Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The needs of the student must come first. The needs of the student must prevail over dogma on either side of politics when it comes to education policy. In the 21st century it has already been established that education is the paramount source of a nation’s prosperity. Education, indeed, is the key that unlocks two doors. It unlocks a door to a prosperous nation. It unlocks a door to a fair nation. A government can provide no greater gift to young people in this country than a good education that is not compromised by the dogma of any politician in federal or state parliaments.

However, the Schools Assistance (Learning Together—Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Amendment Bill 2006 perpetuates the flawed SES funding model, flawed because that funding model, although ostensibly based on the socioeconomic status of the parents whose children go to school, does not give an outcome based on need. We have seen in this parliament long and very acrimonious debates about funding going to the wealthiest non-government schools in this country. The fact of the matter is that by the year 2008 the wealthiest 64 non-government schools in the country will be receiving under the SES funding model an extra $100 million—indeed it could be much more than that—than they would have received under the previous funding model. I will not engage in the politics of envy. I am simply pointing out that the needs based funding model that the government has developed is so fundamentally flawed that the wealthiest non-government schools are getting some of the biggest benefits. That is either by accident or by design, and I do not want to spend too much time in parliament making accusations as to whether it is deliberate or it is unintentional but incompetent. Either way it leads to a very unfair distribution of funding and violates the principle of the needs of the child being paramount in determining funding allocations.

This legislation seeks to accommodate delays that have occurred in capital works spending and literacy support. There have been very substantial delays. It is true, as the member for Jagajaga has pointed out, that that can be put down to incompetence on the part of this government. Any time that there are major new programs there is always a period of trying to get those programs up and running and getting staff on board within Commonwealth departments and governments systematically underestimate the challenges associated with doing that. As a consequence, very often new programs do produce delays that could and should have been anticipated at the time. So there is a problem of government incompetence. Nevertheless, this legislation accommodates those delays and makes sure that the funding is preserved and does go to Australian schools.

Similarly, there have been real problems with the implementation of the program for the tutorial literacy vouchers to be provided by this government. This program is meant to be for students who do not meet literacy standards but, as we have heard from previous speakers, some students who have not met literacy standards in year 3 are now sitting year 5 literacy tests without having had the benefit of this program. The take-up rate has been disappointingly low, particularly in Victoria and in my home state of Queensland. One of the fundamental reasons for that is the Howard government has refused to work with the states on the implementation of these tutorial literacy vouchers. And that is what I mean about dogma prevailing over the needs of the child. During the election campaign, the government effectively indicated that it was unwilling to work with the state governments on matters such as these. That was an expression of its dogma. It was an expression of the federal government’s centralisation of government activity that has been displayed in so many areas of government policy. If the Council of Australian Governments and the ministerial councils had been properly used, we would have had a better result in relation to these vouchers. Since Labor is so concerned that the needs of the child be met in education, we are supporting this legislation but with a substantive amendment that the member for Jagajaga will be moving during the consideration in detail stage and also with a second reading amendment that has already been moved, which I had the pleasure of seconding.

Moving more broadly to the state of the education system in Australia, international tests demonstrate that on average Australians do very well compared with those in other developed countries. That is heartening. Overall our education system measures up quite well against other OECD countries. But, very disturbingly, a disproportionately large number of Australian students do badly—there is a long tail of them—and these are the disadvantaged students, the disadvantaged children, in our society. Some of these measures, particularly the tutorial literacy vouchers, are conceptually designed to help ameliorate those problems of disadvantage, but dogma has gotten in the way and they are not working very well.

The lack of attention being paid to Australia’s disadvantaged students is a national disgrace. The costs of it are huge not only to the children but also to the wider community and to society as a whole. The truth of the matter is that today’s disadvantaged students and neglected students are very big contributors to tomorrow’s prison population. If you look at the history of prisoners in our jails, you will find very high levels of functional illiteracy. Very commonly, a large proportion of the prisoners have been expelled from school or excluded from school on a number of occasions. A very large proportion of them left school before completing year 10—not year 12, but year 10. So the costs to the community of neglected and disadvantaged children in our country are being felt every day.

The cost of accommodating our prison population, to put it in dollars and cents, runs to more than $2 billion a year, but that cost is insignificant compared with the trauma of broken homes, domestic violence, criminal behaviour such as breaking and entering, and substance abuse—addiction to very bad and damaging dugs. All of these costs are felt by the wider community.

My electorate substantially covers Logan City, and it is clear that some very good work is being done there, but the problem of chronic school absences in Logan City is acute. It is clear that several hundred year 7 students in the Logan-Beaudesert area miss school for more than 20 per cent of the year. If they miss school for more than 20 per cent of the year, they cannot participate effectively in school and they cannot get a good education. A staggering 65 per cent of those chronic school absences are parent condoned—that is, it is not a naughty little kid wagging school without the parent’s knowledge; the parent knows it and condones it. I hear statements such as, ‘If it was good enough for me not to attend school, it is good enough for my kids not to attend school.’ I hear evidence of caseworkers saying that on occasions a mother who is just so depressed—often it is a single mother who is just unable to cope—keeps the kids home, perhaps to help her out. These are great social tragedies, yet they are being kept out of the public gaze because the problem is so large. The measurement of the number of kids who were missing for more than 20 per cent of the year led to a caseload so great that there was no prospect of the authorities being able to deal with it, so they lifted the bar to those missing for more than one-third of the year. These children are neglected and they are being condemned to a very tough life.

It would be easy to conclude, as so many people do, that this is a problem unique to Logan City or to a few places around Australia—that it does not really happen in middle Australia and it does not happen in affluent Australia—but the truth is that it does happen in middle Australia. However, there are no coordinated or nationally collected statistics on chronic school absences. I say here today that I will be shining a light on the problem of chronic school absences in this country, because I believe it is the single most pressing issue facing Australia today.

We should be embracing an agenda where economy meets society. The Council of Australian Governments has an opportunity to embrace such an agenda. Let me explain. Premier Steve Bracks, Premier Peter Beattie and the other premiers have been doing a large amount of work on a social agenda: investing in the education of young people, remedying social exclusion and social disadvantage of school students and investing in preventative health. It is a very wise and modern agenda that merges economy and society, because those are good investments for the economy as well as for society.

There was an opportunity at the Council of Australian Governments meeting a couple of weeks ago for the Howard government to replicate the national competition policy principles by agreeing to ‘competition payments’—in this case reform payments—to the states, which have to bear a very substantial amount of these costs, and to consider them not just as a cost but as an investment in the future and, as the states achieved particularly good outcomes, those payments would flow. The Commonwealth did not rule that out, but it did not formally embrace it. I, for one, would like to see that happen. I would rather the Commonwealth and the states work together through the Council of Australian Governments and the ministerial councils than see the dogma that is driving this government with a number of these programs to bypass the states. Students only lose as a result. Perhaps it makes Howard government ministers and backbenchers feel good to bypass the states, but the needs of the child must prevail over dogma on both sides of politics.

Another area of neglect that feeds into the problem of chronic school absences is in preschool education. In Australia today around 60,000 young kids are missing out on a preschool education, and most of them are disadvantaged. When I talk to primary school principals, they tell me that it is very easy to identify which children arriving at school have had the benefit of a preschool education and which have not. A preschool education assists with the socialising of children so that they get used to being with other children. It gives them very basic learning skills, the purpose of which is that, when those children arrive at school, from day one they are ready to learn.

Children who go through a proper preschool education arrive at primary school ready to learn. The children who do not, very commonly, are not ready to learn because they are trying to get used to being with so many other kids and they do not necessarily have those basic learning skills, particularly if they come from households where the parents themselves did not have a good education and cannot do basic reading at home. In many of those disadvantaged households the only book is a telephone book. I know that in situations such as this in my area of Logan City teachers are trying to get kids to read the junk mail—at least it is some written material that is sitting in their homes. It is better than nothing. So that is the low base from which we start in many of these instances.

I have to say that it was a previous Labor government, in 1984, that abandoned Commonwealth responsibility and involvement in preschool education, other than for Indigenous students. This government has carried that on. This government has done some pretty good work in relation to Indigenous students, in making sure that they have some sort of opportunity to have a preschool education, but so many non-Indigenous and Indigenous children are missing out on a preschool education.

The government did embrace an early childhood development program a  few years ago, but there has been no mention of the idea of a nationally coordinated, nationally consistent preschool education program. One consequence of that is that we do not know in fact how many kids are missing out on a preschool education. If you look at state statistics that are compiled, some states are reporting that 101 per cent of four-year-olds are attending a preschool. It is bewildering that 101 per cent could be attending, but they are the official figures coming out of some of the states. The truth is that a lot of kids are missing out on a preschool education. We should be embracing a nationally consistent approach to quality preschool education and making sure that every four-year-old gets at least 15 hours of preschool a week, either at a preschool or, while it is being ramped up, at least at an accredited child-care centre, so that it is not just childminding but a genuine preschool education.

Since 1984 virtually all the enrolment growth in schools in Australia has been in non-government schools. I think there has been about a one per cent increase in enrolments in government schools. One consequence of this is that, as parents who can get together enough money are taking their kids out of government schools and putting them into non-government schools, in poorer areas those classes are being residualised. What I mean by that is that a very large proportion of those kids are very needy. They have disadvantages, and those disadvantages should be remedied in any decent society but the funding is just not there.

That is why I say we should base our funding on the needs of the child, focusing on the needs of the child, not on whether the school is a non-government or a government school. I point out that distinctions between government and non-government schools in Australia are blurring now as non-government schools get more funding out of the SES funding model and as government schools rely more and more on the contributions from parents—effectively de facto fees and other so-called voluntary contributions which if not made would mean that the schools in some cases would be unable to pay the teachers, and they certainly would not be able to get some of the most basic facilities.

So those distinctions are already blurring. Let us concentrate on the needs of the child and let us not get hung up on the dogma of whether kids are going to a government or a non-government school. Under a needs based funding formula, extra funding would go to those schools for remedial literacy and numeracy programs and to full-service schools—that is, counselling, anger management, school nurses, a visiting GP. Marsden State High School in my electorate is a magnificent example of the full-service school approach. There are huge opportunities. Let us get some common ground across the political divide, concentrate on the needs of the child and abandon the dogma that has for so long marred this debate.

See this speech in context