Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

There can be few more important topics for us to be debating in this great chamber than the quality of education and schools in this country. I welcome the opportunity and, while this bill addresses some relatively minor measures, it is an opportunity to review what has been achieved by the coalition over the last 12 months.

I want to acknowledge the previous speaker with her extensive experience presenting her point of view to the chamber, although I was a little disappointed: I would have liked a little more detail regarding her concerns around curriculum review. It would have been a good opportunity to elaborate on her skills and background in this chamber but, unfortunately, that was not the case. What I did manage to divine from her comments was that she did not support a review of the curriculum thinking that it wasn't required; a sense that it is really all about the how, not about the what—which I think most people would probably disagree with; and, finally, a very, very veiled criticism of the current education minister saying that he was in some way not devoted to the task—a comment that even some of his most virulent opponents would probably struggle to sustain.

Today's debate is about Indigenous boarding initiatives and making sure that schools, mostly non-government schools that take large numbers of Indigenous students, are appropriately compensated through the system; and, secondly, to look after the special schools and special assistance schools that, without these amendments today, are faced with a potential fall in their funding in 2015.

Those two relatively minor elements of the overall education picture open a door to examine how we are performing in Indigenous education in general. I made the observation two years ago with the ABS population data of indigeneity that we were in many cases failing to tease out two cohorts within Indigenous Australia's population: the first, the predominantly urban Indigenous Australians who are living surrounded in many cases by opportunity but are unable to access it and that represents about two-thirds of Australia's Indigenous population; and then the 100,000—or even more—Indigenous Australians living remotely. They have completely different outcomes. They follow a completely different life course, and it would be wrong for authorities, entities, departments and those of us in here to average the two and talk about improvements in Aboriginal outcomes. I can guarantee that is not the case in remote Australia. When we come forward today with legislation, our job is to ensure that it supports those remote families just as much as it does those who choose to live in the regions or cities.

Let us talk about some specifics: if you go and visit an East Arnhem community of 1,000 people today, you will find that fewer than five per cent of children finishing school go on to find a job—five per cent. If you visit an average Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory, just 15 per cent of the community have a job. All of those jobs, bar none, are public sector jobs funded by the taxpayer. I have made this observation before: we have created a remote Australia utterly devoid of a private sector, and this is the only place in the world where that is the case. Through our systems we have created the virtual absence of a service economy, bar publicly funded services that are dropped onto or into communities—that is right: there is virtually no inter-Aboriginal service economy. There is no payment for services, so in a context of goods and services where there are no services all you can do with your money is purchase goods. That is at the heart of the dysfunction that we see when we visit: imported rubbish, food and a few other items that are trucked in are pretty much the only things one can spend money on. Until we have a more developed system of opportunity in communities, there will not be much connection through the education system to drive ambition and connectedness.

I thought Noel Pearson put it so well when he said: 'We have a future where we can walk in two worlds as Aboriginal Australians: the Aboriginal world and the mainstream.' In fact, when you think about it, Aboriginal Australians have a pre-eminent place, because they can walk in two worlds, unlike mainstream Australians who cannot. So there is the challenge: that young Aboriginal Australians can aspire to succeed in both worlds. The Pearson argument of course is that the best way to succeed in both of those worlds is to be literate, healthy with a functional family structure.

I would add to that: there is no need to be tied and anchored to land in order to love it. As long as you can be the custodian of that land for some part in your life journey, it involves leaving. This is the element of the Indigenous boarding school initiative. The realisation that, just like people all over the world who do not live in major tertiary centres, at some time you need to leave your small town to fill your life, gain an education, an experience, in order to return it to the community where you were born. That makes complete sense to the rest of the world but, no, no, no, here in remote Australia, mainstream Australia has decided that that is not what Aboriginal Australians want.

You need to talk to families. Of course they want to make sure that they are close to their loved ones. They want to be close to seniors in the final years of their lives, like everyone. They want to know that, if there are cultural obligations, they can get back to their communities. But, beyond that, they are just like everyone else in the world: loving of their family and looking for opportunity for their young ones. They are no different to anyone else, so let's work about creating the opportunities.

I have said one thing very clearly and for a very long time: the greatest human rights violation in this country is not sending your children to school. As long as we have roughly 50 per cent of Aboriginal Australians going to school, we have a massive problem. That is not to say that quality is not important, but a child not turning up to school is getting zero per cent quality.

We need to have those little kids sitting in seats in order to drive the political obligation to educate them well. Where those children do not go to school, you can understand a state or territory government saying, 'There're only 20 kids in that class, not 40. We'll only give them one teacher, not two,' and the funding is withdrawn because the children are not in the classroom. Attendance is everything, and I am delighted the coalition government is 100 per cent focused on that task.

When we look at education reform, we have acknowledged teacher quality, principal autonomy, parental engagement and the quality of the curriculum. I think the work by Kevin Donnelly and Ken Wiltshire in not ripping it up and starting again—no, looking at the curriculum that was an honest piece of work by the previous government—but simply saying: 'There can be some modest but significant changes to make it even better' was almost universally applauded by both sides of that ideological spectrum. They need to be congratulated and not talked down as they were by the previous speaker.

Donnelly and Wiltshire, thank you: you made the obvious observation that sustainability and Indigenous Australia are vital parts of our curriculum but it should not be automatically and mandatorily woven into everything we do. In some cases, Aboriginal history and sustainability are not relevant areas to that part of the curriculum. It belongs where it belongs and it should not be forced where it does not. It is such a commonsense recommendation and, among hundreds of pages of those great suggestions, virtually all of them have been generally agreed to by both sides of a very wide ideological spectrum—from the left and the intense views about collectivism right through to these who are insisting on individualism and a free market. Well done to both of those gentlemen, who achieved such a breathtaking outcome in the education space.

We have a minister who is fiercely engaged in education. I make the simple point that we will be measured for our time in this chamber today and this electoral term on how we go with Indigenous Australia. We will be harshly judged if, as occurred with the previous government, we leave the place pretty much unchanged from how we found it. That is what happened in Indigenous education over the last six years of the Labor government. Let me answer why that was the case. What we had, of course, was a fear of the remote. We had a real sense that most political power being centred in cities was where most of the Labor attention was focused. It was very hard to get Labor focus out to remote areas and remote education. The evidence I put to you is the attendance rate at school, which flatlined. There was no change in six years. I can guarantee you one thing: that will not be the case under a coalition government. You will see an increase in school attendance—because, as long as kids are not at school, they lose that connectedness to the real economy.

Those two key areas at either end of your school experience—the zero to five-year issue of getting kids ready, capable, fed, dressed and able to emotionally self-regulate and sit in a classroom—are, as we all know, vital. Just two or three children can tear a class apart. Imagine having the entire class of children who have auditory inability to even hear a teacher. The solution is not loops, implants and large speakers; the solution is to eliminate the ear disease. Once those kids can sit and enjoy a class, then we have the luxury of talking about quality and the luxury of talking about what will engage kids and keep them coming to school.

The third element of the coalition's approach is to engage parents. My argument is a simple one: if you are a principal of a school, public or private, you are the CEO, but you have a board of directors—and it is not your private school directors; it is your parents. They are the ones you are answering to. Let's see parents directly engaged, cheek and jowl, in Indigenous communities and having a say about what is taught in the curriculum. Over the last 10 years we have swung too far—expunging Indigenous language from the curriculum. That was the wrong thing to do. We simply looked at the literacy outcome, saw that it was poor in Indigenous communities and said, 'It must be the teaching of Indigenous language that is making the English bad.' That was a short-sighted decision. It is rubbish. Educators know that a child can learn two languages at the same time. A child can speak a language at home and be taught another one at school with no problem. They just have to be fit, healthy, motivated and actually turning up every day.

So let's go from attendance—and this Indigenous boarding initiative is one element of that—from just turning up, to turning up every day, starting at breakfast, being well fed, and staying all day and not vanishing after the roll gets called. Let's make sure they go all day, every week, all year and make sure there is an appropriate celebration for that achievement. Finally, when that time comes and school can offer those children no more—and, let's be honest; that is at different ages according to the individual—it is the government's responsibility to connect every one of those individuals with opportunity. We can talk a lot in here, but the one thing we are ultimately responsible for is provision of opportunity. I am not here to guarantee any sort of outcome or output, other than fundamentally give every individual the opportunity they deserve in a great nation—and we can do that.

At the moment it is absolutely limited in Indigenous Australia—where, as I said, 95 per cent of children know that there is nothing after graduation. Well, why go to school at all? We have a situation where we have not even audited the job opportunities within a community to work out what local Indigenous people can do. We have not even set up the complex arrangements to allow people from Indigenous communities to travel in a fly in, fly out arrangement to our regional centres and cities. That does not even exist yet. It works in the mining communities but it is yet to be adopted in this case.

So, ultimately, these boarding initiatives are the future. They are the segue between a complete education—or as complete as you can get in a remote community, where often you only get newly graduated teachers with limited experience—and being shipped out and completely expropriating the responsibility for education to an expensive boarding school down the road. In the middle there are a range of initiatives that are exciting. We have the opportunity to partner up schools, to have classes travel down, for instance, to a major city and reciprocation—acknowledging that, as a young mainstream Australian child, you can learn a whole heap by going to an Indigenous community. These arrangements can be achieved, but we have to think way more creatively about how we promote and support education in remote areas.

Why have I devoted 95 per cent of my conversation to this? It is because that is the ultimate test of our system. It is how it looks after the most disadvantaged. In this bill we are looking after the special schools and special assistance schools and making sure that they do not go backwards. But the boarding initiative is also extremely promising. But I know one thing: you cannot pick out one or two Indigenous children, dress them up in a fancy private school uniform and say you have succeeded, because you have got another 98 children left behind there with nothing. Those two people lifted out of poverty may well have a career in the arts, in sports or in academia, but there is nothing left behind for the other 98. And I do have my doubts that a successful Indigenous Australian coming back to the community is going to transform that community. I do not think that is the case. I think we have to look at the denominator and lift everyone in the tide of opportunity and not rely on the stars coming back to tell people that there is a better life out there—a life that seems absolutely untouchable and unreachable. So, please, I do not want to see too much focus on the stars. We need to have a complete focus on whole classrooms of children.

In finishing, there is no point educating without opportunity at the end. There is no point educating without parental support. That will involve engaging parents who have no faith in the education system. But I rely on the expertise of teachers and attendance officers to bring those parents along at some point in that school year to sit and listen to their children read for the first time and see the trickle of a tear go down their face as they see their young kids achieving something that they never in their own life managed to. It is that transforming moment that can happen in the arms of an Indigenous teacher. That is why it is so truly special to practise in remote Australia. We can do it one by one with the children. Some of them will be travelling to boarding schools; others will choose other pathways. But the quality of the education in that community will rely, firstly, on attendance; secondly, on motivated teachers; thirdly, on autonomy for those principals; and, finally, on quality curricula—something that the coalition is delivering.

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