Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for External Territories) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yesterday it was my privilege to host students and teachers from Walungurru School. Walungurru, or Kintore, is a small Aboriginal community with a population of about 400, which is located 550 kilometres west of Alice Springs. People at Walungurru are mostly of the Pintupi people and speak Pintupi-Luritja as their first language. These people were dispersed from their homelands during the 1950s as a result of the British atomic tests. It was not until 1979 or 1980 that they were able to return to their country. Walungurru School has an enrolment of approximately 70 students and has an extremely good attendance record. I want to thank the students who came to visit me yesterday and congratulate the community for its commitment to education. It is a good example of how remote communities can, indeed, support the education of their kids.

On Monday morning in the Federation Chamber I spoke briefly regarding the process by which the Northern Territory government is giving schools greater autonomy in managing their own budgets through global budgeting. I said then and I am concerned now about the impact this will have on school communities and most particularly people who live in communities which are disadvantaged and where inequalities are already in evidence. I mentioned a visit to a remote school and a discussion with dedicated teacher about the challenges they faced even without the introduction of what now the Northern Territory government is introducing in global funding.

My comments in the chamber hit a nerve because since then I have had several bush teachers, principals mainly, contact me to point out the situation in their particular bush schools. They are concerned about the current lack of resources. One teacher in a two-teacher school told me their school has been understaffed throughout 2014. This person said: 'I began the year as the principal expecting a second teacher. Easter came and went and I assumed a second teacher would arrive before the end of the term. The second term came and went, and the third term.' This means that this is one teacher doing the work of two teachers for all of the year, as in the example I used earlier in the week. This is a school where every student bar one has English as a second language. The teacher is being told there are no teachers to take up a second position; as the school now only has an enrolment of 25 to 30, the school is technically a one-teacher school as far as the Northern Territory government is concerned. That is a travesty. It means this single teacher is being asked to look after potentially 25 to 30 kids on their own across all ages. That is simply not sustainable.

Despite all the boasts of the current federal government that they are tackling school attendance, it is clear that in these communities it is not working. Here is a teacher at the chalkface telling me that the NT government's solution to understaffing these schools most in need is using dropping enrolment and attendance as an excuse to reduce teacher numbers instead of the reverse. That is just perverse. As another teacher said to me in a communication only yesterday, 'Some of us teaching principals in small, remote communities are barely hanging on by the skin of our teeth.'

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot have the government talking about the importance of school attendance and supporting school communities when they know that their friends in the Northern Territory are cutting funds in education. The simple answer is that, due to the CLP government's severe cuts to funding for education in the NT, over 150 teacher positions have been abolished in this school year alone and more cuts are on the way. This is despite the fact that the Commonwealth government has provided 200 teacher positions, reduced to 170 and now, we are told, possibly to 135. This is simply not sustainable.

We will not improve educational outcomes in bush communities by cutting funding to those schools. We will not improve the outcomes of those school communities unless we can maintain sustainable teaching outcomes, and that requires experienced teachers, not teachers who are treated like they are currently being treated by the Northern Territory government: with absolute contempt. They clearly are not concerned about the state of education in the bush; if they were, they would address these problems immediately. Instead they are ignoring them, and the people who are suffering are not only this generation but potentially the next generation of students in these schools. It is a travesty and it ought to be addressed. Tony Abbott and his government should bring the Northern Territory government to account.