Posts

Homeschooling on the Rise: Rejecting Indoctrination, Embracing Education

,

We live in an age where mainstream education is often overloaded with irrelevant social engineering and is taught impersonally. External forces, including the political opinions of teachers, increasingly influence, pressure and distract students. As a result, Australia experienced a staggering 111% increase in homeschooling over just five years, from 2018 to 2023. In 2018, there were 20,260 home school registrations, a number that surged to 43,892 by 2023. Queensland increased the most with a remarkable 210% increase.

Home schooling offers an excellent alternative for many families, providing a learning environment that prioritises children’s welfare and provides more holistic development. During the COVID-19 school lockdowns, many parents were horrified to see how far mainstream schools had deviated from solid education. As a result, many opted to homeschool, finding it a better option to avoid public institutions’ involvement in raising their children while nurturing stronger family bonds.

I took the opportunity to announce One Nation’s policy to shut down the Federal Department of Education. Education is a State responsibility and federal involvement in this area has proven counterproductive. Under a federal led education system, Australia continues to slide backward in international league tables. This decline is largely due to an education system more focused on Marxist indoctrination than on actual genuine learning.

Closing down the Federal Department of Education, including eliminating the National Curriculum and NAPLAN, will not remove a single teacher from a single classroom. Instead, it will save billions in pointless bureaucracy—money that can be returned to the taxpayer, allowing you to keep more of what you earn.

Transcript

We live in an age when mainstream education is often packed tight with irrelevant social engineering and is taught impersonally. External forces, including the teachers’ political opinions, increasingly influence, pressure and distract students. As a result, Australia witnessed a 111 per cent increase in homeschooling in just five years, from 2018 to 2023. In 2018, homeschool registrations were 20,260, compared with 2023’s 43,892. Queensland has the highest increase, 210 per cent, tripling. The second highest is New South Wales, at 127 per cent, followed by Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, and Tassie. 

Homeschooling presents an excellent alternative for many families, providing an academic setting that prioritises children’s welfare and provides more holistic development. Anecdotally, during COVID school lockdowns, many parents were absolutely horrified to see how far mainstream schools had deviated from solid education, and they pulled their children out of school, preferring to homeschool. Educating children at home means avoiding public institutions’ involvement in their raising while nurturing strong family bonds. In traditional school settings, children spend most of their day away from home, leaving little room for connecting with family members. In contrast, homeschooling can not only facilitate academic growth but foster emotional stability and the family’s core values. 

One of the biggest misconceptions about homeschooling is that it does not allow interaction with other children, which is needed for developing social skills. On the contrary, parents can choose a variety of social experiences in which the child can engage, such as community groups, sports, homeschooling co-ops, and visits to live community events and businesses. In this way, parents can guide such interactions, avoid influences not aligned with the family’s values, avoid negative influences and ensure the development of healthy relationships, free of the peer pressure and bullying that today often characterise traditional school environments. 

Furthermore, socialisation takes place every day within the family unit, and the bonds created in interactions throughout every day are incredibly beneficial for the child’s mental and emotional wellbeing. In a traditional educational setting, though, children spend most of their time at school, leaving little time for deep and meaningful interaction with family members. Home education allows the development of trust among family members through shared experiences, activities and discussions—and connections and safety. Ultimately, the presence of a supportive family is an invaluable asset in children’s lives, especially during developmental stages, enduring strengthening of bonds fundamental for children’s wellbeing. 

A notable benefit of home education is the program, which can be personalised and delivered in a way that suits the children’s learning styles and interests in ways not possible in traditional, overcrowded classrooms. Homeschooling’s flexibility ensures a stress-free learning environment and allows enough free time for extracurricular activities and personal interests, employing an allistic development approach. Lessons on emotional intelligence and social responsibility, for example, can be added along with core subjects and life skills such as financial literacy, household management and practical problem-solving, which is what adults need. There will be the exploring of peace within the child, regardless of the child’s surroundings. As a result, children grow up as well-rounded individuals with skills and knowledge which can be absent in their traditionally educated counterparts. 

As said earlier, in the five years from 2018 to 2023, homeschooling more than doubled across Australia, with rates in Queensland more than tripling. This trend reflects parents’ distrust of educational institution. Several social and political factors drive this growing distrust, leaving parents increasingly feeling uneasy and concluding that traditional schooling is no longer the best environment for their children’s academic, moral, emotional, physical, spiritual and social development. Research on homeschooling shows that reasons parents take a step towards home education include the elements of dissatisfaction with the government, with conventional schools and with the curriculum. All these remained consistent pre and post COVID, as well as children’s needs and family lifestyles, which include religious or family values, for example. 

Educational institutions are perceived as increasingly ideologically driven. To put it bluntly, they’re woke. Their purpose is to indoctrinate, not educate, and to create serfs who cannot think critically. As John Rockefeller said, these are factory fodder for his business empire, which is now global. Cross-cultural priorities of race and sustainability are integrated into the curriculum along with other aggressive narratives of gender and identity. I’ll give you a story about my son and daughter, who attended a school with many different races. One day I asked my son, as a four-year-old, how he enjoyed the Ethiopian twins in his class. They were two wonderful little kids. He said he didn’t know. I mentioned their names—Thomas and Anthony. He didn’t know. I mentioned they had black skin; he didn’t know. He really didn’t know. Then I mentioned their short, frizzy hair, and he said, ‘Oh, great, I play with them all the time.’ They played well together. Playing, working and studying with diverse groups builds tolerance experientially—the way people learn. Students discover for themselves. 

Meanwhile, imposing welcome to country chants and calls to pay respect to the custodians of the land loses people. Adult teachers telling students they can change gender is ludicrous, with children having absorbed like sponges since birth the innate difference between ‘mum’ and ‘dad’, male nurses and female nurses and male teachers and female teachers. They’re all the better for it. Children are being taught about gender identity and pronouns and in some cases are made to apologise for the sins of their forebears, encouraged in the abrasive gender and transgender ideology. Children are in fear daily with climate fraud and lies saying we have only five years to live unless we stop driving cars, which will stop the global boiling. Unfounded guilt damages children. All this builds distrust in children and disrespect for woke teachers. Parents and increasingly people across society have had a gutful. 

Meanwhile, between 2003 and 2015, the Australian academic landscape has been in steady decline. One in three students failed reading proficiency. Fifty per cent of students failed science literacy tests. Half are scientifically illiterate. No wonder the climate fraud and climate fear have taken hold! The average in mathematics declined 26.7 points. All these factors accounted for, taking back the lead on their own children’s education makes sense for parents. This sentiment was clear when Queensland Labor’s education minister put forward legislation enforcing the national curriculum in home education. Through the public pushback, with 900 submissions and a petition of almost 22,000 signatures, parents have made their feelings about education clear. Parents are unhappy with public educational institutions and with the national curriculum. Some are angry. More and more parents are re-evaluating educational choices for their children. From here, home education will only grow because it offers an academic pathway that’s more well rounded and allows for learning that is tailored and delivered in a way which takes into account the child’s or family’s interests, values and needs. When this speech is posted on my website, I’ll put in links to assist any Australians considering home education. 

Whilst speaking of education and the growing home school revolution, I’ll comment on two more factors. Firstly, charter schools. This is an American term used in states where schools are started from community initiatives. The state provides funding per student and the money follows the child. Simplistically, to illustrate the concept: if parents withdrew their child and placed them in a public state school, the money goes to the public school. If the parents enrol their child in a private school, the money goes to the school. This gives choice. Principals have real authority to improve their school’s delivery of education to attract more students and more funding. Parents have real choice. Choice breeds competition and fosters initiative for improvement. Choice drives accountability. 

Secondly, abolish the federal department of education. Reportedly, this bloated department employs 4,000 people, yet it has no schools. Constitutionally, education is a state responsibility, not a federal one. Now it’s become a wasteful duplication of resources. It has destroyed a fundamental tenet of our Constitution: competitive federalism. It’s destroying accountability and wasting taxpayer money. It destroys accountability because underperformance in schools leads to states blaming the feds and the federal government blaming the states. Worse, it enables a single gateway for UN initiatives to be ingrained into one national curriculum that then infects all states. When six states and two territories are responsible for education, globalist agendas have to be driven through six gateways, not one. If states alone return to managing and directing primary and secondary education, then we would restore competition between states—competitive federalism—improve accountability and improve efficiency. Universities can be regulated as businesses, which is what they now are. 

Aligned with closing the federal department of education is abolishing the national curriculum, an initiative of the Howard Liberal-National government. I’m told New South Wales has just abandoned the national curriculum. The ACT is claiming it cannot be taught, because it’s too packed with politics and not enough reading and writing. Every parent’s top job is raising their family’s children. One of our nation’s most important tasks is educating children. We must support homeschooling, reform education and give parents choice. (Time expired) 

/0 Comments/by

Universities are Ripping off Students and the Country

,

Many graduates are asking whether attending university and getting a HECS debt was worth it.  For many, the answer is no.

With Vice-Chancellors earning over $1 million a year, degrees are costing more yet worth less.

One Nation would stop universities ripping off students and cut the HECS debt being accumulated. We’ll also require universities to publish the average salaries of graduates for each degree, so you know what you’re signing up for.

Transcript

I speak on the Universities Accord (Student Support and Other Measures) Bill 2024. The university degree system is failing our students and our country. Schoolies is happening right now on the Gold Coast and across the country. These school leavers are too busy celebrating finishing high school to be listening to this speech. Yet maybe their parents will be listening. To schoolies I say: this is the last break some of you will have before heading to university. Enjoy it. Be warned: universities do not have your best interests at heart. Today, they act like a greedy corporate business, and you’re their cash cow. For people heading to uni, please be aware that you’re taking on a very big HECS debt. That debt is meant to be in return for something. Uni is meant to give a good qualification that students can turn into a sound career. For many people, though, universities aren’t doing this any more. Instead, unis are loading up school leavers with millions in debt for degrees that aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. 

Many people watching might wonder how they’re getting away with this. If a uni doesn’t give you a degree that can enable you to earn money, and you can’t pay back the debt, then the unis should go broke, right? HECS is completely different. The uni gets the money upfront from the government—from the taxpayers. Then you owe HECS to the government, seemingly forever for some students. The uni gives you a degree that doesn’t live up to its promises and immediately laughs all the way to the bank while you’re stuck paying HECS debt to the Albanese Labor government. The universities’ lust for money shows up in the data. In 2005-06, an average person with a HECS debt owed $10,400. Today, the average debt is an astonishing $27,600. That’s nearly triple in a bit under 20 years. 

The entire system needs a fundamental reset. One Nation believes that the future students at schoolies right now should be given all of the information to make an informed choice about their future. This bill does not help students do that. Every university should be forced to publish the average salary of graduates from each year and degree at one year, five years and ten years after completion as a form of accountability and quality control, putting responsibility back on the universities. This would break the university scam of treating students like cash cows to load up with debt for useless degrees. It would empower school leavers to make a choice that matches their goals based on real-world data, not leave them in the dark. This data is available. Every uni student is required to have a unique student identifier number—a USI. Everyone with a HECS debt has a tax file number. These have been going for years. It would be simple to match up tax file numbers with unique student identifiers and publish graduates’ average earnings, anonymised to protect identity. 

But the government won’t do this, because universities are powerful. They earn unfathomable amounts of money with amazingly overpaid vice-chancellors at their heads—and there’s the core. As the Australian Financial Review’s journalist Julie Hare reports: 

In 2022, Paddy Nixon, the then-vice chancellor of the University of Canberra, which was ranked equal 421st best university in the world, took home a salary package of $1,045,000—the same as Dame Louise Richardson who was running the world’s best university—Oxford. 

In South Australia, Colin Stirling, boss of Flinders University—which ranked 380th in the world—took home a pay packet of $1,345,000. That’s not bad, considering it was over $100,000 more than the salary of Lawrence Bacow, who was head of Harvard University! At the University of Queensland, the vice-chancellor earns over $1.2 million a year—more than double what the Prime Minister earns. 

Despite being defined as not-for-profit and exempt from tax on revenue, these universities are making billions of dollars. In 2023 the University of Queensland generated $2.6 billion in revenue. Half of that, $1.3 billion, was spent on employee expenses, like the vice-chancellor’s salary. The University of Queensland sits on a piggy bank of more than $4.1 billion in net assets alone. These universities are not simple little charities. They’re huge businesses rivalling the top 10 companies on Australia’s stock market. They have abused the social contract with our country and the generous guarantees that governments—taxpayers!—give them. 

This bill would make some minor changes to the indexation of HECS debt, bringing it down from 16 per cent over 2½ years to 11.1 per cent. But it only tinkers around the edges. This bill does nothing to address the fact that the average HECS debt has tripled in two decades. It does nothing to make sure that it’s worthwhile getting into debt for a degree. It does nothing to address the fact that many people going to university would be better off getting a trade qualification. It does nothing to address universities using prerecorded lectures, sometimes more than three years old, and playing them back once a week forever. There’s no expense, just lots of revenue. 

One Nation’s plan for HECS debt and universities would fix all the things this bill does not fix—all the things that this bill neglects. Inflation is compounding in a way that the original architects never expected. We need to stop the pile-on and give people time to pay down their debt. To do this, One Nation would freeze HECS indexation completely for the next three years. 

Secondly, universities must be made accountable for the degrees they’re delivering and the education they’re not delivering. One Nation would force universities to publish the average salaries of graduates from their degrees one year, five years and 10 years after graduation, so that students know what they’re signing up for. Is the debt going to be worth it? 

Delivering degrees is getting cheaper, so course fees should be getting cheaper too. One Nation would cut the fees for subjects that use repeated, prerecorded lectures and large numbers of group assignments. Our universities should be focused on delivering a good education for Australian students first. They should be focused on students first and on delivering good education. One Nation will enforce English standards for international students, so that universities aren’t sacrificing Australian educations to increase profit from international students—to the detriment of Australian students. We’ve discussed that in the past. I’ve raised it. 

Finally, having a HECS debt shouldn’t mean graduates are locked out of buying a house, which they are at the moment. In combination with our people’s mortgage scheme, offering five per cent fixed-rate mortgages, people with a HECS debt would be able to roll their debt into a home loan and pay it off together. Where they can’t get a loan from the bank because of their HECS debt, One Nation will get HECS debtors into a stable, clean, cheap home loan. 

Mr Andrew Norton, a professor in the practice of higher education policy noted during the inquiry into this bill: 

All parts of the system – the original fees charged, the indexation arrangements, and the repayment system – need to work together in a coherent way … 

The parts of this system are not working for the country. Instead, they’re working for highly paid vice-chancellors and the consultants in the education sector. 

One Nation believes in a university system that works for the students that choose to study there and in the same type of support for people doing a trade. Until we fix the core parts of the system, the Universities Accord (Student Support and Other Measures) Bill 2024 is merely tinkering around the edges. That’s all it’s doing. One Nation will make the changes needed to ensure a university system to serve students and to serve our country. 

/by

How much is getting invented for $4.5 billion?

As the Parliament passes another $400 million in research grants I have a question that no one seems to be able to answer: What return are we actually getting for these huge amounts of taxpayer money?

Transcript

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I have concerns about the Higher Education Support Amendment (Australia’s Economic Accelerator) Bill 2022. We can hear the cheers of joy from the research rent-seekers. This bill includes a huge $400 million grant program, over four years, adding to the nearly $4 billion a year the government already spends on research. Research is important; I know that myself. In the past Australia has led the world on innovation. Yet I’m not convinced the government deserves the credit for our country men and women’s inventions.

Research is not just about money. I’m not convinced that a huge, centralised, bloated federal government splashing huge amounts of cash is going to supercharge our economy. Science grants have already been responsible across science sectors for corrupting science. We see that in climate. We see that in COVID. We see that in water management and many other areas. Money for advocacy on behalf of government ideology—that is what has plagued the CSIRO and turned it into a siphon for taxpayer funds. In return, the CSIRO is now corrupting science and being an advocate. 

Don’t take my word for it. I’m talking about senior research scientists who have retired from CSIRO saying exactly what I just said. CSIRO is now an advocacy group for government ideology and policy—not just the Labor Party but the general policies that have been pushed by governments. Australia’s Economic Accelerator has a focus on translating research to commercial outcomes. Sounds good! Has it occurred to anyone that the reason some of that research has not been translated into a commercial outcome might be that businesses have looked at the research and decided it’s a terrible business idea? What if we’re spending nearly half a billion dollars here to flog dead horses or giving taxpayer money to companies which would have commercialised the research anyway, without grants, because it’s a good business idea? That’s the point: in a free society, not corrupted by massive bloated government, merit determines what succeeds. 

These handouts for projects that businesses would have undertaken anyway are corporate welfare, or maybe they’re corporate bribes. Only the big companies will get access to this corporate welfare. Small business misses out yet again. Only the huge corporates can hire the grand consultants, navigate the forests and weeds of more than 200 grant scheme programs through which the government provides research funding, and make the applications. 

The Department of Education confesses that most submissions to the University Research Commercialisation Action Plan: 

… agreed that there is no ‘silver bullet’ solution to improving research commercialisation outcomes, and that new reforms need to be integrated across the whole research commercialisation ecosystem. 

Anyone reading between the lines on those bureaucratic super buzzwords will realise that no-one really knows if the economic accelerator will do much to achieve its supposed purpose. We know that the biggest brake—b-r-a-k-e—on our country, and particularly our country’s innovation, is big, bloated government pushing on the brake and the accelerator at the same time. 

There’s a big assumption underpinning this bill and research funding in Australia. It assumes that a big, bloated federal government, with bureaucrats sitting in Canberra enforcing grant guidelines, will lead to innovation and commercial activity. That’s a big assumption. If we want true innovation—I think we all do—and a boost in commercial activity, government grants are a terrible way to do it. Government is the one standing in the way. It’s not just the Labor-Greens government; it’s also the former Liberal-National government. The government is the one standing in the way of innovation and commercial outcomes. 

Instead of grants, how about this: get government policy focused on getting back to basics, firstly making electricity as cheap as humanly possible, after government has spent decades blowing up the price of electricity with artificial subsidies that are destroying our electricity sector. That ripples right through the economy; every sector uses electricity. Once it has been made expensive, there goes the competitive advantage that used to apply. Aluminium smelters are now shutting down, rather than coming on, because they can’t afford the electricity. 

Secondly, simplify industrial relations. Instead of protecting the industrial relations club members—large foreign and domestic corporates, unaccountable union bosses, lawyers, consultants and bureaucrats—exploiting workers, as I’ve discussed so many times, and suppressing small and medium-sized businesses, we need an industrial relations system that protects workers and enables small and medium-sized enterprise to get on with the job of employing people. 

Thirdly, fix the taxation system’s hideous complexity and the counterproductive behaviours that it drives. Fix the taxation system with comprehensive reform so that multinationals pay their fair share of tax and relieve the burden on families and on Australian companies struggling under a high tax burden in times of severe inflation—yet another highly regressive government financial burden. 

Do these three things, Minister, and watch the commercialisation of research take off. The government will never have to make another grant. One Nation will not oppose this bill. Without proper reform of the important parts of our economy, though, research grants are just flogging a dead horse. I will be returning to the topic of research grants lacking accountability, which is such a widespread problem in our country. 

/3 Comments/by