Ken Wyatt (Hasluck, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to rise today to support the Australian Education Amendment Bill 2014. This bill amends the Australian Education Act 2013, which was rushed through by the former government and consequently suffered from a lack of forward thinking that education deserves and needs.

Just briefly, before I go into more detail on a few of these amendments, this bill establishes and funds the Indigenous Boarding Initiative; ensures continued transition arrangements for special schools and special assistance schools to avoid a reduction in funding from 2015; extends the commencement of school improvement planning requirements; ensures schools moving between approved authorities will neither be financially advantaged nor disadvantaged; ensures the Commonwealth pays only its share of the total public funding entitlement; corrects the location loading that applies to major city schools; amends a cross-reference regarding pro rata of recurrent funding; clarifies the operation of reviewable decisions; corrects the 2014 amount for capital funding payable to block grant authorities; and allows the minister to take action under this act where a school has failed to comply with requirements under the former Schools Assistance Act 2008.

As you can see, this is a very comprehensive bill and credit must be given to the hardworking and passionate Minister for Education. I know of his passion for achieving educational outcomes for all sectors of our community and I am pleased to see so many positive ideas put into action by this him. Particularly, after the mess left by the former government, I know people in the education sector are relieved that this government is approaching the sector and issues faced by it in a calm, considered and responsible manner.

Nothing in my opinion is more serious than the education of our children. It is education that will equip our youth with the skills and abilities necessary to compete against a future workforce from across the globe. I have always believed that education is the forward for all individuals but, in particular, for Aboriginal people, it is the way that we can reduce disparity across entire communities.

I often quote Nelson Mandela when I talk about education and I want to do so again, because these words are truer today than ever before:

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world—

and if we provide the opportunities for children, we enable them to be part of a decision-making process that gives them increased choices.

Without education, your children can never really meet the challenges they will face. So it's very important to give children education and explain that they should play a role for their country.

And:

Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farmworkers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.

These are particularly sage words given the debate on this bill currently before the House.

One of the positive initiatives in this bill is the establishment of the Indigenous Boarding Initiative. This initiative will provide $6.8 million in additional funding in 2014 to eligible non-government schools to assist them in the provision of the essential services and support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander boarding students. There are 21 eligible non-government boarding schools across the Northern Territory, Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia.

In my electorate of Hasluck, one of those eligible schools is La Salle College in Viveash. La Salle College has developed a strong and productive relationship with the remote community of Balgo. Through this relationship, La Salle College offers boarding places for Aboriginal students from Balgo at the Swanleigh Hostel—the same hostel that I stayed in when I was given a scholarship to attend secondary school in Perth. In many ways, La Salle is recreating today the journey through education that I had many, many years ago.

A few years ago Swanleigh Hostel closed down, and it was great to have a school from the Hasluck electorate turn it back into a boarding hostel for young Aboriginal students. On many occasions I have visited the students from Balgo at school and at Swanleigh, and it has brought back many memories of my time there. That is why I am pleased to support this bill. By supporting this bill I am supporting students just like me—students who could one day be standing in my shoes in this great House through the support given by schools such as La Salle College and the support given through policies such as the Indigenous Boarding Initiative.

The other eligible schools in Western Australia include the Christian Aboriginal Parent Directed School, Karalundi Aboriginal Education Community, Wongutha Christian Aboriginal Parent-Directed School, the Yiramalay/Wesley Studio School and Clontarf Aboriginal College. I have visited Clontarf on a number of occasions and have had the privilege of meeting students from the Yiramalay/Wesley Studio School at a recent public hearing in Halls Creek for the Joint Select Committee on Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. I can confidently say that this bill is supporting great educational outcomes and opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students across the country.

It is interesting that those opposite make these false statements about so-called cuts to education and that they are the best friends of education. As I have said previously, I have been around long enough to know the history of the establishment in 1972 of the Aboriginal Secondary Grants, or ABSEG, and Abstudy—both program initiatives that enabled Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children to attend school, to attend boarding schools and to progress their education from the communities in which they lived. Over time, those programs have diminished under Labor governments—to the point where those opportunities that once prevailed do not exist in the same way that they did. They were a great opportunity to enable parents and communities to encourage their children to go on and take pathways into the tertiary sector.

Those opposite are sometimes the worst friend that education can have, particularly in terms of Aboriginal students. I remind those opposite that it was under the Keating government that education spending on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education was cut significantly. Dawkins, Keating and Labor ripped away the opportunities for hundreds of Aboriginal students across the nation. As long as I am in this chamber, I will never let those opposite forget their legacy. I was on a number of national committees and we met with the relevant education ministers at various times only to be told that programs would be reduced or would cease and, in that period of legacy, we watched programs dissipate and opportunities being taken away.

While we are on legacies, I remind those opposite that the only reason we have this bill before the House today is that they botched the original legislation. They rushed the legislation through the parliament and, truly, the number of errors and omissions in the original preparation of the legislation was astounding. It actually undermined the intended operation of the act and created funding and regulatory uncertainty for schools. I wonder what those opposite were thinking when they saw the bill. I am sure there must be number of teachers on the other side of the House. By simply giving them the legislation they could have gotten out their red pen and underlined the errors and circled the omissions. No doubt, if they were grading the then minister on the first draft of the bill which is currently enshrined in law, they would have given them an F and would have circled in red pen what they thought were the omissions.

I turn the attention of the House back to the bill at hand. As mentioned before, this bill will ensure that certain special schools or special assistance schools will not have their funding reduced in 2015—something that those opposite would have let happen. Without these amendments, the safety net in place will disappear and these schools, which provide a valuable educational service, will have their funding immediately reduced from 1 January 2015. We on this side of the House will not let that happen. This bill will also ensure that schools moving between approved authorities will neither be financially advantaged nor disadvantaged. This is important to ensure that schools do not change their approved authority status solely for funding reasons. It also means that every school will have the flexibility to vary its transition pathway.

This is a good bill and good amendments. If we are serious about bringing in changes that address the needs of not only Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island children but also children in country and rural regions whose economic circumstances are problematic, we need a much better way of starting to think about how we address their educational needs—and this bill encourages that. The last thing we need in this nation is a gap between those who have had the opportunity of traversing the pathways of education to higher education and acquiring jobs that lead them into a life of reasonable wealth and also opportunities to be who they want to be and aspire to as opposed to those who do not get that opportunity—who, not only through disadvantage of their own making but also through government policy, do not access the relevant opportunities that are provided.

I know of many non-government schools and government schools that have formed partnerships with Aboriginal and remote communities with a view to encouraging students to access the options that they provide for any student who is enrolled within the academic or vocational education pathways. What is even more rewarding is watching areas of the south-west of my own state where people are now looking at how we can provide opportunities. One of the factors that inhibits them is the opportunity to access funding. If they are boarding facilities—which many of the non-government schools provide—this is an opportunity to enter into partnerships with significant Aboriginal communities that enable students to be identified and encouraged to seek a pathway into a career of their aspiration and then for those levels of support within an urban context to be provided by those schools that are participating in encouraging the development of skills. I support this bill, and I certainly am encouraged by the minister in his thinking about wanting to address many aspects of education.

The last government made commitments to funding education that they had not fully budgeted for nor had the capacity to fund. When governments make these sorts of commitments, it creates expectations within a community that are unreasonable and unfair. When we talk about an opportunity under a particular strategy there is an expectation that the flow-on implementation will see results delivered—not only in funding but also in the types of programs and support services that prevail.

Having been a classroom teacher, I know the value of the support that can come with additional staff, but by the same token I know that when you are in a school you make budgetary choices and you live within your means. Sometimes governments do not do that, and certainly the Gillard government did not do that in the context of education. Had it thought about what it could deliver tangibly and realistically without sending the economy into incredible debt, then those broad commitments and the financial arrangements entered into with each individual state and territory would not have occurred in the way that they did. Even in the allocation of funding there was a disparity between what WA received and what the bigger states received, because one system does a job well.

The bottom line for all of us should be the educational pathway outcomes for any student who attends any sector where schooling is provided. That is the more important factor—skilling and creating the pathways of opportunity for our young and upcoming future generations of Australians who will require the skills in a global society and economy and also within a country that will position itself to be a key leader in many facets of industry and within the education and higher-education sector. I look forward to speaking with the principal of La Salle College about how the Indigenous boarding initiative will benefit his students, and I commend the bill to the House.

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