Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The document is a response from the General Secretary of the Queensland Teachers' Union, Mr Graham Moloney, to a resolution—a quite bizarre resolution, I must say—that was agreed to by a majority of the Senate back in March 2018. It was basically just a beat-up motion in response to a beat-up article in The Courier Mail about distribution of stickers of the Eureka flag, which somehow was turned into a suggestion of politicised teachers everywhere trying to poison the minds of young children with horrendous political propaganda.

When I spoke last on this issue I did say, as somebody who's practised—not extensively, but for a year or so, a few years back—as a contract high school teacher in some government schools in South-East Queensland, that to suggest that you can talk about and teach and engage in a meaningful way with topics in areas like history, economics or a lot of what used to be called, and are still occasionally called, the SOSE subjects without considering matters that might fall under the idea of being political is frankly absurd and shows how little people understand about teaching, as the original motion did. The response from the QTU secretary made clear that the resolution of the Senate is basically full of factual errors. I should also say on the record that I'm still a member of the Queensland Teachers' Union at the moment, along with over 45,000 other teachers in government educational institutions across Queensland.

What the Senate really should be spending time on, if it's looking at the actions and the views of teachers and how to strengthen the education that our young people get, is supporting the campaigns of teachers' unions across the country, and the campaigns of parents, staff and many others involved with government schools, for fair funding now.

The simple fact is that it is this government that has cut the amount of funding that would have been provided to government schools. In Queensland alone, there is around half a billion dollars less provided to Queensland government schools than would otherwise have been provided—as a direct budgetary decision of this government. And let's not kid ourselves that we cannot afford it. This Senate just recently passed massive tax cuts for wealthy individuals and passed tax cuts for business, and this government is still trying to push tax cuts for large corporations—easily going over $100 billion once you add all those together—and says that we can't afford half a billion for state schools in Queensland. That is simply an indication of the political priorities being totally distorted by this government. They want to spend their time putting forward ridiculous motions, completely misrepresenting the actions of teachers in schools, rather than doing their job of ensuring that schools are properly funded.

It is quite clear that this government is continuing to stuff up royally the issue of funding for schools, continuing to have underfunding and continuing to have unfair, unequal and unjust distribution of funding. Too much is still going to some of the wealthier schools—and it's not surprising. As I said earlier, this government's ideological agenda very much favours assisting those on the wealthiest end of the spectrum. Not surprisingly, that's also where they get their donations from. Until we fix this rigged system and get an approach that seeks to deliver educational outcomes for all of us equally, so that all children have an equal opportunity in ways that appropriately meets their individual needs, we are going to sell ourselves short as a society as a whole, we're going to sell ourselves short in terms of future economic opportunity and productivity, and we are particularly going to fail our core responsibility to the next generation. Many of the young people today have to deal with significant disadvantages from the start of their life, and the least we can do is ensure that their school education is properly funded.

Question agreed to.