Education Policy

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER (Morialta—Minister for Education) (15:27): I am really pleased to have the opportunity to address the house briefly this afternoon. I was encouraged last week to hear the Leader of the Opposition, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition and even the member for Wright taking the stage to talk about education policy because it is, as members of this house would be all too aware, something that the opposition has not talked about much over the last four years.

I am encouraged that they have entered the fray, and I just thought that now that we have had a couple of days to read the detail of their policy, it was worth providing some advice to the opposition on how they could improve it, if they do indeed wish to enhance teacher standards and enhance the outcomes for children and young people here in South Australia.

There have been a number of commitments. Some of them have had a financial allocation put by the opposition; some of those may be accurate, some of them may not be. Some of them, indeed, rather than attempting to come up with a detailed policy have deferred instead to the idea of a royal commission to come up with the policy that will achieve the outcome the Labor Party has decided is valuable.

But I genuinely want to be constructive and assist the Deputy Leader of the Opposition and the member for Wright in their endeavours to provide policy advice to the Leader of the Opposition who, for the first time on radio, was talking about some of the issues related to education over the last week or so that has been so absent from the field up until now.

The first area, of course, and this was a very significant piece of rhetoric, was in relation to the position of principals in their staffing. This was something that was put out as a significant change in the Labor Party's approach. It was something that Leader of the Opposition said would make the AEU very unhappy. We welcomed the rhetoric from the opposition that, after 16 long years in government and 3½ years in opposition with a different point of view, they now saw the principal as an important person in the running of the school through the management of staff in a way that we have been arguing for a long time.

However, the detail is where the opposition's policy falls over. Much was made of their claim that they are proposing to reduce the staff management process for performance issues from 10 months to six weeks. In the detail of their policy, available for all to see, they identify the current process as too slow, but many of their assumptions are unfortunately not true.

The process that took years under previous administrations (and I congratulate Tony Harrison, Rick Persse and the deputy leader) had started to come down a little bit under their term and has indeed come down dramatically in recent years, to the point where, far from being a 10-month process the opposition is proposing to abbreviate to six weeks before the chief executive has a look at a process, it is now 7.5 weeks for an average case, unless there is a specific circumstance, unless a teacher takes leave, sick leave, for which we now ask for sick certificates, unless the teacher uses their WorkCover entitlement.

If the opposition are proposing to deny teachers the opportunity to take leave if they are sick, or indeed to take WorkCover if they are entitled to it, then let them say that, but otherwise all they have done is propose to abbreviate a process that for a standard case would take 7½ weeks. They are promising to do it in six weeks—good luck to them.

The second part of that principal autonomy piece was the idea that principals would be able to hire the teachers they wanted. The Leader of the Opposition's tile was all about how principals will choose staff, not head office. I put to the house that there are two reasons why principals have suggestions or assistance in choosing their staff. I also note that the department has actually already under our government delegated authority to principals to make teaching appointments at their sites. That is something that we have done.

The remaining aspects are whether the principal is going to be influenced by the AEU representative on a selection panel or a promotional panel. In the parliament, the Labor Party has voted against our attempts to remove that AEU influence from the principal's selection on promotional panels in the EB agreement. In the EB arguments, discussions and negotiations the department and the government were having with the AEU several years ago, we endeavoured to remove them from the selection panels as well. The Labor's Party's response was to see the red flags marching, see the abusive posters about members of the government and join them, put on the red shirts, sing the Johnny Farnham songs and continue the argument against principals having that flexibility.

The second reason why principals have assistance from the department is when we are giving teachers who have a permanency, an entitlement to go to a school. We have made that process easier. We have given principals much more selection but, unless the AEU is proposing to remove people's industrial entitlements, the ALP should stop pretending that they are actually giving principals more flexibility with their proposal because they are not.