Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too would like to commend the member for Fowler for moving this motion. In an electorate like mine there are pockets of my community that do very well, many people that probably fall into the statistical averages generally but there are also areas of significant disadvantage that appear around the electorate. I spend quite a bit of time at my train stations and on a regular basis I go down to Telopea Station about 6.30 in the morning. It is in the middle of a very interesting area that includes a lot of new housing but also public housing. Most days when I am there this very young girl, who was about four or five when I first saw her, comes down to the station, goes across the train lines at a crossing where you have to wait to make sure a train is not coming, goes across a main road to the shop to buy some milk and then takes it back up to her home. In more recent years she brings her four-year-old brother with her, both in their pyjamas at about a quarter to 7 in the morning. I suspect that she comes from a home that is affected by things that cause her parents not to be up at that time of the morning, but she is clearly a person of great courage and strength. I look at her and I think, ‘This is a person who has got everything in them that they need naturally but probably won’t get the things from us that she needs to do well.’ It is a tragedy really, and poverty is already etched on her face at the age of six, that wariness that you see coming out of disadvantaged areas.

High school retention does not fix everything but it is an indicator of how well we are doing with people who need as much support as we can possibly give them. The increase in retention rates during the Hawke-Keating years, when we managed to increase rates from just over 40 per cent to nearly 72 per cent, was something I was very proud of. I am also proud of our current government’s commitment to improving year 12 or equivalent vocational completion rates to reach our target of 90 per cent in year 12 by 2015. One of the reasons we need to do that is that for the last 12 years of the Howard government in particular there was not the level of improvement we might have expected. In fact, it stagnated around 72 and 74 per cent for some 12 years. By the way, that is long enough for a person to start and finish school, so it is certainly long enough to have more of an impact than two per cent. One of the first things that Prime Minister Howard did when he became Prime Minister was to disband the disadvantaged school program. There was quite an uproar among the education leaders at that time about how that was actually making significant inroads into retention rates. Under the Howard government Australia was the third lowest investor in primary and secondary schooling in the OECD—not a record that any government should be proud of.

We have seen numbers turn around in the last couple of years. They have risen from around 74 to around 78 per cent in the last three years. Already we are starting to see the impact of the Rudd government and Gillard government strategy. We have been tackling the issue in a holistic way. We are well aware that the ability of a child to do well at school is largely dependent on the condition of their learning when they arrive at school in the first place, so we are investing heavily in early childhood education because all the research shows that if a child arrives at school well, they do better at school.

We have invested $723 million over four years towards our national partnership on youth attainment and transitions programs, also to improve retention rates. We have already heard about the trades training schools today in this debate. The new national curriculum is another strategy which will give every child access to world-class curriculum, and the national partnership on low socioeconomic school communities also addresses the complex challenges facing students in disadvantaged communities. Those of us who spend considerable time in our schools would know that our schools quite often, probably in every case, reflect the communities surrounding them, and schools positioned in areas of disadvantage need considerable help. We have also extended the family tax benefit for families who have 16- to 19-year-olds at school or in vocational education, also a significant help to families with teenagers who come from that low socioeconomic band.

Finally I reiterate how pleased I am that the member for Fowler has moved this motion. It is something we should be concentrating on with all our efforts because it is the future of our children. (Time expired)

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