Alex Antic (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The state of education in this country at the moment is absolutely dire. When the national curriculum was introduced in 2010 we were told that it would be a world-class back-to-basics system. However, as with all centralised bureaucracies, it's failed.

In between 2021 and 2022, the federal and state governments spent billions on primary and secondary school education, yet during the same period we saw a long-term decline in student achievement. Worryingly, just 15 per cent of Australian students are now exceeding expectations, and most of our year 9 students can't use punctuation at a year 3 level. Simply increasing funding for schools doesn't automatically lead to better educational outcomes. This is just another example of the welfare mindset that doesn't actually create improvement.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the uptick in progressive ideology, as it is called, in the school system. Call it what you like—progressivism, leftism, wokeness, identity politics, intersectionality, political correctness or whatever—the parents that I speak with across Australia are fed up with their kids being indoctrinated by their school system. It is clear to them that schools are more concerned with social conditioning than with genuine education. Today the school system gives students the conclusions they're supposed to get to on their own in the modern world rather than helping them reach their own conclusions. We've allowed our school system to become a vehicle for indoctrination.

It's not just primary and high schools that have become ideology factories. Australia's early learning sector is also kicking off the process of indoctrination by introducing infants and toddlers to radical concepts like gender theory and social justice theory, rather than simply allowing kids to be kids. The government's early learning framework called Belonging, Being and Becoming is now mandatory for early childhood learning centres. It mentions 'reconciliation' 96 times, while the words 'mother', 'father' and 'parents' have been erased from the guidelines and are not even mentioned once. Many parents have little choice but to send their kids to ELC because the system has forced dual incomes on society due to the cost of living.

In South Australia, the state Labor government has celebrated its $715 million spending package to provide pre-schooling for three-year-olds. Why aren't we making the cost of living cheaper so parents can stay at home, or at least one parent can stay at home, with their kids rather than both being forced back into the workforce early? It's because this way the state gets its grubby hands on the kids earlier, which is another assault on the family unit.

Parents tell me they want their schools to get back to basics and focus on the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic. They want their children to be taught how to think, not what to think. They describe how their children feel pressured to agree with pre-approved opinions rather than engaging in genuine discussion. At the end of the day, it's the parents' duty to educate their own children.

Instead of simply throwing more money at the failing schooling system, there are two approaches we can take as a society. The first is holding the schooling system to account for its poor outcomes by changing or perhaps even abolishing the national curriculum, and the second is promoting the home as the primary locus of education. Young people emerging from our school system are being indoctrinated. They're unnecessarily ridden with angst about the so-called climate crisis, they're gender confused and they're lacking basic skills. We owe the young people of this country a much, much better standard of education. We owe these young people a better future.