 50 of these 200 additional teachers. Additional funding of $56.8 million will also be provided through subsequent acts for the remaining 150 teachers over the years 2009-2011.

Funding will be provided to NT education providers to recruit and employ the additional teachers. NT education providers will be responsible for deploying and housing the teachers employed through this initiative. 

I am also pleased to announce that I have recently approved funding for a number of complementary measures for Indigenous students in the Northern Territory, including a quality teaching and accelerated literacy package to ensure that students benefit from a high quality teaching workforce, and additional classrooms to ensure that existing infrastructure meets the demands of anticipated enrolment increases.

The government has also promised to build three new boarding colleges for Indigenous secondary students in the Northern Territory and to expand intensive literacy and numeracy programs.

While the challenges are daunting, this bill contains the first of many practical measures this government will bring forward in a renewed spirit of reconciliation and partnership with Indigenous Australia to begin closing the gap in educational outcomes.

I commend the bill to the Senate.

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

The opposition supports the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment (2008 Measures No. 1) Bill 2008. The intent behind the bill is sincere and indeed commendable. It reflects great concern for the vital issue of educating young Indigenous Australians. While the opposition does support the bill, it is important to reflect more broadly on what might need to be done in the future to further the good policy intention of the bill. So I read with interest Minister Gillard’s second reading speech and, in particular, her statement about the importance of:

... practical measures to overcome the extreme disadvantage faced by too many Indigenous Australians.

The minister is right. Practical measures do sound a bit like practical reconciliation. It is a good thing that, at long last across all parts of this chamber, we now talk about practical reconciliation. I think no longer can we talk about the politics of identity by itself, neither do we talk about self-determination by itself and we certainly do not talk about separate development by itself. Right across the parties we now have all leaders talking more about practical measures such as improving health and education, and creating favourable economic conditions and opportunities for Indigenous people. That now is where the debate is and that is where it always should have been. No longer can we have that derailed by ideology or the politics of identity.

The welfare drip, sit-down money—whatever you want to call it—perhaps fed the body but it certainly starved the soul and it did not serve Indigenous people in the long term. They themselves recognise that and certainly people like Noel Pearson have spoken about this for a long time now. The government is quite right: education quite clearly is a key and that is why the opposition supports this initiative. It is a start but there is a long, long way to go. My colleague in the House of Representatives the member for Murray, Dr Stone, spoke of these challenges in her second reading contribution. I will not repeat those challenges here but I congratulate her on her generous and thoughtful comments.

Two very prominent thinkers in the area of Aboriginal policy have recently come up with their own proposals to improve educational opportunities and outcomes for Indigenous Australians. These are two very eminent Australians: Noel Pearson, the director of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership, and Professor Helen Hughes, an eminent economist, indeed one of Australia’s most eminent. Noel Pearson’s plan is to attract more teachers to remote Aboriginal communities. That targets two groups of people. First, he says, the existing cadre of experienced teachers who have an exceptional track record of delivering results should be encouraged. Second, there is the huge number of outstanding university graduates or professionals who do not currently have an education degree. They too, he argues, should be encouraged. The first group of experienced teachers will be attracted partly by the prestige of the program and partly, he says, by the establishment of a $50,000 annual fellowship paid to selected teachers to top up their normal wages. As for the outstanding university graduates from non-teaching degrees, Noel Pearson says:

Our plan involves targeting the best and brightest individuals who are at present not in the teaching profession, providing them with two months’ intensive training and then placing them alongside a fellow in remote schools for mentoring. A $20,000 stipend would be provided (conditional on performance) in addition to the usual salary package of a first-year teacher.

These are incentives to get good teachers where they are needed in remote Australia. The necessity for good teachers is also the theme of recent research by Professor Helen Hughes. In an opinion piece in the Australian of Thursday, 6 March this year, she writes:

Because of past policies, more than 5000 of the nearly 8000 indigenous teenagers in the NT cannot pass the national literacy benchmarks.

That is 5,000 out of 8,000. The article continues:

Nor could another 5000 men and women in their 20s. The accumulated backlog of insufficiently literate indigenous young people is 10,000. They represent the future of indigenous communities.

No part of the present education system can accommodate teenagers with Year One literacy.

How right she is. She continues:

They cannot sit side by side with six-year-olds or in a class of teenagers from the mainstream education system. To bring these indigenous teenagers to the stage where they could access mainstream jobs and further education would require one or two years of sheltered accommodation in an English-speaking environment, intensive tutoring and part-time employment. The minimum cost—

she argues—

would be $50,000 a year for each student. The real cost of remedying past failed policies would therefore be $500 million to $1 billion.

There is clearly a lack of any remedial action on this scale. Even partial solutions will require more funds have been committed.

Professor Hughes articulates what I think we all know—that is, that the job before us is immense. While the government is to be commended for this bill for at least starting the process, we have a long, long way to go.

More recently in the March edition of that great Australian magazine Quadrant, Professor Hughes writes in an article entitled ‘Strangers in their own country: a diary of hope’:

The Northern Territory Education Department website advertises “a fantastic lifestyle” for teachers, but does not demand the skills essential to teaching English as a second language and mathematics. Many of its Seagulls lack even modest teaching qualifications. The more than fifty “Learning Centres” in small settlements like Wangupeni are not listed as schools by the department. Some do not have enough desks for all the children in a community, many lack facilities such as the ablution blocks, and most do not have the teaching aids used in normal Australian primary schools. “Learning Centre” children have not been included in benchmark testing. Another fifteen “Community Education Centres” are in larger Aboriginal settlements. They also lack school places, have sub-standard facilities and lack the teaching equipment of normal Australian schools.

But the major deficiencies of “Learning Centres” and “Community Education Centres” are curriculums and teaching practices that do not teach effective literacy, numeracy and the other subjects of a primary curriculum.

It gets back to the basics.

Not surprisingly, where possible, Aboriginal parents are driving and bussing their children to non-Indigenous primary schools.

That says it all. Professor Hughes writes:

The Northern Territory Department of Education is aware of these outcomes. Year after year it reports that only 20 per cent of remote Indigenous students pass its Year 3, 5 and 7 benchmark tests. Some of the “Community Education Centres” claim to go to Year 10 and even Year 12, but most of their pupils do not reach Year 6 standards. Charlotte and Margaret—

they are the teenage Indigenous girls who are working alongside Professor Hughes—

are the victims of an apartheid education system.

So we do have a long, long way to go. The good thing about the proposals by Professor Hughes and Noel Pearson is that not only are they interesting and very worthwhile but they also come from people who are passionate about improving the life and education of our Aboriginal people. They have been at the coalface.

The proposals have one thing in common: they show that if the federal government is to increasingly assume responsibility for the education of young Indigenous Australians, the cost will be much higher than we are currently committing. In a sense, this will be a test of the government’s seriousness in tackling these problems. Words are cheap. Mr Rudd is enjoying a honeymoon at the moment and the politics of symbolism that he is playing on is all very well, but, in the end, policy outcomes are what will matter. My recent engagement in estimates and in debate in the community generally shows that the education revolution, for example, is a prime example of symbolism over results. We know that all of the unsexy infrastructure costs about the education revolution—power, wiring, air conditioning, software upgrades, security, maintenance, repair and replacement—will not be borne by the government; they will be borne by schools or parents. So while the photo opportunities are terrific and they play great politics, in the end, in the final analysis, these policies will be judged by their outcomes and not by the political grab on the 6 pm news. A bright shiny toy is only good for a while.

I conclude on some remarks about the intervention. This is not the time to backslide on the intervention in the Northern Territory. It is all very well to talk about improving the outcomes, the educational opportunities for young Indigenous people, but you cannot do that if kids are scared of being raped, if they are not well fed, if they are not looked after and if they do not feel secure. The idea of the intervention—supported by the then opposition—is to make sure that at least kids have those opportunities. Without that security and without that sense of belonging they can never be educated. This bill is commendable in that it is at least starting the ball rolling in spending more money on the education of young Indigenous kids, but any backsliding on the intervention in the Northern Territory will undermine this commendable policy. You cannot have one without the other; you cannot have education without security. Where there is alcohol, drugs, abuse and neglect, not only does that destroy the health of the community, but it also corrodes its soul and educational opportunities.

Major challenges remain. They are logistical, of course, and cultural. I think all of us acknowledge that. Teachers will have to be properly supported, schools properly equipped and students motivated and made secure—not just to attend but to embrace the spirit of learning, advancement and excellence. All Australians deserve that opportunity. I commend the government for what they have done with this bill. The opposition supports it and is pleased to do so, but I think we all recognise that this bill is only a start.

Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to address the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment (2008 Measures No. 1) Bill 2008. This bill provides an additional $7.162 million over the 2008 year for the recruitment of 50 of the additional 200 promised teachers for schools in the Northern Territory. Obviously any increase in the number of teachers to work in Indigenous communities is very welcome, but 50 or even 200 teachers must only ever be seen as a start. A recent Australian Education Union report called Education is the key: an education future for Indigenous communities in Northern Territory estimated that on the basis of the 2006 census data it would seem that some 7,500 children aged from three to 17 years could be missing out on preschool and school. Provision for these students would require an additional 660 teachers. The report also estimated that if all Indigenous children attended school full time—as opposed to, on average, 60 per cent of the time currently—an additional 700 teachers would be required. That is 1,360 extra teachers that are needed—many more than the 200 that the government has so far promised. That does not include the 300 extra assistant teachers, 85 extra teacher assistants for preschool programs, 100 home liaison officers and 100 extra Aboriginal and Islander education workers that the report also recommends.

We hear a huge amount about the appalling life expectancy gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, a 17-year gap that has not improved in decades. The statistics for education are equally appalling. Too many Indigenous children continue to fail to read, to write or to count at even a basic level. Most Indigenous children unfortunately are already behind when they get to school and staying longer at school does not appear to necessarily improve their skills. The figures from the national report on schooling in Australia clearly tell the story. Fewer Indigenous students meet year 7 benchmarks for literacy and numeracy than Indigenous children in year 3. According to the National report on schooling in Australia 2006, the proportion of Indigenous children in the Northern Territory who meet the writing benchmarks falls from 33 per cent in year 3 to 26 per cent in year 7 and the proportion of Indigenous children who meet the numeracy benchmarks falls from 65 per cent in year 3 to 30 per cent in year 7. The proportion of Indigenous children who meet the reading benchmarks stays about the same, 40 per cent in year 3 and 39 per cent in year 7. Compare this to the year 7 figures for all students, 89 per cent of whom meet the reading benchmarks, 92 per cent the writing benchmarks and 80 per cent the numeracy benchmarks—twice the rate of their Indigenous counterparts.

The situation in remote communities is worse still. In 2006 fewer than two in 10 children in very remote Territory communities passed the reading benchmark, less than one in 10 the writing benchmark and one in 10 the numeracy benchmark. We know that a child must attend school for at least four days of every week for 13 years to reach the national benchmarks for reading, writing and mathematics, but we also know that conservatively 20 per cent of Indigenous children are rarely going to school. The Department of Employment, Education and Training has estimated that there could be as many as 2,000 children aged six to 15 who are not enrolled in compulsory schooling at all. Despite some improvements, an enormous gap remains in retention rates for year 7 to year 12 between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. Only four in 10 Indigenous students stay at school until year 12 compared with three out of four non-Indigenous students who stay on.

These significant disparities that remain between Indigenous and non-Indigenous outcomes limit the post-school options and life choices of Indigenous students and perpetuate intergenerational cycles of social and economic disadvantage. Without a doubt education is a central element of removing the disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, and more resources for education across the board are long overdue. The Indigenous population is young: 40 per cent of Indigenous people are under 15 years of age compared with 20 per cent of the non-Indigenous population. The Indigenous population is also growing at twice the annual rate projected for the rest of the population. Indigenous students represent an increasing proportion of all students, particularly in government schools. And the parents and grandparents of those Indigenous students struggled with the school system themselves. There is therefore an urgent need to tackle the view that the disparity in the educational outcomes of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students is ‘normal’.

But the terrible level of Indigenous educational disadvantage will not be tackled by simplistic solutions. While we strongly support more teachers, the Democrats have great concerns that adequate attention has not been given to the practicalities of implementing this initiative or to the additional resources that will be needed to make it a success. There is already a national shortage of teachers and strong competition amongst the nation’s schools to attract them. Rural and remote regions are already the hardest hit by the teacher shortage—a shortage that the Democrats have been drawing to the attention of governments for at least the last 10 years—and if the NT is to successfully attract and retain extra qualified teachers it will need to offer substantial incentives that make teaching in the communities that are involved in the emergency intervention attractive. Those incentives will need to include a variety of measures such as monetary incentives, additional leave entitlements for travel, subsidised travel, professional development and promotion opportunities and adequate subsidised housing.

I recall standing in a very small remote community in the Northern Territory called Djamada and asking a visiting teacher where exactly she stayed when she arrived there for four days of every fortnight or something like that. She said that she stays around here, and gestured to the general environment. I asked where exactly she meant, and it turned out that she brought a tent with her in the back of her utility vehicle and pitched a tent in order to teach Indigenous students. She was very young and no doubt did not mind those sorts of conditions, but I doubt very much that an experienced teacher would put up with that kind of thing. In particular, if there are to be more teachers, they will need to be experienced teachers who can mentor in schools to develop the skills needed to improve literacy and numeracy. There are still too many teachers with little preparation for teaching Indigenous students. We know that the majority of those teachers come straight from university and have little experience teaching, let alone experience teaching in Indigenous schools. So we need incentives to encourage experienced and accomplished teachers out into those schools.

We need better and more comprehensive teacher induction and in-service training—programs that cover cultural awareness and language diversity. This is a crucial issue. I have been in schools where no teacher in the school has even the most minimal grasp of the Indigenous language which is being spoken at home and most commonly by the students that attend that school. We cannot all learn Indigenous languages—I understand that—but it seems to me that if you are going to make education relevant within those communities then something needs to change in terms of recognition of the language most often spoken by those children.

There is also a lack of recognition in this bill of the importance of building the Indigenous community’s own professionally qualified teaching workforce. There are very few Indigenous teachers in Australia. Even in the Northern Territory, where roughly 30 per cent of the population is Indigenous, only 3.6 per cent of the registered teachers identify as of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent. And many of these teachers have not completed the normal four-year qualification for teaching. In order to provide teachers for specific communities, to provide role models for Aboriginal students and to encourage diversity within the profession, there needs to be specifically targeted programs to recruit Aboriginal teachers. I know we have been trying to do this for some time but much greater effort needs to be made here. To do that we need to create special training programs that are located in remote communities. We need mentoring programs and specific support at the beginning of Aboriginal teachers’ careers. It is not easy but it must be something which is tackled with greater emphasis. But there is no provision in this bill, as far as I can see, to upgrade the qualifications of underqualified teachers to reach acceptable standards.

Increasing the number of Indigenous teachers in schools is key to expanding the educational opportunities of students. This would ensure that Indigenous students have access to teachers who understand their language, their culture and their learning needs. I think we need to revisit the merits of bilingual education, and Indigenous teachers are well placed to support bilingual schooling where it is seen as appropriate by those communities. Some Indigenous students start school speaking standard, so-called Australian English. However, the majority will speak a form of Aboriginal English, or a creole, one or more Indigenous languages or a combination of these as their first language. Learning in one’s own first language allows children to move from the known to the unknown in their schooling and enables them to acquire a second language with greater ease. At the very least, we should be looking at making sure that many more non-Indigenous teachers in Aboriginal schools have formal qualifications in English as a second language. As the Little children are sacred report points out, classes of 20 children with no English, or a bare minimum of understanding and whose teachers speak only English, are unlikely to engage students, particularly those students, I might add, who have experienced otitis media. As we all know, that infection causes deafness, which can be permanent in Indigenous students, and that is another reason why they typically do not last the year, or even the term, at those schools.

According to an Australian Education Union report five years ago, teachers with ESL experience estimated that an additional 100 positions were needed. But in 2007 it estimated that that figure would be 120 positions. And we cannot forget that, if we want all Indigenous children to attend schools and we want more teachers, then we need to make sure that the facilities are there for those students and their teachers. That means more classrooms, upgrading existing schools, more books, music and audiovisual equipment, and of course computers. It was some time, after going into several schools on various committee inquiries into Indigenous education, before I discovered a school in an Indigenous community which actually had computers. There is obviously a different rule for Indigenous schools than for others in the Northern Territory, at least.

We welcome the extra 50 teachers. They are clearly insufficient to seriously address the current needs, let alone future needs, so I urge the government to think seriously about this. I also urge the Minister for Education and the government to look more broadly at the education needs of Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory and to do so with some urgency, because this matter has been allowed to fester by previous governments for far too long to be allowed by this one to continue. I would refer the minister to the many reports I have mentioned and to the many recommendations which were made, with Labor support at the time, so that we can implement those many important recommendations as quickly as possible.

Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to provide a contribution to the debate on the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment (2008 Measures No. 1) Bill 2008. It gives me some pleasure to rise today to speak to this bill, which will see a very small start in really helping to close the gap in education in the Northern Territory between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. For many, many years we have seen the previous government pay little attention to Indigenous education, with minimum consultation of the parents and communities involved. Indeed, under the previous government, we saw many decisions made on what were pure economical grounds rather than sound, educational grounds. For example, they abolished the Indigenous parent groups in schools, ASPA committees, and took away in-class tuition in early childhood, where kids actually had to fail a year 3 MAP test before such tuition was made available. Such decisions were made with minimal real consultation with Indigenous parents and certainly, I think, with a very limited sound basis of educational research and rationale. They were indeed made despite findings in a DEST review that, while these programs might have been improved, there was in fact no justification for the massive changes that occurred in the programs.

As a result of these actions, Indigenous education severely suffered under the previous government. The executive summary of a national report to parliament on Indigenous education and training, which is dated 2005 but was tabled only some weeks ago, in 2008—so we are at least a year behind in this department under the previous government’s tabling of this report—states that the national literacy and numeracy benchmark test results show that Indigenous scores in 2005 were lower than the 2004 scores on eight of the nine benchmarks, and in eight of the nine cases the gaps between Indigenous and all student outcomes actually widened.

So, under the previous government’s 2005 reporting benchmarks, we see a situation that has worsened from the previous year, not improved. Further, that summary also states that the proportion of Indigenous students who achieved a year 12 certificate actually decreased to 49 per cent in 2005, while the proportion of non-Indigenous students increased to 87 per cent. At page 75, the national report states that progress against the 2005 IEP—Indigenous Education Program—targets are the lowest yet recorded, with only 16 per cent of all the total targets being achieved. Let us take stock and have a look. These brief figures from the national report demonstrate the lack of success of previous government policies in Indigenous education. It seems that all they achieved over the years was a reduction in spending on public education and a shuffling or reorganising of short-term programs with little chance of getting any results. There really is a need—and there is now a terrific opportunity with Labor being in government at the federal level and at the Northern Territory level under the ministership of Minister Marion Scrymgour—to have a really close look at what is happening in Indigenous education.

During the government’s Northern Territory intervention, we heard about an emphasis on the Little children are sacred report; we heard an emphasis on making sure that kids were checked, that health checks happened and that attention to kids’ health occurred. We talked about more policing and we talked about quarantining income support so that more money would be spent in shops on food for children. There has been a huge gap in the debate—that is, about Indigenous education. Very little has been said about Indigenous education. I spent last weekend scouring through probably 50 to 100 articles that have been written on the intervention since last August by a range of journalists, researchers and academics. I can find very few that link the lack of debate on education with the intervention in the Northern Territory. Everybody is talking about getting more kids to school and everybody is talking about the key to Indigenous education success in this country being raising the literacy and numeracy standards. But that is where the rhetoric stops. There is now a need in this country for a revolution in Indigenous education.

The figures that I have just read out show that what we have done in the past is clearly not working. I do not think that the former government ever took the time over its 11 years to do any analysis of that and to have the people in the department put to the minister that you cannot just keep churning out the same education dollars for schools in the Northern Territory, Western Australia, South Australian and Queensland under the same model. It just is not working. Senator Allison alluded to some of the problems that are out there. But, after 28 years or so in the industry, I believe that the major problem out there is quite simple: we, as a nation, have to start to fund Indigenous education as we fund education for people who come from a non-English-speaking background. We fund migrants who arrive in this country at a better rate per hour, on a lower teacher-class ratio, than we do Indigenous kids in the bush. We have to stop having classes of 22.

I was at the community of Finke—Apatula—about five weeks ago. There was a very experienced teacher there, with probably some 16 to 20 years experience. She was making playdough with the kids. Then they were going to write up the process of how the playdough was made. She was standing in front of a year 2-3 composite class of 28 kids. I put it to you that most experienced teachers in the suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney, who have in front of them kids who have English as their first language, would be doing a mighty fine job if they could teach 28 kids in a year 2-3 composite class, let alone out bush in a place like Finke, where those children have English as probably a second, or maybe even a third, language. What we should have seen in that classroom was a comparable, experienced teacher working with her—one teacher to 14 kids. There should have been two teachers in that classroom. In fact, it should have been two classrooms. But we are not funding the system to provide for that. If we do not put resources in to intervention at the bottom level of children’s education, we are never going to lift the literacy and numeracy rates.

I also think it is time that we had a national centre of research for Indigenous education in this country. I see it in health. I see the Centre for Remote Health; I see the Menzies School of Health Research; I see organisations from James Cook University in Queensland dedicating all of their time and energies to medical and health research. For example, what is scabies? Why is it that kids get otitis media by the age of six weeks? What is the link between having dogs in the community and poor health? This dialogue is constantly happening in our country. The research is coming at us thick and fast, and we learn from it. But, when I look at the research around Indigenous education, I see pockets of people doing some great work in some parts of this country, but it is uncoordinated, and very little of it is published and promoted. What we seriously need now, I believe, is a funded centre for Indigenous education research—a centre that will ask why it is that the literacy and numeracy rates are going backwards in this country. Is it because of class sizes? Is it because of the lack of experience out there? Is it the lack of resources? What is it that we are not doing in Indigenous education to achieve the results that we want?

While ever we keep funding it, which I applaud, and while ever we keep giving 200 teachers to places like the Northern Territory, it will all help, but unless we have some sound research I do not think we are really targeting our resources in areas where they are most needed or in areas where the research justifies what we continue to do. We need to ask ourselves what it is about a school in a community that does not engage with Indigenous parents. Is it because parents do not understand what education is about? We do it in health. We teach Indigenous parents why they have to buy healthy food, why it is important that you wash your child every day and the link between having dogs in your camp site and poor health. We educate people about health outcomes all the time, but we never educate Indigenous people about why it is that you must send your child to school every day for 40 weeks of the year. Teachers know the answer to that—that is, if the child is developing, to actually achieve the next stage of their learning development they need to have an intensive interaction with the teacher for at least 40 weeks of the year. We know that, but do we impart that knowledge to Indigenous parents so they get to understand it? I think not. We do not have community liaison officers at every school around this country engaging with Indigenous people. We ought to fund that.

I was at Kalkaringi just two weeks ago, and about eight kilometres from Kalkaringi there is a little community called Daguragu. We have had a massive rainfall in the Territory this year, and at Daguragu the Waddy Creek was up. That meant that the kids could not get across that river and were not able to go to school for that day. What is the problem there? The first problem is this: the school attendance records that are now online under the SAM system do not allow teachers to record that students are unable to attend because the infrastructure is so poor that they cannot get across the river. You are either sick or you are not sick. The system does not actually allow us to know who cannot get to school because they cannot get down the road or across the river.

I did ask the community: ‘How many times a year does this happen. How many days in a year would kids miss school because they cannot get across the river?’ They said: ‘Sometimes it is 15 days a year, on and off—three days here, two days there. It can be as many as 15 days.’ You think about that—three weeks a year over 12 years of a child’s life is at least one year in their education cycle when they miss out on school simply because they cannot get across the river. Do we need to build a bridge? Probably not. The community is saying to me that a walk-over would be fine. If we could just build a fly-over that the kids could walk across to catch the bus, that would be great. But we do not ask these questions as part of our educational debate and research in this country. We never ask those communities that are out bush what prevents their children from going to school in terms of infrastructure—roads, access to the school. We do not ask those questions. If we do not start to ask those questions, find the answers and fund the answers then I do not believe the outcomes are going to improve over time.

So this government does have an opportunity—in fact a responsibility, I believe—to work for the future and to genuinely make the changes needed to improve Indigenous education outcomes. We will do so in partnership with both the Northern Territory government and Indigenous people themselves. I want to note and congratulate the Northern Territory government for finally appointing a new Indigenous Education Advisory Group. It is the only state or territory government around this country that had not done that. That has now been set up—the first time in many years that there has been such a body. The chair is Mark Motlop. I hope to meet with that advisory group soon. That is one step in a positive direction. Indigenous people in the Northern Territory voted overwhelmingly for the Australian Labor Party in the November election. They have put great trust in us to implement our policies in consultation with them, and this we are starting to do. We must be seen to continue this process, though, in an open and transparent way.

This bill is an example of a thoroughly practical measure for Indigenous education which will increase the overall resources available in Indigenous community schools. I want to congratulate the Australian Education Union, through its president, Nadine Williams, and Micaela Cronin, for producing a substantial piece of research that actually showed us what we would need if, under the intervention, the children in the Northern Territory that we think are not attending school—that is, about 2,000 of them—actually started to turn up to school. It sounds really simplistic, but they did the research that showed us how many classrooms would be needed, how many more chairs would be needed and how many more pencils would have to be bought if you suddenly had 2,000 children turning up on your doorstep to attend school. That is not the kind of work that had ever been contemplated by the previous federal government when the intervention was introduced.

Both the department and the Australian Education Union in the Northern Territory have long acknowledged the need for more teachers, and this funding can now make this a reality over the next four years. It will give schools a chance to use additional staff to improve staffing ratios and have smaller, more intensive classes in literacy and numeracy. It will enable schools to adopt a more appropriate English-as-a-second-language approach. When I was out bush the other week a teacher mentioned to me that, if you had smaller class sizes out there, you may well solve the retention rates and the occupational health and safety problems. And that is true. Smaller class sizes out bush would mean there would be more teachers in the school. More teachers in the school mean that you share the load. More teachers in the school mean that you have more colleagues to interact with and the isolation of a remote community may not seem as bad. So there are long-term benefits, not only in kids’ education but also in professional support for teachers if you were to adopt smaller student-teacher ratios.

This bill is educationally sound and it will make a positive contribution to Indigenous education over the years. However, we recognise it is only a start and that years of hard work will need to follow. This bill amends the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000 and appropriates around $7 million to recruit the first 50 additional teachers for the Northern Territory—this from an eventual total of 200 additional teachers over a four-year period.

It is estimated that this will ultimately assist in the education of a further 2,000 additional students of compulsory school age who are currently not enrolled at schools in the 73 communities affected in the Northern Territory. We have never done any research or asked ourselves why we have never seen any of those children present themselves at a school in the Northern Territory. We still really do not know why those kids are not even turning up to school in the first place.

The figures show that in those 73 communities there are some 10,000 school age children and, as of last year, only around 8,000 were enrolled at school. So the children who are not going receive no education and are not counted on any staffing formula or resourcing for those schools in their communities. In addition, attendance is not good in many schools, and so these poorly attending children too are falling short in education outcomes. What many non-Territorians may not realise is that, for these Indigenous students from remote areas, English is at best their second language. In some cases it may be even their fourth or fifth language. To achieve English literacy results with such a student requires a different staff-student ratio. It does require more teachers.

So we have a picture of many kids not even enrolled, whom we need to capture, plus some poor attendees, most of whom struggle to come to grips with what the education system means. These children require intensive support to not only get them to school but keep them at school and then ensure there are some sorts of meaningful outcomes. This funding will be provided to DEET in the Northern Territory, who will then recruit, deploy and house these teachers. The federal government is, however, providing some additional funding under the NT intervention for the extra classrooms that will be required.

Recruiting additional teachers in itself will be a challenging task in this time of shortages. But teacher numbers are only part of it. In finishing, I want to quote Mark Doecke in the February 2008 Teacher:

It takes a special person to work with Aboriginal students, one who understands that the most important concern of families is a child’s wellbeing and that the three most important things in a child’s life are family, family and family.

So we can provide additional teachers to communities but, unless we start to engage the families in the education process, educate them about education, then we will have wasted our time again. (Time expired)

Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I commend Senator Crossin on her fine words. I know, coming from the Northern Territory, her commitment is second to none. I rise to speak on the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment (2008 Measures No. 1) Bill 2008. The purpose of this bill is to amend the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000 and to appropriate additional funding to facilitate the provision of 200 additional teachers over four years. These teachers are desperately needed to assist in the education of up to some 2,000 students in 73 Northern Territory communities affected by the Northern Territory emergency response.

It is important to note that these kids are currently not enrolled in school and are not receiving any education. Put simply, they are not catered for in existing staffing formulas for Northern Territory schools. It is estimated that a further 2,500 enrolled students do not attend school for long enough to get anything out of their education. In total, therefore, up to 4,500 school age students living in Northern Territory remote communities require immediate and ongoing intensive support to remain at school and achieve meaningful learning outcomes. The bill makes appropriations for the 2007-08 and 2008-09 financial years to cover the provision of additional teachers for the 2008 calendar year. Further funding support for this measure will be dealt with in the context of the upcoming 2008-09 budget.

This bill amends the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000 by appropriating additional funding of $7.162 million over the 2008 school year for the recruitment of 50 of these additional 200 teachers. Additional funding of $56.8 million will also be provided through subsequent acts for the remaining 150 teachers over the years 2009 to 2011. Funding will be provided to the Northern Territory education providers to recruit and employ the additional teachers. Northern Territory education providers will be responsible for deploying and housing the teachers employed through this initiative.

In February the Minister for Education announced funding for a number of complementary measures for Indigenous students in the Northern Territory, including a qualified teaching and accelerated literacy package. The Rudd Labor government has also committed to building three new boarding colleges for Indigenous secondary students in the Northern Territory and to expanding intensive literacy and numeracy programs. This bill contains the first of many practical measures this government will bring forward in a renewed spirit of reconciliation and partnership with Indigenous Australia to begin closing the gap in educational outcomes.

Education is recognised as the foundation upon which productive and rewarding lives are built. However, Australia’s system of school age education is clearly failing large numbers of Indigenous kids living in many communities in the Northern Territory. Regrettably, this is not a problem confined to the Northern Territory. Low levels of educational attainment amongst Indigenous kids is widespread throughout Australia. Indeed, evidence indicates that things are not improving. In some remote communities in the Northern Territory it appears that the situation may even be deteriorating. This issue rightly deserves the close interest and attention of the Australian government, regardless of the fact that school education systems are primarily the responsibility of state and territory governments.

The achievement of high levels of educational attainment amongst young Indigenous people is fundamental to the sustainability of Indigenous communities. The long-term achievement of higher levels of educational attainment is also fundamental to closing other gaps. If we look at the difference in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, we see the divide is, shamefully, almost 20 years. For this reason alone, there are overwhelming arguments to support this bill. The Rudd Labor government has made a commitment to establish a new national objective of halving the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students in reading, writing and numeracy levels within a decade. The government showed its commitment to this goal by including it in its historic apology to Australia’s Indigenous people delivered by the Prime Minister and the Australian parliament on 13 February 2008.

In Australia, only two-thirds of year 7 Indigenous students have been able to achieve the national reading benchmark. Sadly, this is well below the performance of all Australian year 7 students, 90 per cent of whom achieved the national year 7 benchmark for reading. There has been no improvement in the performance of Indigenous year 7 students against the national reading benchmark in recent years. Regarding the year 7 national benchmark for numeracy, not even half of Indigenous students in Australia were able to achieve the national benchmark. Compare this to 80 per cent of the total number of year 7 students in Australia who did reach the national benchmark. Again, the performance of Indigenous students with respect to numeracy attainment has not changed in recent years. Australia’s education system has repeatedly failed generations of Australia’s Indigenous children.

The number of students attending schools in remote and very remote regions of Australia is not insignificant. In the Northern Territory, over 17,000 students attend schools in communities classified as remote or very remote. In my state of Western Australia, the figure is around 25,000. Across Australia, over 80,000 children attend schools in regions classified as remote or very remote. It goes without saying that Indigenous students make up a significant proportion of these students.

In the Northern Territory, statistics seem to indicate approximately 60 per cent of Indigenous school-aged children live in 73 communities affected by the Northern Territory emergency response. Further, it is estimated that, of the 10,000 children who live in these communities, some 20 per cent are not enrolled in school. It is likely that these children are at risk of spending their school-aged lives without receiving any or very little formal education. On top of the high rate of non-enrolment in school, it is estimated that over 30 per cent of these children are not achieving any meaningful educational outcomes. This is a terrible fate for the lives of the thousands of Indigenous children living in remote parts of the Northern Territory. What is perhaps even more startling is that, if the unenrolled students turned up tomorrow at their local schools, there would not be enough teachers to teach them. Statistics in Western Australia indicate similar shortfalls in educational attainment of Indigenous school-aged children.

The challenge for our government is to closely examine the performance of school-aged Indigenous children throughout the country. We must find a way forward that improves the lives of these Australians. Many Aboriginal communities, through no fundamental fault of their own, have become trapped in what you might call an economic and social malaise. They are trapped between a culture and historical heritage which has a rich and successful history dating back over tens of thousands of years and a modern world that, while depriving Indigenous people of much of their heritage, has offered very little in return.

We need to ask the question: why is it that Indigenous people of this country have had to give up so much of themselves and yet have not been offered a fair and equitable place in Australian society? The modern Australian nation has to be willing to take responsibility for having created a situation where our traditional owners of country have been effectively locked out of Australia’s prosperity. After well over 200 years as a nation, we have only now acknowledged the damage that has been visited upon Indigenous people since the first white settlement. Fortunately for all Australians, the demise of the Howard government removed the last bastion of conservative intolerance that stood in the way of reconciliation.

I also want to remark on recent comments made by members of the opposition about the government’s commitment to overcoming Indigenous disadvantage. Approximately three weeks ago, the Prime Minister invited the Leader of the Opposition to co-lead a joint policy commission to begin the work of closing the gap between the quality of life and standard of living between Australia’s Indigenous people and other Australians. The first job is to develop and implement an effective housing strategy for remote communities over the next five years. It is very much to his credit that the Leader of the Opposition accepted this invitation in the spirit in which it was offered.

It is well known that there is a chronic shortage of adequate housing in many remote Indigenous communities. How do I know this? I have spent time in remote Indigenous communities. I have sat cross-legged under the mango tree talking to the elders in these communities. That is where I got my education on the problems that are facing Indigenous communities. Whether I am in Mowanjum, Imintji, Dodnun, Kupungarri, Oombulgurri, Ngallangunda, and the list goes on and on, the message is the same. Indigenous people are a proud people. The Indigenous connection to country relies on respect for storytelling, history and education. It is very easy, unfortunately, for senators opposite to throw out off-the-cuff remarks about these communities and the sources of the problems they face. I say to those senators: there are worse things you could do than travel the Gibb River Road between Derby and Wyndham in the far north of Western Australia.

Sadly, it is very easy to sit in the pointy end of a Qantas jet heading for Broome and talk about Indigenous issues. It is very easy to sit around slurping an almond daiquiri while you watch the sun go down over Cable Beach. I must say, it is a beautiful part of the world, but that does not address the issues in Indigenous communities. You do not know anything until you actually get out there amongst the dust and the diesel.

Statistics published by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare show that 34 per cent of Indigenous households in the Northern Territory live in overcrowded conditions. This alone is no doubt a significant contributing factor leading to poor performance at school. We know that severe residential overcrowding is not conducive to an orderly home life and presents significant obstacles to children taking advantage of their educational opportunities.

However, having said that, I would like to bring to the attention of senators what the member for Tangney, Dr Dennis Jensen, had to say about the Prime Minister’s commitment to closing the gap in Indigenous housing. On 18 February 2008, the member of the Tangney, in the other place, said:

I am very concerned with what appears to be this government’s first policy move on this front—more houses. More houses in the wrong areas, particularly in remote communities, will achieve nothing. You will simply end up with abandoned or destroyed homes.

I also bring to the attention of the Senate remarks made by Senator Cormann in this place on 13 February 2008:

In short, in my view, the government’s handling of this difficult issue has been arrogant, it has been divisive and it has been insincere.

Here are two classic examples of Western Australian Liberals who need to take my earlier advice: saddle the horses, put Geeves on notice, cancel all leave and head north, young men. It would not do you any harm.

When we have unfortunate comments by the member for Tangney and Senator Cormann in the Australian parliament, it is very relevant that the Prime Minister had this to say as part of the apology:

Today’s apology, however inadequate, is aimed at righting past wrongs. It is also aimed at building a bridge between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians—a bridge based on a real respect rather than a thinly veiled contempt.

Unfortunately, as has been displayed in recent times by members of the Western Australian Liberal Party, it is not difficult to discern a thinly veiled contempt in respect of the apology to Australia’s Indigenous people. I would point out, however, that the Australian people have not been fooled by the mad ravings of Western Australian Liberals. In a Newspoll conducted on 19 February 2008, results indicated that no fewer than 69 per cent of Australians supported the national apology to the stolen generations. It is also interesting to note that roughly three-quarters of Australians aged between 18 and 24 supported the apology. We are riding the wave of change and young Australians have embraced the Prime Minister’s vision. They want a fair and equal Australia. On that note, I commend the bill to the Senate.

Kay Patterson (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was not going to speak on the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment (2008 Measures No. 1) Bill 2008, but having listened to the contributions from various senators I felt moved to make a few comments. I know that Senator Crossin has extensive experience and knowledge of the issues facing the Northern Territory, but I was very concerned when, as the Minister for Family and Community Services, I had responsibility for the COAG trial in Wadeye. When I inherited responsibility for that area, they had been granted funding for a school pool. Part of the rule was that, if you did not attend school, you could not use the pool. The pool was opened and children turned up to school. Of course, there were not enough classrooms, teachers or seats. In downtown Abbotsford, Lilyfield or Mosman Park in Western Australia, there would have been an outcry if hundreds of kids had turned up to school and there were not enough classrooms or seats for them. That is what happened. We talk about stopping the blame game, but it was evident that the Northern Territory government had not focused sufficiently on Wadeye or on providing sufficient school facilities. That is just one example.

I then went to the Northern Territory housing minister and said, ‘We’re trying to encourage people to build their own houses,’ and the then housing minister said to me, ‘Oh, are we still doing the COAG trial?’ The light had not dawned on him—or the lights had gone out. So I had a situation where the education minister had failed to provide the schools and the housing minister did not know we were still doing the COAG trial.

I had the wonderful experience—and Senator Sterle talked about this—of going out and sitting cross-legged on the ground. There are highlights in this job, and one of the highlights I had was when the women of Wadeye took me out to a very remote beach in their homeland and went out and caught mud crabs, longbums and other shellfish. They cooked them over the fire, as they would have done 40,000 years before, and we ate them. I had a little trepidation, I must say, with the longbums, which had green iridescent stuff on them. I was told by one of the women not to have too much of that because it could go through you! But I sat there with them for a day and they talked to me about some of the problems in that area. I hope that the new Indigenous advisory group will do the same thing. One of the things the women said to me was, ‘The school year doesn’t fit us very well, because during the wet, when you can’t get out of Wadeye for five to six months, that’s when the guys can’t get the grog. That’s when there’s a bit more peace and harmony in the community. That’s when our kids should be at school. When the dry comes, we want to take our kids out into homelands and teach them about our traditional ways. That’s when the guys can go out and get grog. If we could just change the school year for our people here, we reckon our kids would go to school more often.’ It is not very hard—no extra money involved; just a bit of creativity.

I did actually mention that to the relevant Territory minister. I said, ‘Could you talk to the women of Wadeye. They’re the ones who know. Listen to them. Listen to what they want in their education system.’ What we think works in Darwin, in Broome or at Cape York in Far North Queensland might not necessarily work in a remote Indigenous community. So I hope that in this new spirit of bipartisanship people will listen carefully to all of us in here who, with passion, have visited these communities. It is not just on the other side that people have been to Indigenous communities; I spent a lot of time, both as health minister and as Minister for Family and Community Services, out in those communities. Also, former Senator Grant Tambling had taken me up there early on when I was a backbencher. He said, ‘You’ve got to understand what happens in the north. You can’t just represent Victoria; you’re a senator for the whole of Australia.’ I thank Grant for that because he took me to some very remote communities.

Out on one of the stations there, I saw a teacher who was working on her own in a ‘spaceship’. Those buildings have a special name but I have forgotten it. They are a spaceship type facility, where you have two spaceship-looking classrooms with a platform between them and a roof over it. This teacher hardly had any contact with people. The two Indigenous people who came and helped wash the kids’ clothes and get the kids’ lunches went back to where they lived, the kids went back on the school bus, and she was left there from when they left until when they came back the next day. She might have driven the four hours down to Tennant Creek at the weekend. I thought: why haven’t they got some rotating teachers who could go out and share some of the teaching with her so she does not go stir crazy or get cabin fever? I used to ring her from time to time just to talk to her, because I could not believe that she could be stuck out there for weeks on end with nobody knowing whether she was alive or dead from when school finished until when she got up in the morning. It seems to me we need to focus a lot more on the social and emotional needs of teachers in very remote communities. That is why they do not stay.

One of the teachers wanted to be rotated closer to Tennant Creek because she was pregnant, but the department said no. If you do not have that sort of understanding of the needs of these people working in very remote communities, they are not going to stay, and the message gets out. So we need to focus on and listen to those people, particularly to the women in those communities, when they ask for something that might be a bit different, something that does not necessarily fit with what we think is the way to go—for example, changing the school year—and we need to listen to teachers working out in those remote areas.

The other thing I hope that we can do in the spirit of bipartisanship—and I suppose it is because I am getting closer to retirement that I am thinking about this—is harness the resources of grey nomads. Have a look at how many of them are former teachers or have worked with children and could be very, very useful if they were to stop and work with a teacher, to give them time, give them some ideas about lesson planning or actually take some children for a month or two and give them some special attention. We had the Aboriginal volunteer program that was never used by the Northern Territory. We have people volunteering to go to projects overseas—senior volunteers—and it seems to me we should be harnessing the attributes and experience of that army of volunteers. We have got the baby boomers about to retire, and we could be harnessing those people, who have got experience and wisdom and understanding and patience, and working with them.

I sat with two young girls in Alice Springs who were starting nursing and I thought: if only somebody who had done a course in medical records could sit and talk to them about terms—for example, when you put an ‘a’ in front of something, it means ‘without’, so ‘anoxia’ means you do not have oxygen. ‘Dys’ means ‘a difficulty with’, such as in ‘dyslexia’, and then ‘alexia’ means without the ability to read. A couple of weeks with those kids before they started the medical course could make a huge difference to how they are going to perform. There are people around who have got those skills, who could take those young people and give them a kind of bridging course before they start off. I felt desperate about these two young girls’ basic skills. Having taught health science students for 11 years before I came here, I felt that they were destined to fail and I felt badly about that. With some creativity—using some people with some background skills to go around before students start their courses and run some bridging courses, in English or in medical terminology or just in basic biology—how much of a better start would those young people have?

I hope that this bill is the beginning and not the end. I hope we see some really creative, thoughtful ways of harnessing all the resources and goodwill on both sides of this house and out there in the community to actually improve the lot of those people, particularly in remote communities, who deserve our assistance and will respond in spades to our assistance. I support this bill but I hope it is the beginning, not the end.

Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to thank all those who spoke on the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment (2008 Measures No. 1) Bill 2008. The Rudd government is committed to closing the gap between the educational outcomes of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children. This bill will appropriate funding in the order of $7.162 million over the 2008 school year. This funding is for the recruitment of 50 teachers for employment in Northern Territory schools as part of the government’s commitment of 200 additional teachers. Funding of $56.8 million will also be provided, through subsequent acts, for the remaining 150 teachers over the 2009-11 school years.

Under this measure, funding will be used by Northern Territory education providers, who will be responsible for the recruitment, deployment and housing of the additional teachers. There are an estimated 10,000 school-age children in Indigenous communities who are part of the Northern Territory emergency response measures. Of these, the best estimates are that only some 8,000 are enrolled at school, leaving up to 2,000 school-age children not enrolled at all. A further 2,500 enrolled students do not attend school regularly enough to benefit from their educational experience. If we are to encourage these young Indigenous people to come to school, we need to have enough teachers ready to teach them. The government is, therefore, committed to providing funding for these additional 200 teachers in the Northern Territory over the next four years. We are determined to play our part with practical measures such as this and to work with Indigenous people and the Northern Territory education providers. This commitment is underpinned by three guiding principles. The Prime Minister provided those and outlined them. They are: respect, cooperation and mutual responsibility. This partnership approach will ensure that these young people have every opportunity to receive the quality education they are worthy of. The measures complement the government’s broader education policy and align with a number of other measures for Indigenous students in the Northern Territory, including a quality teaching and accelerated literacy package to ensure that students benefit from a high-quality teaching workforce and additional classrooms to ensure that the existing infrastructure meets the demands of anticipated enrolment increases.

The government has also promised to build three new boarding facilities for Indigenous secondary students in the Northern Territory and to expand intensive literacy and numeracy programs. The Australian and Northern Territory governments will work cooperatively on these goals and have entered into a memorandum of understanding that ensures effective collaboration on the implementation of important education and training initiatives like this one, which have the potential to impact positively on the lives of these children.

While there are well-documented challenges to face when addressing the gap in education outcomes for Indigenous students, having enough skilled staff is a practical measure aimed at lifting the education standards of Indigenous students. This tangible measure is designed to contribute to improving literacy and numeracy outcomes for Indigenous children and closing this unacceptable gap between the achievements and opportunities of our Indigenous and non-Indigenous children. This bill for additional teaching funding is a small but important step towards these goals. I commend the bill to the Senate.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.