Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Education, the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, and the Minister for Social Inclusion. Will the minister detail the weekend’s historic commitment to investment in education reform, and are there any alternative viewpoints to such agendas?

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Page for her question and for her interest in education in her local community. Last week, prior to the COAG meeting on Saturday, we had in this country Joel Klein, the chancellor of New York schools, speaking about education and transparency. Joel Klein has a remarkable turn of phrase when talking about the need to lift standards in education. He talks about the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’, the belief that somehow poorer children cannot get a great education. The Rudd Labor government agrees with Joel Klein and we believe that we should be lifting standards in every school in this country. We are determined to deliver excellence and to deliver an education revolution in every school. That requires a set of interlocking reforms. That is why the COAG meeting on Saturday was so important, because it will deliver a set of reforms that lock into each other and work powerfully together.

The first is a new era of transparency, ensuring that we have publicly available information about school quality, the needs and characteristics of student populations within schools, student results, who is doing the teaching and the resources available to that school. Why do we want that information? So we can compare schools with similar student populations. If you see one doing a lot better than the other then you can ask yourself: what is the difference? The difference might be a teacher quality. The difference might be the quality of the principal. The difference might be the community engagement. It might be the resources in the school. Whatever factor we highlight is the difference between the underperforming school and the school that is doing well, we as adults, on behalf of the children in that school, can actually make a difference and fix it. That is why transparency is so powerful and so important. Secondly, we committed ourselves yet again to a national quality curriculum to lift standards in this country. Thirdly, we entered a new national education agreement—$42.4 billion going into schools around the nation.

Then we also said that we would invest in a $550 million new national partnership on teacher quality and lifting the quality and support for principals around the country. Then we announced an additional $1.1 billion investment in disadvantaged schools around the nation and an investment of $540 million in literacy and numeracy. We also corrected a historic inequity between the treatment of government primary schools and government secondary schools under the national education agreement, and we will be investing $635 million in government primary schools—an additional investment—to end this longstanding inequity.

You would think that members in this House would be able to endorse this kind of agenda. Members in the House should appreciate that there is a member in this House who in 2006, on behalf of the then Liberal government, said:

We—

meaning the then federal Liberal government—

should not have to be investing in state run primary schools.

That was a statement to this parliament. It is very interesting to find out who made that statement to this House. It was none other than the member for Sturt, the current shadow minister for education, who does not believe that federal governments should be investing in government primary schools—a most remarkable statement.

Presumably that means the member for Sturt and the Liberal Party are opposed to this new investment of $635 million for government primary schools. Presumably that means the member for Sturt and the Liberal Party are opposed to any government dollars going into government primary schools. If that is the position of the Liberal Party then each and every local Liberal Party member in this place should go to every government primary school in their electorates and be honest enough to say, ‘The position of my political party, led by the member for Sturt on this question, is that you should not get a cent.’ That is what members of the Liberal Party would be obligated to do if they are going to follow the member for Sturt down this disastrous path of saying that a federal government should not be investing in primary schools.

We believe in investing in government primary schools and we are proud to be delivering an extra $635 million to them. We are also proud to be presenting to the parliament the Schools Assistance Bill. I make the point yet again that non-government schools in this country are now calling upon the Liberal Party to pass the Schools Assistance Bill, stop playing their cheap and silly politics with schools and with children’s education, stop the threat that these schools will not be funded from 1 January 2009, endorse national transparency and endorse national curriculum—something the member for Sturt called today on radio ‘offensive’. We do not think transparency is offensive. We do not think national curriculum is offensive. We think it is part of an education revolution to lift standards around this nation. The Liberal Party should withdraw its threat to the funding of non-government schools and the Leader of the Liberal Party should make it clear whether he endorses his shadow minister and believes that federal governments should not put a dollar into primary schools, because it is clearly what his shadow education spokesperson believes.

An incident having occurred in the gallery—