Recording: The right to education

VERITY FIRTH:  Hello, everyone joining us today.  I'll just let you come into the virtual room.  We'll start in about a minute. This is the first webinar of this year, hosted by the Centre For Social Justice and Inclusion, so thank you very much for joining us.  Alright, let's begin.  Before we begin, of course, I want to acknowledge that we're meeting today on the lands of First Nations peoples.  I am at UTS, so I'm on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and I want to pay particular respect to the Gadigal as the traditional custodians of knowledge for the land upon which this university is built. I also want to extend my respect to the traditional owners of the country where you are joining us from and pay respect so their Elders. 

 

My name is Verity Firth.  I'm the Executive Director of Social Justice here at UTS and I head up our centre for social justice and inclusion.  It's my real pleasure to be hosting today's even and we're putting this on in partnership with the Human Rights Law Centre, so I'll be introducing you to Hugh de Kretser in a minute but we really enjoy this partnership we have with the Human Rights Law Centre.  We have some fantastic guests.  Dr Leanne Holt, Jane Hunt, Chris Ronan and Hugh de Kretser,and I'll have a chance to properly introduce them in a minute, but before I do that, I'd just like to get some housekeeping sorted. 

 

The first thing is that the event today is being live captioned, so to view the captions, you click on the link that's in the chat or you can find it at the bottom of your screen in the Zoom control panel and the captions will then open up in a separate window.  If you have any questions at all during today's event, you can type them into the Q&A box, so we will have an opportunity to ask questions from the floor and you can find the Q&A box in your Zoom control panel.  You can also in that function upvote the questions that you think you'd really like to be asked.  So do keep them relevant to topics but I tend to use the questions that have the most votes, so vote for the questions you want to be asked.

 

So today's event is about education and the data is clear that education is not the great equaliser it was once thought to be.  Currently, the best predictors of a young person's educational aspirations and success is their postcode and their family's socioeconomic circumstances.  The educational divides are widening in Australia across many lines, for First Nations communities, for students in rural and remote areas, compared to their metropolitan peers, for children from migrant backgrounds, and for those without access to digital resources.  So I'm really delighted to be joined today by a distinguished panel, each working to resolve the inequities in our system, from early childhood all the way through to higher education.  Do families and children have a right to quality, equitable education? What can we do to ensure that every student is on an equal playing field?

 

So I'm now going to introduce everyone to our speakers and I'm going to start with Dr Leanne Holt.  Dr Leanne Holt is a Worimi‑Biripai woman with over 25 years of experience in the higher education sector.  She is the inaugural Pro Vice‑Chancellor Indigenous Strategy at Macquarie University and on the Advisory Board for the new established Centre for Global Indigenous Futures.  Dr Holt is the Immediate Past President of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Higher Education Consortium and serves on a range of community and professional local, national and international boards and expert panels.  She recently launched a book Talking Strong, which tracks the development of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education policy in Australia.  The book records the voices of those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders that worked with communities, governments and education providers to map a path for the positive educational future of Indigenous peoples. So welcome, Leanne, and thank you for joining us. 

 

Jane Hunt is the founding CEO of the Front Project, which is an independent national organisation addressing disadvantage and improving outcomes for children, families and society by realising the benefits of quality early learning.  Jane is an innovative and results‑driven social change leader who has dedicated her career to empowering people to improve the world.  She is steering Australian business, government and community leaders to place a new value on children in the early years.  This work combines her passion for children's education, health and development and her commitment to empowering leaders to make change for the better.  Welcome, Jane.

 

Chris Ronan is the Equity and Engagement Director for the Country Universities Centre and he's worked in higher education and not‑for‑profit sectors across the United States, New Zealand and Australia.  He is the President and Advocacy Director of the Society for the Provision of Education in Rural Australia.  Welcome, Chris.

 

And last but not least, Hugh de Kretser has been with the Human Rights Law Centre since it was established in 2006, starting as a Board member before becoming its Executive Director in 2013.  Under his leadership, the Centre has continued to extend its positive impact on human rights in Australia.  The Human Rights Law Centre is currently building the public campaign to create an Australian Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms to help level the playing field for individuals and communities and ensure that the decisions and actions of our government are guided by the values of freedom, equality, compassion and dignity.  Welcome, Hugh. So I'm going to open with a question to all of you and we might just go around and each of you can have a response.  I'll start with you, Hugh. Now, the question is: some think that if you're smart enough and hardworking enough then there's no barrier for you to receive the education that fits your skills and abilities.  Is that true? Hugh?

 

HUGH DE KRETSER:  Of course it's not true.  People who have ‑ so people in Australia and like countries can make it to the top but there is this myth of an egalitarian Australia.  We are divided on many different grounds.  We have intersecting levels of disadvantage from regions, postcode, poverty, race, social status, gender and so on, and so when we look at our health system, our housing and our education systems, that inequality persists and so it's been well‑documented.  We had the Closing the Gap agreement that I am sure Leanne and others will talk about in terms of trying to bridge the gap in educational disadvantage.  Chris I am sure will talk about the postcode disadvantage experienced by people in rural areas and then there's poverty and other disadvantage as well. So we absolutely need to do more to make sure we have much greater equality in our educational systems in this country.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Jane, do you have anything to add to that?

 

JANE HUNT:  Yes.  Quite a lot to add! The question reminded me that we just love that myth of the heroic individual who is smart enough and able enough to navigate things but there's a reason that's a myth, or at best a kind of exception, if you like, because it really doesn't hold true for children in their early years.  I mean, the evidence is very clear that in Australia, we have children growing up who do not have the conditions that enable them to develop those foundational skills and abilities that they need to set them up for learning, and we know this because we measure it through the Australian Early Development Census, the AEDC, and what we have found through the measurement of that ‑ it's measurements of core skills and abilities, things like emotional maturity, language, social competence, et cetera, but what we find is that every year about 60,000 children are assessed as developmentally vulnerable as they start school. That has a profound lifelong effect.  So by grade 3, those children are generally a year behind their peers on NAPLAN.  By grade 5, they're two years behind their peers and those children are least likely to finish school and, therefore, go on and get employment and so on. But what we know that early childhood education is a powerful mechanism to reduce that developmental vulnerability.  Parents know it.  81% of our families and community members say we need high‑quality early childhood education and care for children but there are things that get in the way of that, and so families say that if they live outside of the city, they have very constrained choice.  They have little or no choice about accessing early childhood education and care.  The further you move away from the city, the least ‑ the more likely you're going to be at risk of developmental vulnerability.  Nearly half of the children in remote areas and nearly a quarter of those in regional are assessed as developmentally vulnerable. 

 

Then the other factor that's a real barrier for early childhood education is cost or affordability.  80% of families say it's an issue for them, whether they're accessing through childcare or kinder.  I mean, kinder alone is around $2,000 a year, which is prohibitive for some families.  If you're accessing it through childcare, then you have to be working or assessed as having an activity.   And so we know that they're barriers, absolutely, for children's access.  But I think there's something else we forget.  I used to work with families, particularly women, who are wanting to go on and get work, so they've come from really vulnerable situations, and for them all of their being was focused on alleviating scarcity.  So if it was food or housing or stability of relationships and so on, and when you're trying to alleviate scarcity, your bandwidth is constrained.  That is what you're focused on, and that holds true for children as well.  It's really hard to learn if you are hungry.  You don't get the nutrition that you need to learn but everything will be focused on getting food, and not being able to develop those building blocks for learning. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  That is amazing.  Chris?

 

CHRIS RONAN:  Thanks, Verity.  I just want to pick up on what Jane was saying a little bit around the narrative of the hero and that notion of overcoming adversity.  So I think in education, those narratives feed the premise of your question, that if you're not ‑ if you're smart enough and work hard enough, then there is no barrier, and the knock‑on effect of that is we see look at person X who has been able to do this, why can't you do that? And it embeds the notion that if someone can't overcome that adversity, they can't work hard, they can't get a quality education, then somehow they're less successful and that's their fault.  And I think it places the blame on the individual.  So the question is: how much does obtaining an education fall on the individual compared to the education system and the social structures that sit around and supports that? So in trying to simplify it down to explain it to a primary school student, you can use a running race analogy.  If you're on the start line and you race, then some people don't start together.  You can start 10m behind, 20m behind, so they're working just as hard but they're still not achieving ‑ or they have to work that much harder to overcome that adversity.  So it's a question of equity: is that fair? So I think that analogy ‑ it's very simplistic but it's an easy way to I think focus on structures and move away from the discourse of individualising it and focussing on individual deficits instead.  So I think that's something to pick up on what Jane had to say. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes, I agree.  And Leanne?

 

DR LEANNE HOLT:  Yes, thanks, Verity.  I think that it's an interesting question and obviously as all my co panel members have stated, but I think it also is about how do we define smart.  We use a very Western baseline to define smart from an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspective and we know that there's multilayered barriers for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to access higher education or education more broadly, and their comment to other groups like the financial implications and school experiences, but there's also family and community responsibilities that is quite unique to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and also a big one is a sense of belonging and particularly coming into a higher education, and so we find that that's probably one of our prominent challenges for students coming into higher education.  They can be academically smart but they still don't feel that sense of belonging and that they should be ‑ that they should be here in this environment.  And so I suppose that comes to universities providing environments and curriculum that is conducive to the values and experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and recognising other challenges such as racism and discrimination and that we have a zero tolerance to that and that we don't just say it, that there's actions that back it up.  I also think ‑ I totally agree with the challenges that we have for our rural, regional and remote students, but I think government policies also need to consider the uniqueness of some of the challenges of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities as well, and in a NAPLAN report or the report that was done a few years ago for rural, regional and remote, it stated that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students had a higher attrition rate ‑ urban Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students had a higher attrition rate than very remote, low socioeconomic students, and yet when the recent policies changed to the job ready graduates package, they included demand driven places for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander regional and remote students but, no matter how much we argued that this is a need for all of our students, we're still having the argument.  So I think there needs to be consideration for those multilayered barriers and what are we trying to achieve. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  I'm glad you say that, Leanne, because in that same package, they also adjusted the way that equity funding was paid to universities so that in this bizarre ‑ a perfect example was they prioritised rural and regional students essentially over urban students from low socioeconomic backgrounds.  So a university like the University of Western Sydney ended up losing the most of any university in Australia when it came to equity funding, and I think that was just madness. 

 

DR LEANNE HOLT:  And another one of my ‑ that I harp on about is that while we use postcodes to define ‑ to define economic status, it's flawed because we know that some of our most poverty stricken communities reside in urban areas, and that's not taking away from the challenges from our communities in regional and remote areas either.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.  It doesn't have to be either/or. 

 

DR LEANNE HOLT:  No, it doesn't. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Leanne, I'm going to come to you now to talk about your book, Talking Strong.  So in this book, you explore the development of national education policies for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and, as part of it, you spoke with many leaders who worked to map a path for a positive educational future.  And so what were some of the key takeaways from that book or that process?

 

DR LEANNE HOLT:  Thanks, Verity.  I loved putting the book together.  I was really privileged to talk to so many wonderful past and present Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders.  They continue to be our leaders.  But there were some really key themes and one of the questions that I asked them when I spoke to them was: what advice do you have for future leaders, educators, our ambassadors of education? And there were definitely some key themes.  One of them was inclusion of curriculum that builds an understanding and knowledge of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and not just around our challenges but also around our successes and the deep knowledge that has been acquired over thousands of years because when we talk about Aboriginal histories, it hones in on the deficits of our history and not the strengths of our history.  So that was one thing that came through very clear.  Another one was Aboriginal‑led decision making and so the importance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices, but also having respectful and reciprocal relationships with non‑Aboriginal people, continuing to improve the educational outcomes, and also because the thing about these leaders, they looked at education from early childhood through to higher education and it was quite unique and it still is unique.  Like the Government silos are so we look at early childhood or we look at school education or vocational education or higher education.  It's all very pocketed.  But like public health, these are things that we should be looking at wholistically and that message came through really strong.  The other message ‑ the final message that I'll highlight was ensuring that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are empowered to be true to themselves and their identity as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.  There was concern that we put a lot of effort into growing white fella capacity, as it was noted, but making sure that isn't at the detriment of remembering where they came from or who they are in their heart.  And I'll quote a really lovely one of the late Lillian Holt, who was a key leader and elder within our communities.  She said to me she cautioned that it's not just about the head; it's also about the heart.  It's about the head and the heart and she said the greatest journey sometimes is from the head to the heart.  And I always reflect on that because I think it's a really beautiful statement. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  That is beautiful.  Jane, I'm going to come to you because I really love what Leanne had to say about the continuum of education, and she's exactly right, that we silo early childhood, silo primary, silo secondary, when, in fact, it is a continuum.  So you already talked a bit about how important the quality of education that a child receives early on is but can you elaborate on that in terms of the difference that that makes as the child goes into primary, secondary, vocational and how it all comes together?

 

JANE HUNT:  Yes, absolutely.  The other thing that resonated, Leanne, in what you were saying is connection to family and community as well and country.  So again we sort of silo things, don't we, but for children really to have the best chances of thriving, it's education and.  And, yes, absolutely, an education pathway the whole way, and thinking about it in that way, which is why so much work is happening in those transitions because we've artificially created these siloed systems.  But certainly ‑ I think there's a really key point in your question, Verity, and that's about quality.  It's about supporting all children to have access to appropriate high‑quality early childhood education and care.  We know why it's important.  Most of the brain development for children occurs in those early years, particularly 0 to 3, for anyone who has had little children in their lives, and high‑quality education delivers substantial and sustained impact.  We know this because, unfortunately, we've seen what happens with low‑quality education.  There have been countries that have scaled low‑quality systems and they've actually caused harm.  So they've impacted early language skills or cognitive development and so on.  It's only in high‑quality that you get the return.  We've got some beautiful examples in Australia.  There's some beautiful First Nations examples.  There's a great example in ‑ another one in the early years education program that has got very clear evidence that if you support children in the early years with early childhood education and care at the right amount for them, it does vary for children, plus some family support.  In their work, children who came through out of home care system, very vulnerable children, who started behind their peers at IQ levels, after that work with the family and the provision of early childhood education and care, were entering on par with their peers to school.  So we've got program Ma tick evidence that this works.  We've also got population level evidence, so we worked with PwC a few years ago on having a look at the return or what the impact of a year before school was, so that early education, and what we were able to show very, very clearly is that early childhood education puts students ahead at the start of primary school, and that that benefit increases over a time.  And it was associated with approximately ‑ and it's always tricky about these things ‑ 14 additional NAPLAN points at year 3 and then, of course, higher scores at year 3 linked to better skills at year 9 and then on to graduation.  But this is something that's not quite the education continuum.  When we released that research, it got a lot of attention from parents because what we were able to show the link between is children participating in early childhood education and their improved earnings when they got to work over time, but that is because of the education learning continuum that was put in place. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  That's incredible.  Improved earnings ‑ I suppose that makes sense.  You don't have to look after them for as long if they have better earning potential! Chris, the percentage of regional Australians with a university degree as we've been discussing is half that of metropolitan areas.  So let's talk about rural and regional students.  What barriers do they particularly face, what barriers do their communities face, when it comes to accessing university education in particular but you can talk more broadly than that if you want?

 

CHRIS RONAN:  I think it's an immensely complex question but it often elicits a rather simplified response, and I think that's problematic. So  there's obvious barriers.  So the general discourse is around cost, distance, university infrastructure.  These are the things that permeate through all of these conversations and challenges presented for governments and universities as well. But I guess I would challenge that we probably need to look a little deeper than that.  To use a stat in your question, Verity, 40% on average in the metropolitan areas are the people who have Bachelor attainment compared to 20% in regional areas, so that's half as much.  But the point on that 20% is that that's stagnated for 30 years or around 30 years, so it has not changed.  And that's in the face of so many government and university interventions, things such as HEPP, widening participation in school outreach, increased university infrastructure in regional Australia, policy mechanisms like demand‑driven funding.  These things have been effective for other equity groups but not for regional communities.  So the question for me and that I constantly ask when this sort of topic comes up is what's the throughline for all of this? And for me it's the conceptualisation of higher education in Australia hasn't changed across those 30 years.  These attempts have been about supporting individual students to change and to be able to fit the mould of higher education, and the point is this isn't just about rural/regional.  This is about lots of different groups of people who have traditionally been excluded from higher education.  So there's been no systemic shift, and universities and governments have essentially said, "Change to fit our mould".  So if we look at aspirations as an example, so much funding has been invested into nurturing and supporting aspirations of regional Australians for university but research has shown in New South Wales the Department of Education and a recent study in South Australia shows that aspiration is actually high for students.  They do have a high aspiration for university.  The challenge comes in that transition space, in moving to university, be it their context that they live in or the barriers that they have, and that's the key around the barriers, that they have to change who they are and their identity and the community in which they live to fit the mould of higher education in Australia. And also I guess in the front end of the question was we haven't talked about community yet.  It's always been about university and government intervention.  Where is community in all of this? And so only now recently do we start to see that and I think there has been good progress starting to be made around putting communities at the centre of challenging higher education for regional Australia.  So in my work, we put the community at its core.  That's been the largest point of success.  So I think barriers for regional people to access higher education are deeply embedded in that system and my provocation is probably that often the discourse is simplified for cost, distance, aspiration, and while there's certainly challenges if we truly want to address that gap and break from that stagnation of 20%, which has existed for 30 years, then we need to dig a lot deeper.  I think Leanne and Jane both highlighted the importance of education and community working together.  The community is a key because it takes a village to raise a child, and that's the same in education, yet for some reason in regional Australia especially, we've sort of excluded communities from the conversation around higher education and around universities.  So I think that is the real core that ‑ the core barrier that is driving a lot of this. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  And that's really good insights there, Chris.  And I'm going to come to you, Leanne, and I know we're talking higher education again, but considering what Chris has just said around that sort of ‑ well, that sort of lack of community engagement but also it's almost higher education's, "We know what mould you need to fit and if you don't meet our exacting standards, you are not clearly not for us", how that actually translates, particularly for first in family students that come to university, and do you think enough is being done ‑ like, what is your response to that? Is enough being done to actual help with that transition and recognise that not everything universities do are perfect?

 

DR LEANNE HOLT:  Yes, I think that there needs ‑ there is a lot of room for improvement and I think that ‑ understanding that a lot of our students are first in family, so, as Chris said, they're not lacking aspiration, which is what has been the focus for many years, oh, like they're regional and remote or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, they don't have high aspirations, and recent research has shown that's absolutely not true.  It's whether their aspirations are supported from a school level.  That has been a big challenge.  And also about actually linking with ‑ there was also a lot of research and you can't be what you can't see, so we're looking at ‑ this year, we're developing an Indigenous outreach or Indigenous pathways academy, and we're linking industry partners in with that so that we can link year 11 students with an industry in line with their aspiration so that they actually can meet people that are in the professions that they're interested in instead of it being like a bit of a dream and it's here but we're here and we need to try to swim to get to the other side so that we can see what it's like over there.  So trying to bridge some of that so that the relationships with those industries and professional areas can be developed a lot sooner and so that while they're doing their year 12, they actually can be thinking: well, I have this relationship with this legal firm or this engineering firm or this business firm or education or a school or whatever and I know people that have achieved this and I know what I need to do, I know I've got mentors", so I suppose making it more realistic, but also definitely engaging the parents and all of those structures around the student in those conversations too, so that ‑ like, we know ‑ I remember that when I first came into the university and I was a prospective student adviser, so I'd go to schools and I went to Kings at a career fair, I was working for Newcastle at the time, and this boy said to me ‑ he was in year 8 and he was helping carry the boxes in, and he said to me, "I'm coming to Newcastle" and I said, "Oh, are you? What are you going to do at Newcastle" and he said "I don't know", and I said, "oh, right, so why Newcastle?". "Oh, my dad went to Newcastle".  To me that showed what an influence parents have on their children's future pathways and aspirations.  So it's so important that we engage community in these discussions because they have so much influence and they want to be able to provide that information and, if they don't know it, then that disempowers them as well.  And I know as first in family myself, when I started ‑ I hadn't stepped on a university campus until I came for my interview to work at a university and never had considered university as an option.  I was going to TAFE at night and working full‑time.  I applied for the university because I was about to get married and I knew that I could get maternity leave from working at a university! And it was a 12‑month contract and my father was saying to me, "Why? Why would you want to work at a university? What good is that going to do you and it's a 12‑month contract?"..  so he had little understanding of what a university was and he had his own perceptions, so I suppose it's changing those perceptions to show that universities are actually positive places for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, for example. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.  Hugh, so we're partnering with the Human Rights Law Centre and part of the reason why we're partnering on this is because we want to discuss the concept of education as a human right.  So, Hugh, my question to you is: do people have a right to education?

 

HUGH DE KRETSER:  And the answer is yes and no. In preparing for today's talk, I had a look at the New South Wales Education Act and it says in section 4, the Object of the Act, the legislation says: "Every child has the right to receive an education", and then you scroll through this long Act and you get to the bottom at section 127 and it says: "Anything we said in the Objects clause does not give any right to any civil cause of action".  So, on the one hand, the Parliament is promising this right to education, "This is why we have this piece of legislation that sets up schools and registration and curriculum and all that stuff", and then on the other hand they're saying, "By the way, don't hold us accountable to this; we're not giving (inaudible) to take legal action against us to enforce this right to education".  And that's pretty much the state across Australia, with some exceptions. 

 

So the Australian Government has promised under international law to comply with these really foundational treaties, the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which guarantees the right to education.  Successive Australian governments have signed and ratified that.  We report against it.  We're scrutinised against that.  But we have not embedded that right in Australian law, and that's what we're trying to change through an Australian Charter of Human Rights, and people who want to get behind that campaign can go to charterofrights.org.au because we think that the Australian Government should be held accountable to those promises that they've made internationally and to the Australian people to create a legally enforceable right to education.  And things are changing.  So in Victoria, where I'm based here on Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, we have a charter of human rights, but it's only focused on civil and political and cultural rights.  It doesn't guarantee the right to health or the right to education or the right to housing.  The ACT, the first jurisdiction in Australia to have a Human Rights Act or Charter, has a right to education in it but it's a very limited right to education.  Queensland then created their Human Rights Act in 2020 and said, "We will have a right to education and it's legally enforceable". So they say every child has the right to access school/education appropriate to their needs.  So that is a binding, legally enforceable right and it's early days in Queensland but there have been complaints that have been brought applying that human right and saying that right is being breached. 

 

When you look at some of the issues that Chris and Jane and Leanne are talking about, when you hear stories of children going through high school in remote and regional communities and coming out without functional literacy and numeracy through no fault of their own, they're not getting a decent education because of the postcode they grew up in or what's in their bank balance, that's where it needs to change and that's where a right to education can play a role and it's why we see it as a fundamental part of a Charter of Rights.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  So I'm going to come across to some of the audience questions now because I think some of the audience questions are also about rights and discrimination law and I think it's quite a nice flow.  The questions that currently are leading in the votes, and as I said I am taking the most popular questions, it's got a very long introduction.  Essentially the NSW Government is currently considering Mark Latham's anti‑trans kids bill, which would erase trans and gender‑diverse students in classrooms and schoolyards across New South Wales and silence discussion of LGBTQ issues more generally.  The Government response to an inquiry, chaired by Mark Latham but endorsed by all three government MLCs and one of two Labor MLCs, is due by 7th of March.  So that's the introduction.  The question is: how can we protect and promote the right to education for everyone when LGBTQ kids can be lawfully discriminated by religious schools under New South Wales and Commonwealth law and are largely written out of the national health and physical education curriculum and subject to discriminatory attacks like Mark Latham's anti‑trans kids bill?  So I might actually throw to you first, Hugh, because you will probably have views particularly around the anti‑discrimination element of it. 

 

HUGH DE KRETSER:  Yes.  And the right to education ‑ when you look at this international law and the UN treaty and you look at how that's been interpreted by the expert committee which talking about how that right is realised, of course it has to be accessible and adaptable.  The education system has to respond to the diverse needs of different communities across your country, and that means LGBTIQ+ kids, that means kids from remote areas, Aboriginal kids, kids from multifaith backgrounds, kids of all diverse communities and areas, and that right then intersects with your equality rights, and we do have ‑ imperfect but we do have protections against discrimination on the grounds of various attributes in Australia:  race, religion, gender, et cetera.  And what we've had is a very toxic debate in the Federal Parliament recently, an awful debate particularly for trans kids and their families, as their worth is sort of debated in Federal Parliament and the national media, and it underscores the need to do more to protect those kids. 

 

So the Prime Minister promised in 2018 to protect some kids from discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools but didn't go as far as protecting trans kids and that's a gap.  It needs to change.  And there is a constant cultural war here where people like Mark Latham are trying to chip away at those protections but inch by inch those protections are being strengthened.  In Victoria we've just had laws that strengthen the protection against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools for both students and staff in the schools as well. 

 

And so the right to an education is a critical human right, a gateway to protecting other rights.  If you have a good education ‑ as Jane said, early childhood education is a pathway to employment, health, housing, all of the things we know create a decent, dignified life, so getting it right in education is so critical to other human rights and equality in that education, and making sure children aren't discriminated against unfairly because of who they are is fundamental to that. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  And, Leanne, I just thought I would just follow up because I know you said something earlier about the importance of belonging.  So for students to actually succeed in an education setting, they need to have this sense of belonging, and I'm assuming ‑ I don't know if you have anything to add particularly to the LGBTQ example but maybe you could talk a little bit about the importance of that sense of belonging?

 

DR LEANNE HOLT:  Yes, I think it's horrific.  I think anything that has anti and kids in the one sentence is flawed. I think that ‑ I think sometimes we get caught up in looking at groupings, like looking at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, LGBTIQ, and looking at that as equity initiatives instead of just looking at it as good business and good practice.  I sort of say the employment and the education of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students is not an equity initiative.  It's a value‑add proposition.  It's a value‑add proposition to not just our universities but to our societies and the sooner that our governments realise the value in our diversity, in all the aspects of our diversity, the sooner that ‑ like, we can start making good policies and making good future decisions for our society.  So, from my perspective, it's commonsense.  But who puts 'government' and 'commonsense' in one sentence?

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Or 'electioneering' and 'commonsense' in one sentence.  Jane  and Chris, do you have anything to add to that question?

 

JANE HUNT:  Can I add something because I really agree with Leanne on this.  I think one of the things that strikes me on this, you can't slice and dice rights.  It kind of comes back and reminds me of a conversation I actually had weirdly with a business leader at the World Economic Forum and we were talking about ‑ Leanne, you talked about all those skills, like good business, right, and all those skills employers need and things like that, and this global business leader was telling me how they were running empathy labs for their employees because they've got this decrease in empathy.  Now, empathy is built in the early years.  That ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes, that ability to be with lots of different people is built early.  You can't retrofit it later, right.  So to your point, Leanne, we grow good humans through your education system, don't we, and saying, "These types of humans are not able to access this kind of education" is not the way it works for a good, healthy citizenship. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Totally.  So the next question I'm going to ask is from Pam Rowley.  Rita, I recognise you've also asked a question around the Disability Discrimination Act so we'll come back to that.  But I thought Pam's was interesting.  It was: is the right to an education a matter of providing access to education or is it about successfully gaining an education? So Hugh, do you want to tell us the technical response to that and then I might open it up to the floor?

 

HUGH DE KRETSER:  The way it's expressed under international law is it's an obligation on governments to provide, for example, free primary school education and then that's been interpreted to mean education of a decent quality.  So it's not enough to set up substandard education programs with gaps in it that don't across the needs of communities that inaccessible to people from different areas.  And so the obligation on governments is to provide quality education for people from diverse needs. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Does anyone else want to add to Hugh's comment? Chris? 

 

CHRIS RONAN:  I'm happy to.  It is interesting in the regional context, often regional communities will get something in terms of universities or schools and then it's acknowledged, "OK, well, now you have access to education".  So the question of quality doesn't often come into it, or even access to opportunities.  So in the higher education space, a small regional campus might pop up and only offer three or four degrees.  So the question could be asked: is that genuine access, when in a metropolitan sense, you can access a whole plethora of choice? So that issue around choice and quality I think often doesn't come into it. 

 

And just on Leanne's point earlier around the sense of belonging and categorisation, I think it's counterproductive when we try and single out people using categories.  I can only speak from my context in regional Australia and it is problematic and it sets us back.  So intersectionality has been stitched through a lot of people's comments through this and that sort of nuance needs to be picked up in the discussion.  It needs to be picked up and acknowledged in the debate.  It's an immutable fact that that is the challenge that we're looking at here, not these simplistic categorisations and trying to simplify things down. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Agree.  Now, Rita has asked a couple of questions around disability discrimination, which, of course, is a big issue in education. So I think I'll just go with the first one because it's nice and broad, which is how do we change the Disability Discrimination Act to fully honour the right to education and the right to security of person? Again, I'm going to go to Hugh because it's a Discrimination Act question but then I'll open it up to the floor. 

 

HUGH DE KRETSER:  And there's people who are much more expert than me at this particular topic, and when you look at Australia's obligations under, for example, the Convention on the Rights of People With Disabilities, there are specific obligations that Australia has signed up to to provide education that is inclusive, so not having separate systems for children with a disability but to have genuine opportunities for children with disability to participate in education in mainstream schools, and the committee ‑ every time that Australia is periodically reviewed ‑ criticises Australia for failing to properly meet its obligations under that treaty.  And one of the ways that Australia should be meeting those obligations is through effective anti‑discrimination law.  That discrimination law is well documented as being useful but flawed in the sense that it often puts the onus on changing these systems on individual people who bear enormous stress and cost risk and the like to challenge the exclusion at great cost to themselves and so there is a need to modernise anti‑discrimination law, particularly for people with disability and inclusion in schools.  There's a need for Australia to properly live up to its promise under international law to provide systems of education that are inclusive for people with disabilities. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Does anyone else want to add to that? That's alright.  We will move to the next.  So we've got a beautiful comment from Jennifer.  You can read that yourselves.  She is seeing what a great panel it is and how much she appreciates it.  So thank you.

 

We might now go to ‑ sorry, my thing is now moving because people are voting so it's going up and down on the screen.  I might just quickly go ‑ I want to ask Steven Masters' question because he has asked the very good question around why Australia doesn't have a Bill of Rights in relation to education but I thought we might conclude on that because that's a nice conclusion.  So we'll have enough time to ask one more from Natasha Sky and she talks about the Gonski funding.  So there was a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald, in the 20 years to 2020, government funding to government schools has grown by 53% while funding to private schools has grown by 98.7%.  How do we fix this funding model to ensure our most vulnerable and disadvantaged students, many of whom attend public schools, are not left behind? And in the wake of COVID disruption, how do we plan for the impact of the lost years of learning for our kids, which I think is a big issue that a number of us are grappling with at the moment?  Jane, do you have any views around that?

 

JANE HUNT:  I do because there is no needs base funding in early childhood education, and it's a massive systemic issue that means that children who most need early childhood education are actually not able to access it.  So I'll pass to the colleagues on the later year but I just want to make that point, that we don't have it in Australia for children in the early years. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Leanne or Chris, do you have any things you want to raise about the funding model? No, that's alright. 

 

DR LEANNE HOLT:  I'll just add one thing because later on Natasha talks about ‑‑

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Costs of universities, yes. 

 

DR LEANNE HOLT:  Yes, costs of universities, and it was one thing that I put a lot of concentration on last year again with the changes to the graduate Job Ready package and where they changed the student contribution rates for particularly humanities and made it a lot higher, and obviously my focus was for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students who the vast majority do units within humanities and so it straightaway ‑ that raised their debt.  But the actual basis of putting a financial policy in line with trying to influence students to pick up units in STEM or in areas that they want to shift students to, I think that goes against all students' human rights to start with.  I think it's ridiculous that there could be a financial policy put in place that actually is ‑ the basis of it is to try to actually make people do something that ‑ like they may not be their dream or their aspiration based on being financially better off when they complete university.  Again it's beyond me. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  It doesn't work if you force a whole lot of poets to study science.  You'll just have scientists who aren't very ‑‑

 

DR LEANNE HOLT:  All I could see was a whole large percentage of our students coming out of university with a higher debt. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Chris, I will throw to you on the issue of the cost of university because I'm sure you will have views on that. 

 

CHRIS RONAN:  Yes, absolutely.  It disproportionately impacts ‑ all those Job Ready graduate packages disproportionately impact people who have been excluded from higher education.  So if you take regional students, for example, and the notion that Leanne was talking about around funneling people into degrees and courses, it's magnified in a regional community because what the young people especially see, or even mature aged and non‑traditional students see, is that connection to industry.  So if the Government is telling them to go down a specific path, providing financial incentives to do so, it really surreptitiously pushes them ‑ it influences them far more than somebody who comes from a more privileged background who has the idea of choice. 

 

And circling back to the first in family component as well, looking at first in family students, often universities is an unknown unknown.  So when you have these pressures and you're pushing them in one direction, I don't think it's in the best interests of the individual and it's something that makes me deeply uncomfortable, and I just want to emphasise what Leanne said, how important that is for regional communities because we see it, and the communities pick up that language and pick up those financial incentives and it can really shape in a negative way what happens on the ground. 

 

DR LEANNE HOLT:  Can I just add very quickly, I'm just really agreeing with Chris because a lot of our students ‑ and not just Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, but students that have had challenges like accessing education, they choose those careers because they can relate to them and they feel that that is the way that they can go back and give back to community and make it a better place.  So to undervalue that contribution that they want to make is ‑ it just doesn't make sense. 

 

HUGH DE KRETSER:  I was just going to add to that because just hearing that discussion ‑ this morning I read that there's a committee in the Federal Parliament that scrutinises legislation for compliance with international human rights standards including the right to education.  So this morning I read the committee's report on that Jobs Ready legislation that increased the cost for some students, and the committee asked questions of the Minister and said ‑ and the way the right to education works in international law is it says Australia has to progressively realise this right and move towards, as officially and as expeditiously as possible, free higher education.  So how can you justify that against increasing the cost for some people?  And the Government said no‑one needs to pay upfront.  So they kept pointing to this loan scheme, ignoring the fact that people's debts under that loan scheme were going to be hugely increased depending on what they chose to study.  And the committee said what this is, it appears to be a retrograde measure which is going back on the promise the Australian Government has made, breaching the right to education, and the Minister obviously didn't agree with that, and that was a nice academic debate that happened in this committee in Federal Parliament that no‑one really picked up on in the mainstream media and put very little pressure on the Government whatsoever.  So it underscores why it's important to have legally enforceable rights to actually make sure governments take these obligations seriously to live up to the promises they have made to provide a right and realise a right to education for all people across the country. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Alright.  I'm mindful of the time.  We've got five minutes left.  So what I want to do now is just get the panel to quickly give me a response around what do you see as the solutions in your area to make the right to education a reality for everyone? So including the people and communities you're engaged with.  So what do you see as the solutions? And I'm going to ask Jane first. 

 

JANE HUNT:  Thanks, Verity.  Well, for us it would be the right to at least two years of high‑quality education and care for all children, regardless of your parents' employment status, and, in fact, targeted support for those children who need access to quality education and care that are at the moment being excluded, and I think the other thing is picking up on Leanne and Chris's conversation about first in family, investing in the early childhood education and care work force.  The educators and teachers, they have the most impact on the outcomes for children and we have a work force that are often first in family, they're upskilling from diplomas to teachers, and we need to invest because they're the ones who, to your point, Chris, will go back into regional communities, go back into areas and then grow the next generation of learners. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Leanne?

 

DR LEANNE HOLT:  I agree with Jane.  I also think that we need to go back to looking at education wholistically, as we discussed before.  Community driven and community voice, and Chris talked about this too ‑ we need to be centring our communities around what we're doing in education and how we're making education accessible and conducive to the success of our students, and also systemising things so that they're not just ‑ like, we get this short‑term funding that there's wonderful things that happen but unless we embed that within the systems and structures of our institutions and our broader government policies, then they disappear and we don't actually get to see the fruition of the long‑term impacts that they can make. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  And Chris, what do you see as the solutions?

 

CHRIS RONAN:  I agree around putting the community at the centre of it and focussing on the systems, so moving away from all the conversations we had around individualising and that sort of almost blame on the individual who have come from, you know, traditionally excluded backgrounds.  I think that is the key.  It is interesting in this conversation drawing the throughline between early childhood and right through to higher education and being able to chip away at all the different structures along that life cycle of a learner's journey I think is imperative.  So structures is the number one thing and then integrating across all the different levels. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Couldn't agree more.  So I'm going to let Hugh have the last word.  He's the partner after all.  I'm just going to give you a two‑parter, Hugh.  So the first bit of the question is: in light of what you've heard today, how would an Australian Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms make a difference? But I thought you could also address Steven Masters' question where he said why hasn't Australia managed to have a Bill of Rights which will include the right to a universal education? And then we'll conclude with your comments. 

 

HUGH DE KRETSER:  No pressure! So we've had various attempts where we've come close to getting a national or Australian Charter of Human Rights, Bill of Rights, Human Rights Act ‑ we call it a Charter of Human Rights.  And the last, closest attempt was 2009.  There was a national consultation led by Father Frank Brennan, I think the biggest ever consultation done nationally at the time.  Huge support for stronger human rights protection, and stronger human rights education, by the way, was their number one recommendation, but for a range of political reasons the Rudd Government didn't implement that recommendation around establishing a Human Rights Act or a Charter of Human Rights.  And so that's why we have a campaign right now to try to change that.  And so people that care about these issues, please do get behind the campaign, charterofrights.org.au, and help us to achieve this. 

 

When you actually ask Australian people which human rights are the most important ‑ there isn't a hierarchy of rights by the way  ‑ but when you ask people what they think are the most important, they say education, health, housing, food, water, these fundamental economic and social rights that governments are typically reluctant to actually live up to those promises.  And so we can change that by saying you have a legally enforceable right in a Charter of Rights to an education, to a right to health, the highest attainable standard of health, to a roof over your head, to food, to water.  These are things that are fundamental to living a decent, dignified life and we should make them legally enforceable in Australia. 

 

A Charter of Rights would require governments to properly consider those human rights when they're making decisions and delivering services and to act compatibly with them, to comply with those human rights obligations.  It would give people the power to take action if their human rights were breached, and the experience from ‑ Australia's the only Western democracy without a national Charter of Rights or equivalent, and the experience from comparable countries is that it works.  They work to prevent human rights problems from happening down the track.  They focus the attention of governments, when they're making decisions around policies, when they're delivering services, to think about the impact of government action on humans and their lives.  But to be taken seriously, they need to be legally enforceable obligations.  So that's our vision.  We want to see a Charter of Rights.  We want to see it with economic and social rights like the right to education embedded in it to give people a legally enforceable right to have a decent education regardless of where they live or what's in their bank balance.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Fantastic.  Thank you, Hugh, and thank you to all our panellists today.  I really enjoyed that discussion.  It was great.  So thank you for giving us your time and thank you also to everyone who joined us.  It was really wonderful having your participation and your wonderful questions and we'll see you next time.  See you, everybody. 

 

HUGH DE KRETSER:  Thank you, Verity.  Thanks, everyone.