Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm going to provide a window into the feelings of one of our teachers:

Dear Senator Hanson, I'm writing as a passionate, frontline educator who's fed up.

The 2025 changes to the Western Australian Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) curriculum are not just disappointing—they are a disgrace.

They represent a calculated, slow-burning dismantling of everything that once made Australian education proud, grounded, and worth fighting for.

What they're doing to our children's education is unforgivable.

They're stripping out what it means to be Australian—piece by piece, quietly, behind the backs of the very people expected to implement it.

Here's just a taste of what's been completely removed from the curriculum:

•   Who can become an Australian citizen, and what rights and responsibilities come with that

•   The roles of police, judges, and legal personnel—the people who keep this country safe

•   What it actually means to be Australian—our national identity, our shared values, our heritage

•   World War I and II, the Treaty of Versailles, the Great Depression—gone

•   Civil rights movements—erased

•   Ancient history, national heroes, social justice, responsibility, freedom, sacrifice—all gutted.

This is not education. It's indoctrination through omission.

They're teaching kids NOTHING of Value.

They want children to learn about scarcity in economics before they learn how to make a budget, how to save money, or how people live and retire in Australia.

They've removed content on how retirees earn income—no mention of superannuation, the age pension, or the value of hard work.

So kids won't understand how their country works or how their money works. Or how their own future might work. And by the time anything interesting shows up in the curriculum, they'll be tuned out, bored stiff, and convinced Humanities and Social Sciences is a waste of time.

Where's the National Pride?

Australia used to be proud of its story—the struggle, the conflict, the hard-earned democracy. But this new curriculum reads like a soulless, globalised spreadsheet, designed to avoid controversy, history, or truth.

They've even buried or erased: -The Eureka Stockade -The Pinjarra Massacre -The Anzacs' legacy in global conflict -The systems that underpin law and order.

If our children don't learn who we are, how we got here, and what we stand for—then who exactly are we raising?

This Is Not About Education. It's About Control.

These changes don't just reflect bad decisions. They reflect a system that doesn't trust its citizens, doesn't value its traditions, and doesn't care what parents or teachers think.

We're being given a lifeless curriculum that will raise a generation of students who know nothing about how the world really works, nor understand the country they live in.

Our young Australians will have no respect for law, citizenship, or democratic responsibility.

It's disgraceful, dangerous and it's happening now.

This is not about left or right. This is about truth, history, and national integrity.

Real Australians are feeling ignored.

This teacher is one of them. She wants our politicians and educators to call out what is happening before we lose a whole generation to silence, confusion and a curriculum that teaches them nothing of value about the country they call home.

Those are her comments. These are mine: I'm reading the paper today, and former Alice Springs school principal Gavin Morris is up on five counts of unlawful assault because he had to hold a student in a bear hug to stop him from kicking a railing bar and throwing chairs around the room. Our teachers have no control over their classrooms. You've allowed this misbehaviour to go on. You've got no control. Teachers are absolutely fed up, and that's why they don't want to go into the teaching profession. We've allowed this behaviour to go on, and that's why the teachers are leaving. Here's a principal who can't control a child who's out of control in the classroom. You know what the teachers told me? They said, 'If children start throwing things around, we get the rest of the kids out of the room and let them go berserk, and then we come in and clean up afterwards.' Nothing is done. What an absolute mess of the curriculum and of discipline. What we're teaching our kids is ridiculous. Shame!