5AA

SUBJECTS: Education reform; Labor leadership; Australian economy

E&OE……… 

Leon Byner: Christopher, do you honestly believe you’ll be able to achieve this? 

Christopher Pyne: Well, I do Leon, yes, because the federal government is really the level of Government that really has the purse strings and while state governments fund public schools and the federal government non-government schools we have many programs amounting to several or many billions of dollars are also pumped into government schools.  I think working with the states, particularly new Coalition states like New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and hopefully Queensland, many people in the Coalition think we need to get back to that traditional method of schooling rather than the progressive method, which has dominated for several decades. 

Byner: Are you talking a whole of language approach? 

Pyne: That’s one example.  That is one example in terms of the teaching of English, but there are many examples and what I believe education is about is building knowledge of a student; building the whole student.  It’s not about skilling students and while that’s an unfashionable argument, it’s an argument we need to have in Australia today.  There is a blind acceptance among the education elite that skilling students is what education is about.  In fact it used to be about building knowledge so that as professions change, as trades change whoever is in those jobs can shift to another job because they have the general knowledge and the basis of learning which they learnt at school; that if you learn an obsolete skill then when those skills are no longer required, the education system has let you down. 

Byner: But knowledge is not obsolete. 

Pyne: Knowledge is never obsolete.

Byner: It’s highly portable.  Can I put something to you? All this education is a real issue for Australia and boys now are seen as problems and boys get the raw end of the stick in terms of the way we teach, even the way we examine.  What is your government going to do if it gets to be in Government? 

Pyne: Well, we are going to do a number of very important things.  The first one is to introduce genuine autonomy at the school level decision making to the local community and the local school.  We trust principals and parents to make the best decisions for their students.  We will weaken the power of central office and the bureaucracy and we will strengthen the decision making at the local level giving principals more autonomy.  All the overseas studies show, not all, but what many of the overseas studies show and even studies conducted in Australia show that schools with greater autonomy get more out of their students and those students are more likely to go onto tertiary education. 

Byner: What’s your view of the new SACE in South Australia, which has been very controversial?

Christopher Pyne: Well it has been controversial and it continues the approach to education which seeks to deliver some would say outcomes rather than build the knowledge of individual students. For example a lot of the students I see through my office coming to see me about the fifth subject which is essentially the project subject, they tell me that they don’t want to be doing this project that they regard it as a second class option they would rather be doing fib=ve subjects so that universities and other tertiary institutions can rely on the result they get in Year 12.

Now, why we have to  have four subjects plus a project is really beyond me but it continues that sense that schooling is made easier rather than lifting the student’s abilities – the system is settling to where the student’s abilities were before they were given the chance to grow.

Leon Byner: OK what’s your take on what’s going to happen in Canberra in the next few weeks? Do you think that there will be a leadership challenge or …everybody says that Rudd hasn’t got the numbers so if he hasn’t he’s not going to challenge is he?

Pyne: Well Leon, commentating about politics is your job and the job of the press gallery in Canberra; I’m an advocate so I don’t come to this with an unbiased view. I obviously think that the government should get their house in order. The loses from the chaos and the shambles that is currently the Labor Government are the Australian people. While their focussed on their internal divisions and their breaches of promise and who’s up and who’s down then their focussing on job security, border security and cost of living.

Byner: Let me ask you this, it’s a big issue at the moment that many jobs are going off shore. We’ve had the financial sector exporting good jobs overseas because they can get people to work for a third of the money. If the Coalition Government was in power, what would you do to curb this trend?

Pyne: Well obviously we need to  make the economy strong enough that Westpac or other institutions and bodies corporate don’t feel they need to go off-shore in order to stay in business and what the first thing we could do Leon is to  restore confidence to the Australian business community  and to the Australian people. Last year in 2011 was the first year in twenty years when there was a no net jobs growth. So Australian people are hanging on to their money, retail is week, property prices are falling  and that’s all because the Australian people don’t have confidence in the  elected government so it all goes back to having an unambiguous government in Canberra that can get on with the job of doing what’s needed to address the day to  day concerns of the Australian people rather than introducing a carbon tax which the economy doesn’t need and which is only going to export our emissions and not even help the environment.

ENDS