5AA Jeremy Cordeaux

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

SUBJECT: Review of the National Curriculum

JEREMY CORDEAUX: …would like to ring us on any subject at all – but we'll kick it off with education – 8223 0000. We started talking about this when it was announced last week and I have seen, I guess, what I would have describe as a kind of a drip feed of anger, resentment, denial, opposition – which is what you would expect from the opposition I suppose. But, you know, the idea of putting two people – Kevin Donnelly and Professor Ken Wiltshire – they both seem to be kind of a balancing factor to me. They're saying that Kevin Donnelly worked as a staffer for a Liberal Party minister; he was former Chief of Staff to Kevin Andrews, okay. Professor Ken Wiltshire drew up a whole lot of educational review material for the Goss Labor Government in Queensland, so I think there's a bit of a balance in there.

But, you know, listening to the stuff that they have thrown, particularly at Kevin Donnelly – Professor Wiltshire seems to have come off scot-free – but not so Kevin Donnelly.  Ken Boston – I used (to talk) with Ken when he was the Head of Education here in South Australia. He's the Head of Education in New South Wales these days, but he was absolutely vitriolic about Kevin Donnelly. So much so that I thought Kevin might be running to see his lawyer at any moment. But listen, let's talk about this. I've got Kate Ellis, Shadow Minister for Education; Christopher Pyne who is the Education Minister. Christopher good morning to you first, how are you?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Good morning, Jeremy. I'm well, how are you?

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Happy New Year.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Yes, Happy New Year to you and all your listeners.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Now it seems that you are in government but you're not allowed to do anything?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: [Laughs] Well the left never likes it when the Liberal Party wins an election, but let alone when they actually try and implement their election policies.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: How dare you're doing – how dare you do that?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Exactly, I mean, let's cast our mind back to the election. In that period we said that we would review the national curriculum, we'd have a focus on teacher quality, we'd have a focus on parental engagement, and we would try and extend principal autonomy across all the states and territories. So what I announced last Friday was the review of the national curriculum, in keeping precisely with our election promises, and we appointed Kevin Donnelly and Ken Wiltshire – both very experienced, very intelligent, very sensible men – to review the national curriculum.

It's been welcomed by ACARA – the Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority – by the Australian Principals, Primary Principals' Association, the Australian Mathematician Teachers' Association, the National Catholic Education Commission, the Independent Schools Association of Australia. Now if those in the left who don’t like it, I think what they're really saying is they don’t like the idea of the Coalition Government actually doing anything.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Well I spoke to Kevin Donnelly on Friday and he was - he put it to me that his mother was a member of the Communist Party, his father was a member of the Communist Party, he grew up in that. That should have appeased the left to some degree, shouldn’t it?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: [Laughs] Oh well…

JEREMY CORDEAUX: I would have thought?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I think the truth is whether Kevin or Ken – whatever their political persuasion – it doesn't actually have any bearing whatsoever on whether they can review the national curriculum.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: I couldn't agree more.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: For Kate Ellis or anybody else to say that these are Liberal appointments – I mean the Labor Party has made a past art of elevating their former staff, Members of Parliament, Premiers, whatever to positions in government. And, really, the Emperor has no clothes when it comes to that criticism.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Well if you exorcised everyone who had rubbed shoulders with a particular political party or politician from public life or contribution to the betterment of the country you'd be in serious trouble?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well you'd have a very small pool of people from which you could draw your advice…

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Yeah.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: The most important thing is that we get a very good review of the national curriculum to make sure that it is robust, it's worthwhile, it's useful for students and that's all I'm asking these two gentlemen to do and I'm looking forward to their response.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Well Minister how do we calm this down because looking at this - I mean I over the weekend just, I had a sort of a boring, no-time moment - so I collected all of the stuff. The Australian said, the Weekend Australian said "we have to learn from the best". I don't think that's anything but a motherhood statement, that's fine. "Pyne's move on curriculum will bring on chaos" screams the Australian Education Union. "Pyne blasted over curriculum review", "Teach the best of the West". Christopher Pyne - "Pyne's decision to review curriculum just point scoring". I mean why don’t we just concentrate on the one important thing and that is teaching our kids how to read and write and add up?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well our priority, Jeremy, is putting students first, and I've said since Friday morning in every radio or television interview or interview for the print media that, quite frankly, I'm not too concerned about the stakeholders in education because schools don't exist for teachers, they don't exist for parents even, they exist for students. Now, they are designed to give students the best start possible in life, and if we have to take some criticism from the stakeholders like the Education Union or Jennifer Rankine – the State Minister for Education – who dismissed it immediately in spite of all the problems that South Australian education had under Labor, then that criticism is like water off a duck's back to me because the important thing is putting students first.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Yeah, well, you've got to take the politics out of it, I think you've said that, but journalists maybe? I don't know, maybe it's the Opposition but everyone seems to be cramming politics into it. I've sort of long held the cynical view that teachers were more interested in politics than they were in teaching and I guess that would work through to the curriculum, I don't know, but it's been my experience over the years that that is the case. How do we just de-politicise the classroom?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well the important thing is that the vast majority of teachers just want to be good teachers and produce magnificent students.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Hope so, hope so?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Exactly, and we have to give them an uncluttered curriculum that is not prescriptive and not too rigid but does the basics in English, maths, science and history, and one of the most important things about history is that, sure, we need to know about the mistreatment of Indigenous Australians over the last 200 years, but we also need to celebrate the kind of country that we are today, and that's because of the infusion of Western civilisation on this continent since colonisation. I think some of that balance is missing from the national curriculum and I want to return that to it.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: There ain't nothing wrong with balance. One little thing, Minister, before I say goodbye, I noticed that there are stories around about the fact that we are fast losing the art of handwriting and that's because everyone types – nobody has a pen and it's a pen it's a ballpoint, it's not a fountain pen or a dip pen – and I wouldn't go so far as to say people should go back to the quill. However, it does produce that wonderful copperplate writing which people think so much of which will soon be absolutely dead and buried. Maybe there's some way in the education system, and you're the Minister, that we could have a quaint little class where people actually learn – with a copybook, I don't know – when I went to school there was a copybook and you had to do this copy writing – broad down strokes, light upstrokes [laughs], all this sort of stuff – hated it – but the point was it did teach you some basics of character handwriting.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well I can't really talk about handwriting, Jeremy, because mine is shocking and always has been but I'm…

JEREMY CORDEAUX: You could have been a doctor?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I was the son of a doctor, you see, this is the big problem.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Holy [laughs].

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: You see this is the big problem, this was never a good start and then I was a lawyer so my handwriting is shocking but I'm sure there's a place in the curriculum for all of the aspects that we talk about, whether it's study of the classics in English and history right through to proper handwriting and the languages, I mean we have to cater for everybody's interests, but we have to also get the basics right and I think one of the criticisms of the current curriculum is this thematic aspect where you have to have three themes in everything – sustainability, indigenous Australia and Australia's place in Asia. Now, in maths, for the life of me, I'm not sure how those three themes are associated with the maths curriculum.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Minister great to talk to you, thank you.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Thank you.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Minister for Education Christopher Pyne. Kate Ellis is the Shadow Minister. How are you?  Happy New Year.

KATE ELLIS: Good morning, Jeremy, Happy New Year.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Won't, don't we just tear everything down and start again?

KATE ELLIS: Well because we've made a lot of progress in recent years.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Have we? We've gone back in ten years, Kate?

KATE ELLIS: Well in terms of the national curriculum, Jeremy, this took five years of working in a bipartisan nature with state and territory governments, with education experts, with academics and the national curriculum is actually only just being rolled out and implemented in 2014. So rather than constantly creating uncertainty and change, I think that we should actually be looking at the real issues in education and we do have real issues in Australia's schools. We've just gone through the biggest review of our school system in 40 years; we've come up to the solutions to this in terms of the Gonski Reform.

Christopher Pyne and Tony Abbott told the Australian people – before the election – that they would implement those reforms and what they're doing now is just creating a big distraction; let's all talk about the curriculum, let's all look over here so that we don't focus on the fact that they have broken that key commitment, which is just too important to disregard.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: But Kate, in your family, if you wanted something desperately and needed it but couldn't afford it, you'd put it off wouldn't you, and you'd do it when you could afford it. Wouldn't that be reasonably good, sensible housekeeping?

KATE ELLIS: Well the issue here is not actually just about money. What this is about is making sure that we have the reforms in place and that the money gets to the right places. So I don't take that as an excuse and I don't take that as a reason for breaching the faith that the Australian public put in them in an issue that is so important, it is affecting every classroom, every school across Australia. I don't accept Christopher Pyne coming on your show and saying what we're doing is implementing our promises when actually what they're doing is distracting the public from the fact that they have broken their key promise when it comes to our schools.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Well here's something revolutionary. Why don't you just wait until it doesn't work and then be critical of it because I don’t think what has been in place for the past few years has been working.

KATE ELLIS: Well the issue is we know that our school system is broken, we know that, and we're seeing the evidence…

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Because you've been there six years, so why didn't you fix it?

KATE ELLIS: Well I'd love to be able to click my fingers and fix everything overnight, Jeremy, but what we did do is actually go through this biggest process in 40 years, come up with the solutions, start putting them in place and secured a commitment from Tony Abbott that he would keep on with that process that he's now cast aside. So that's the debate that I want to engage in on Christopher Pyne, we have the answers, this is not about politicians and our opinions and our views, this is about a comprehensive enquiry and I'm not prepared to throw away the futures of each and every one of our school students to play politics over it.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Well you see I didn't know how it worked when Julia Gillard was the Minister for Education and she didn't know what the word hyperbole or how to say hyperbole, and yet she was the Minister for Education? I couldn't understand that, I found that very strange.

KATE ELLIS: Well I am sure we have all had moments where words have come out the wrong way. I know that I certainly have and I'd be surprised if many people in public life didn't have that from time to time, but what I do know is that this isn't even just about…

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Well we did have the “suppository of all wisdom” didn't we?

KATE ELLIS: We did, we did, to be fair it happens on both sides, Jeremy.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Yes, yes. I think I'd rather have a hyperbole than a suppository, I think that's probably true.

KATE ELLIS: I think I probably share your view on that one, but I might not explore that too much further.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Now just on the subject of religion because this kind of thing kicked back to religion for some strange reason…

KATE ELLIS: Yeah, yeah.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: What's wrong with just teaching religion but keeping a bias towards Western religion, but also teaching Judaism, Hinduism, the Islamic religions, but you keep it with a focus or through the lens of a Christian-Judeo country?

KATE ELLIS: Jeremy I thought that discussion about religion in the last few days was quite strange because in the national curriculum it does actually cover religions, including Christianity  and what it does do is talk about religions and their history, and talk about particularly, their role in Australia's development, so the role that Christianity has played in Australia's development. But what it doesn't do is preach to our children in our schools - that's obviously an issue that is up to parents, is up to their church communities. But it is just not true to say that there isn't religion in our curriculum, because of course that's incredibly important for people to learn about in order to make their own decisions, make their own judgements going forward, so that is something that has been covered by educational experts and by academics, not by people trying to push their particular view onto other school students…

JEREMY CORDEAUX: No, no, we'd all agree.

KATE ELLIS: Frankly I don’t think that's what we want our six and seven year olds getting.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: No we'd all agree. Personal question – don't have to answer it – are you a Christian?

KATE ELLIS: I am a Christian, yeah.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Nice to talk with you, Kate.

KATE ELLIS: Lovely to talk to you too, Jeremy, thank you.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Happy New Year.

KATE ELLIS: Happy New Year.

JEREMY CORDEAUX: Shadow Minister for Education Kate Ellis. Top news stories of the hour – your calls – 8223 0000. I'm Jeremy Cordeaux, this is 5AA.

ENDS