Rod Sawford (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This will be my last address-in-reply, the 20th, on an appropriation bill. It is interesting that this is the budget that has anaesthetised the Australian electorate, and the very fact that so many government members do not recognise it is bewildering to say the least. Ross Gittins described this budget as a set of jam jars, with a new endowment in education funds as simply another jam jar for another Future Fund. He was right. In fact, one of the few redeeming features of Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2006-2007 and cognate bills is that, for the first time in many years, there is apparently a genuine focus on education—that it is misplaced is another story, but I will come to that later. At least the issues are being recognised—and about time too. Being my 20th year in this parliament I can, without fear of contradiction, state that the quality of debate on education has been pretty ordinary in this place.

This country dropped the ball on education 30 years ago. Since that time, neither the Commonwealth nor the state governments have bothered to take a serious analytical approach to education. It is worth a brief trip back to 1977 to establish when education in this country went off the rails. In 1977, education was in far better shape than was ever acknowledged. Without interference by politicians, state education bureaucrats wisely balanced up the quality of educational programs in Australian schools from the very boy-friendly content and competitive programs of the fifties and sixties. It is a tragedy that certain events, reports, ideologies and political interference contributed and conspired both unintentionally and intentionally to seriously weaken what was an extremely well-balanced public and private education system in Australia, which, importantly, was recognised internationally as one of the education beacons of the world.

Bipartisan support for education has diminished. When the well-received and well-intentioned education reports were implemented, they impacted very badly on the public education system. The failure to realise the strength and diversity of primary and secondary public education, which was supported by the wider community, was indeed a tragedy. Integrating technical schools, girls schools, boys schools, area schools and agricultural schools into a comprehensive high school system has been an unmitigated disaster. Replacing primary and junior primary educational directorates, who had the most progressive bureaucrats in education in the country, and integrating education into a single bureaucracy crushed and crunched much of the innovation found in our junior and primary schools, as well as starving those sectors of funding. The administrators of education became more and more the lap-dogs of state politicians and ever more distanced from the core business of improving the quality of leadership, education programs, teaching and learning in our schools, and this again impacted negatively on the morale of teachers. Teachers were then undervalued. They are today and they know it.

Ideological nonsense pervaded the education system big-time. Political correctness and victimhood that the system did not need gained more and more prominence. Competition was frowned upon. Collaboration was revered. Analysis was replaced with synthesis. Examinations and testings were dropped in favour of continuous assessment. Style was favoured over substance, expression over organisation and structure, passivity over activity, intuition over insight, safety over risk taking, description over comprehension, nurture over nature and so on. If truth and common sense prevailed, all of the above would be included in a balanced educational program. But half of the education experience was removed from too many by the misguided.

The introduction of all the ideological nonsense was based on just that—ideology—and flawed, inadequate or no research whatsoever. It confused, angered, divided and sidelined teachers and parents and was the basis for the coalition introducing apartheid-style policies for public and private education. But the outcome is there for all to see: Australia has slipped down the educational ladder to be part of the pack rather than the leader it ought to be.

Last Wednesday, Justine Ferrari of the Australian wrote a very interesting article on how ideology has ruled the classroom rather than rigorous scientific research to establish the most effective techniques in the classroom. The article stated that too many educational establishments rejected research in favour of individual opinions. Dr Kerry Hempenstall, a former teacher and now an educational psychologist at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, said many current arguments—like ‘Learning is a natural process for children and you should interfere as little as possible; learning to read is like learning to walk or talk; it is more important to teach higher level thinking skills than facts and content’—are just plain wrong. Although arrant nonsense, those beliefs have been very ‘in’ during the last 30 years. The article goes on to say that research tells us that learning to read is an acquired skill that has to be specifically taught, that high-level thinking skills and concepts cannot be directly taught in a content-free context and what distinguishes the expert from the novice is how much they know, not how well they think. Of course that is correct. Why was it ever doubted?

In other words, it is not one or the other. It is both. It is theory and practice. It is research and practice. It is competition and collaboration, analysis and synthesis, activity and passivity, insight and intuition, expression and self-reliance and so on. The key is balance. The key is inclusion. The key is common sense. The direction comes from evidence, from proven practice and not from selective ideological political correctness or social engineering.

For about 18 of the last 19 years I have spent in the parliament I have been a member or the deputy chair of the House of Representatives education committee in its various formats. During that time I have had the opportunity to introduce, personally or jointly with colleagues, matters that deal with early intervention, literacy, numeracy, technical and vocational education, the need for more rigorous mathematics and science teaching, violence in schools, boys’ education, national curriculum, teacher education, income support for tertiary students, examinations and testing and so on. The best efforts of members of that committee on both sides of the parliament and the production of many quality reports have, in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary sense, now become front and centre in the national education debate. That is some progress from my first caucus committee, when I could not get a seconder to highlight early intervention and literacy and numeracy failings in 1988.

However, having the issues front and centre is no guarantee of sensible implementation or success. The current government recognised literacy and numeracy deficiencies. In fact, my crafted words in the Crawford report on literacy and numeracy were used over and over again by the former minister Dr David Kemp. But the implementation was more about a blame game than a genuine tackling of the problem.

A similar story has emerged about technical and vocational education and the flawed set-up of technical colleges. At fault is a common human failing: everybody has an opinion on education. The direction of education initiatives should be based on research—qualitative, quantitative, longitudinal—and proven practice. If all the areas that are now mentioned as being front and centre in education are to be successful, the methodology, ideology and divisiveness of the last 30 years need to be rejected. Guessing what should happen and listening to opinions, rather than evidence from legitimate research and practice, will lead to another 30 years of a mediocre education system. A plan for education should be like a plan for building a house: you begin with the foundations, not the roof. Education in this country begins with a roof, according to this government. International and local research, reaffirmed time and time again, explains that the most significant education occurs with children between the ages of seven and 11 and that the quality of education received by children in those years overwhelmingly decides the future success or otherwise of every individual. In Finland they take that very seriously and that is the age when kids begin school. In Australia, this sector receives the least resources and attention. When I say ‘early intervention’, I say it in an educational sense and I too refer to the seven- to 11-year-old age group. Early intervention as it applies to children from the age zero to seven is not an educational imperative. That does not mean that social, technological, manipulative or play skills and mobility gained by children at this age are not important—they are—but the education should be informal.

For children in the age zero to five group we invented the lovely term ‘child care’. How dishonest. It was never about child care; it is not about child care now. It is about parent respite, to allow parents, usually women, to re-enter the workforce. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that. It makes perfect economic sense to have a high proportion of women in the workforce, but it comes at a cost. Children aged from zero to five monitored and parented largely by their parents, their grandparents or other family members do far better than the equivalent child in a childcare centre. That fact is not always welcome; it is true, nevertheless. The two years of school from ages five to seven prepare the ground for formal education. That is why we should plan for a high-skill, high-remuneration future for our workforce, rather than the intent of the current government of low skill and low remuneration. Most families in Australia do not have the choice of not using child care. However, the cost can be far greater than the monetary costs. The next government should, as Kevin Rudd has pointed out, begin an education revolution, but it needs to start at the beginning—and that beginning is with the seven- to 11-year-olds.

I have tried to encourage the House of Representatives committee on education to take on a particular research inquiry for 18 years. No minister of education has ever had the courage to do it. The inquiry should be: what is the current allocation of resources from public and private means to fund primary, secondary, TAFE and tertiary institutions, whether public or private? If there are differentials, what is the justification in educational, historical and traditional terms? In beginning the education revolution, what resources are necessary to make both the public and private education systems in Australia the best in the world? In other words, stop guessing about where education is and find out by research where it is.

I remind the House that successful primary education in our schools—despite family difficulties caused by socioeconomic status, culture, gender, race or religion—is most likely to deliver a successful student at a secondary and post secondary level. If everybody opened their eyes and looked around them, they would see dysfunctional behaviour on the roads, at sporting venues, in families and at shopping centres everywhere. It is not a given that people should behave in that way. Getting it right when it counts would save this country billions of dollars and create the opportunity for real and sustainable long-term wealth and societal cohesion.

I gave a speech in this place in the early 1990s on the positive value to the economy of environmental technology and I predicted that water and power would be the big issues at the beginning of the 21st century. So when I heard the Prime Minister’s national water plan in February, I thought: fair enough, that is a good idea. But it was not a plan; it was a bucket of money—a whole $10 billion. It was bereft of detail and purely political in its conceptualisation. But money talks even louder than state premiers and those words led the Sydney Morning Herald’s editorial on the Prime Minister’s $10 billion national water plan.

The editorial went on to further point out that the states have made a real mess of the Murray-Darling Basin. As we were dropping the ball on education 30 years ago, the ball was dropped on water over the same period. It was all ineffective because each state could exercise a veto power. The national interest was the first casualty. The Commonwealth was planning to buy back licences from irrigators to reduce demand, increase water use efficiency and cut water usage by improving the infrastructure of irrigators—not a perfect plan by any analysis, but a sort of a plan nevertheless. New South Wales agreed immediately. It could not afford to buy back the licences and the overallocation of water this state had allowed. South Australia, Queensland and the ACT arrived at the same view, albeit with some grandstanding. However, to the credit of the leaders of those administrations, some sensible concessions were gained from the Commonwealth without compromising the national management of the rivers. A panel of five experts to be appointed for their expertise rather than their state localities is a sensible move, and Mike Rann from South Australia should be congratulated on putting that idea forward and having it accepted. Not having the Victorians on board is a weakness, and Steve Bracks has brought no credit to his state with his uncooperative and parochial stance.

However, when I step back and I reflect on what has happened, I am again struck by the same weakness that has applied to education: a lack of analysis, a lack of reason, a lack of research, a failed appreciation of the change in circumstances in population, agriculture and industry, craven ineptness, negligence and intellectual shallowness. Take population as an indicator. In 1977 the population in Australia was 14.2 million; today it is almost 21 million. So how could the state governments in the last 30 years be so slack—with a population growth of 50 per cent, multiplied by the required use of water in agriculture and industry to meet the needs of the increased population—as to ignore increasing the supply of water? But they did, and the current drought has caught them out.

It is all very well in a drought period to encourage constituents to reduce their demand—but that is not a long-term answer; it is not any answer. Increasing the supply of water is the challenge. Recognising the four ways to do that does not require too much brain power, yet no state government or the Commonwealth government has recognised that. Obviously the damming of catchment areas has limited options; however, recycling of water has to occur, as does the preservation of stormwater. The other option of course is expensive desalination, as the Western Australians are to discover. Where are the significant recycling of water initiatives in this budget? Where are the significant stormwater conservation initiatives in this budget? Silence. They are not there, are they?

In the western suburbs of my electorate, the last significant piece of open space will be sold with the approval of state government and local government. A public campaign I organised forced the government to save 40.6 per cent of the land—a figure that could be reduced to 35 per cent because of the dysfunctional Charles Sturt Council and the negligence of the state government. A national water plan of substance would not allow this land to be sold. I have written to the federal government requesting their urgent intervention. I received an acknowledgement from the Prime Minister’s office but not a substantive reply. Should I hold my breath? Will the federal government be dinkum on water and stop the folly of the sale of this land? The wider electorate has turned off the political process. It no longer believes the government. It no longer believes the media. It is holding the power of its vote until election day and refusing to seriously indicate what it is really thinking.

On the topic of governance, leadership and the ineffective media in this country, I would like to put on the public record a view of what I believe is happening in my own state. I have said some of these words in the Main Committee previously, but they are worth repeating in the context of this address-in-reply. No matter where you look in South Australia, politics, business, unions, education, health, public transport infrastructure, governance and leadership are all too often seriously compromised. It is a dynamic that has dogged my state for the last 30 years—and it has dogged Victoria too. The tripartite relationships between the top end of town—and the corporate world—the media, particularly the commercial media, and the executive government are too often clouded in questionable goings-on. State governments in South Australia have had a far too comfortable and accommodating relationship with the top end of town. Who could forget the State Bank fiasco of the late 1980s which shamed all political parties and the media?

During the Liberal term from1993 to 2002 we endured the folly of waste of taxpayers’ money on a national wine centre, overspending on the Hindmarsh Stadium and the botched sale of the TAB. During the current government’s term it is going to happen again. A sum of $55 million—mostly taxpayers’ money—has been allocated to build a grandstand in Adelaide’s parklands to be used for car racing and horseracing. The grandstand—or ‘the stand for the grand’—was originally planned to be four storeys high, 248 metres long and 10.8 metres wide. Despite taxpayers paying for this monstrosity, there will not be one public seat. It is a facility for government and the corporate world. The cost of the project will just grow and grow. The arrogance and the contempt for the taxpayer so implicit in this funding beggar belief. Any government should realise that getting into bed with the car racing fraternity is not what it is cracked up to be. Adelaide once had a formula one grand prix. Claims of its so-called economic benefits were always greatly exaggerated. This very fact has been stated by the Victorian independent watchdog, which has said that the cost of holding the grand prix in Melbourne is $6.7 million. The Victorian state Auditor-General, Des Pearson, released a report on 23 May that found many studies justifying the use of taxpayers’ dollars for major events are inadequate. You bet they are. South Australia is no exception. The Clipsal V8 car race in South Australia will eventually tell a similar story.

Another matter is the all too comfortable, ‘nudge, nudge, wink, wink’, cosy relationships that state governments have had with the media. Although wrong, it is at least understandable that the media would protect its income stream and the people who provide the advertising revenue. Nevertheless, it far too often compromises the fourth estate in South Australia and it shows. In fact, respected journalists over the years have told me of their frustration at the lack of resources for investigative journalism and overzealous editorial control. The national media’s complaints about the prohibition on information release are largely correct. However, you cannot think that the very same media would be as selective in what it chose to make available. The next question to ask is: would it be done on an ethical basis? Governments protect themselves. High-profile business and media personnel are strategically appointed to government boards and paid handsomely for their time, participation and support of government. Whether these individuals recognise it or not, they are badly compromised.

I have always believed that the sale of the TAB in South Australia demanded a royal commission. I think the same about Cheltenham Racecourse and the Victoria Park development—a parklands monstrosity. However, the likelihood of that happening is probably pretty small. Have a listen to this: the lobbyist for the South Australian Jockey Club, promoting the sale of the Cheltenham Racecourse—the best stormwater retention site in the western suburbs—and the Victoria Park development is appointed by the government to give advice on stormwater management. South Australia, like Tasmania and Victoria, needs the establishment of an anticorruption and crime commission to be monitored by the federal government and— (Time expired)

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