E&OE...
Thank you very much Sandy, Kevin Donnelly, Julie Bishop, my other parliamentary colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. I am delighted to accept the invitation to launch this book, both because I've greatly respected the author as an individual and I've greatly admired his persistent campaign for high basic standards in Australia's education system. For too long, the education debate has focussed exclusively on inputs and quality, on money spent on student-teacher ratios and the like. And this was the territory staked out and defended fiercely by education producer groups, by the state education bureaucracies, curriculum designers and the teacher unions. Now, as a government, we will yield to nobody in defending our record so far as the provision of resources to education is concerned. But the point that Kevin has made and the point I make today has been, and continues to be, to open up the education debate and to focus it more squarely onto quality. And our great challenge as a nation is to improve the quality of Australia's education system.
The high ground of school reform in Australia centres on three key areas. Greater choice and accountability, higher standards and greater national consistency. And when you have 80,000 school students a year moving from one part of the country to the other, to use the language of the young, the need for nationally consistent curricula is indeed a no brainer; and those three things are the foundations of a quality education system.
And it's into this realm of education quality that Kevin Donnelly's work - and Dumbing Down is the latest example - has been a beacon of commonsense, exposing many of the fads and politically-correct fashions that have found their way into Australian schools.
Kevin Donnelly's book makes a very big point about the danger of so-called