Grievance Debate

Education System

Dr CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (15:20): Naturally enough, I want to talk about education and this horror of a pandemic that we are all dealing with. It grieves me that this state, this nation and this world is having to go through this experience, but go through it we are. For that to be in any way survivable and for us to be able to restore our country and our world to anything like it has been in the past—that long distant past of about six weeks ago—we need the very best leadership.

One of the features of that leadership must be clarity and another feature must be honesty. If we do not clearly understand what is happening and if we do not have our leaders being utterly up front and honest with us then we risk losing community support and community confidence for what is being collectively asked of us. I do not want to talk more generally about that, although there are many ways in which we should be discussing that theme.

However, if I think about education I see the most acute example across the nation of confusing messages that are upsetting, puzzling and disturbing teachers, principals, support workers, parents and children. I would like to start by saying to all staff in schools: thank you for what you do every day, and thank you for the last two weeks when you have had an avalanche of information that has been disturbing and concerning, such as that spatial distancing applies everywhere but in your school.

The idea that keeping away from other human beings is the best and safest thing we can do, unless you are in a school, must be very hard for those staff to have to deal with, to hear and to manage. This is particularly so in schools where they do not have enough hygiene products, and by that I mean soap, as well as hand sanitiser, and where they do not have the space to keep kids apart in the way that every other human being in Australia is being asked to keep apart.

I say to parents and to students that I understand what you are going through because I, like most people here who have school-aged children, am going through exactly the same questioning: what is the right decision? What is the right choice? How do I reconcile the health advice that tells me it is too dangerous for my children to see their grandparents but it is fine for my children to go to school, see each other, be with teachers (some in the older-age cohort) and then come home afterwards? Do they get it or do they not get it? Do they spread it or do they not spread it? I hear these questions.

I am not giving medical advice—I cannot and I should not—but I understand those questions. I understand why people are agonising over what their personal choice should be and what the right choice for the whole system should be. I have said for the last week or two that it is important that we allow parents to make choices and that we support those choices. What I have heard today is that the department at this stage is not regarding it as their responsibility, educationally, to support the parents who choose not to send their children to school. In fact, schools are, because schools are awesome. It worries me that the central messaging is that that is not the responsibility, that it is different if you are in isolation to if you make the decision.

I was disturbed a week ago to hear from both the Prime Minister and the Premier that not only is it a good idea to keep the schools open, which I appreciate is the health advice, but that parents should and must send their children there. That has now changed; it is okay, you can make your own decisions, but we are still not in a situation where the education department feels it has a responsibility to you if you make that decision.

As I said, fortunately, schools are different. Schools are fantastic, and I know that the staff at my children's school are going out of their way to support parental choice and maintain learning. It is so important that we collectively understand the pathway, that we understand the triggers that take us from one stage in this crisis to the next stage, what that response will look like in a week, or what that response will look like when this condition is met.

It horrifies me that I am sending to my constituents what I get from the New Zealand government site, which says, 'These are the stages; we are at this stage and that is the consequence.' We still have time to do this and I urge the government to take control and show proper leadership.