Mrs CROSIO (11:41 AM) —I would like to comment on a couple of things that the member for Pearce said. As she knows, I admire her sincerity. But I ask her to go back and read all the reports she referred to. Not one of those reports or recommendations state that we need amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act, and this is really what the debate on this bill, the Sex Discrimination Amendment (Teaching Profession) Bill 2004, is all about today. It is about the fact that the government have introduced a bill and now realised that they do not need it, yet they are still persevering by having what I think is a Clayton's debate.

Nevertheless, like all the other speakers here today, I am somewhat at a loss to work out why we are even discussing this bill at this time. The government claims that the amendments are necessary to fix the problems of imbalance in the number of male and female school teachers. The government also claims that the existing provisions of the act will not allow schools—and non-government schools in particular—to provide extra male primary school teachers. This is simply not true. The government has introduced this legislation in an attempt to reclaim the agenda on boys' education and to attack Labor for its support of the original bill.

What happened was that the Catholic Education Office applied to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission for an exemption to offer 12 teacher training scholarships to male students. When HREOC declined to grant the application, the Catholic Education Office lodged an appeal with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. The Howard government pre-empted this appeal process by introducing an amendment to the Sex Discrimination Act—the bill now before the House that we are debating.

Since the bill was introduced on 10 March, there have been further negotiations between the Catholic Education Office and HREOC which have resulted in an exemption being made for a period of five years. This means that the arguments presented by the Howard government in support of this bill are no longer valid. As the executive director of Catholic schools, Brother Kelvin Canavan—a person I admire and have a lot of confidence in—said in a letter to the Catholic community on 15 March:

Brother Canavan said the intention was to seek approval that would allow the active recruitment of more males through the provision of some additional male-only scholarships. The plan was seen as one small initiative to raise awareness of the shortage of males entering the teaching profession. In the past five years, 80 per cent of the scholarships on offer from the Catholic Education Office in Sydney have been awarded to women.

The original CEO proposal simply sought to add 12 additional male-only scholarships to year 12 students in 2004. At no stage did the Catholic Education Office request amendments to the act—nor did anybody else, except, of course, the minister. In his letter, Brother Canavan said that a far bigger challenge was the need to address the underlying reasons why more men are not attracted to teaching. These include the status of the profession, the salaries and the career opportunities.

Changes to the Sex Discrimination Act are not—I emphasise, are not—the most effective way of dealing with this problem. They do not deal with the fundamental reasons why men are choosing not to enter the teaching profession. The Catholic Education Office has now taken the sensible approach, with the agreement of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, to offer an equal number of scholarships to both men and women. This agreement makes this bill unnecessary, but the government has moved with unseemly haste to have the act amended. The legislation was introduced into the House in the last sitting and is scheduled to be debated in both houses by the end of the week.

The last amendments made to the Sex Discrimination Act were in response to a report by HREOC which was delivered in June 1999. The government response to that report was delivered in November 2000, some 17 months later. The related bill was introduced in February 2002 and assented to in October 2003. In other words, legislation based on their own recommendations in their own report took some four years to be passed. Now, suddenly, there is an urgent need to have these changes legislated in less than three weeks. I wonder why. Is it because changing the act costs nothing and the government can look like they are doing something? Symbolically, action is being taken to help boys in schools, just when Labor and our leader, Mark Latham, have identified this as a major social issue.

Indeed, Mr Latham has had an ongoing interest in the so-called crisis in masculinity. From early on in his career—as Hansard reflects—he has sought to highlight the lack of male role models and mentors and has pointed to the lack of male teachers in our primary schools as being of great concern. Since Mr Latham became Leader of the Opposition, he has continued to voice his concerns—concerns which formed part of both his initial speech to the National Press Club and his early media interviews as Leader of the Opposition.

It is not only the opposition which has concerns about the amending bill we are debating today. A Queensland union has described the bill as `simplistic' and `a shallow move'. The Australian Education Union is reported as saying, `The proposed changes are simplistic and short-sighted.' This government's proposal invests nothing in the future of boys' education and makes no significant attempt to address the real issues—and they are the issues that we should be debating in the House, not this amendment to the Sex Discrimination Act. The fact that there are more female teachers in primary schools is not disputed; it is not disputed by any member in this parliament.

I am indebted to the staff of the Parliamentary Library, who told me that the international instrument on which the SDA is based is the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, or CEDAW. Unlike the Australian act, the UN convention focuses specifically on eliminating discrimination against women because, it says, `Women have suffered and continue to suffer from various forms of discrimination because they are women.' The government has ruled out participation in a complaints mechanism under CEDAW; nonetheless, it would be interesting to examine whether the provision of male-only scholarships would breach that convention. Alas, we can only speculate.

Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that in the past 10 years the proportion of male primary school teachers has declined from 25.6 per cent in 1993 to 20.9 per cent in 2003. This drop has affected government schools more than non-government schools, with the proportion of male teachers in government primary schools dropping from 26.7 per cent in 1993 to 21.1 per cent in 2001—a drop of 5.6 per cent. The decline in non-government schools was 1.7 per cent for the same period. This downward trend is not exclusive to this country. In 2001, in all OECD countries for which data was available, primary school teachers were predominantly female—64 per cent or higher. Australian figures were not included in the OECD analysis, but our Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that 75.4 per cent of primary teachers in Australia were female, which is below the OECD average of 78.6 per cent, the figure supplied in 2001.

So it would seem that there is no argument about the shortage of male primary school teachers. The argument is: how do we best address this problem? We know that there is no barrier to men entering the teaching profession or in fact progressing within the profession. If anything, there are indications that, while fewer men are teachers in primary schools, a disproportionately large number of men are school principals. The lack of men in the profession is not because of any kind of systemic discrimination or disadvantage that they face in applying for teaching courses or positions; they are choosing not to enter the profession for other reasons. Whatever those other reasons might be, it is plain that, in the words of our leader, Mark Latham:

That is exactly what this proposed legislation is: a sledgehammer. As usual, this government is taking its heavy-handed approach where none is needed. When all is said and done, the proposed legislation is a no-cost cop-out option for the government to hide its inaction.

By way of contrast, we in the Labor opposition have a five-point plan to address the very real problem of getting men back into the teaching profession, particularly into our primary schools. First of all, we will mount a national campaign to attract quality entrants to teaching. We will target men with the required skills and backgrounds. Secondly, in line with the view expressed by Mark Latham, we will encourage more male mentors to work with schools and parents. We will involve fathers in reading to students, using technology, vocational education, music, drama and sporting activities. Thirdly, we will provide incentives for quality teaching aimed at teachers who have the skills needed to improve the learning outcomes for our boys. Fourthly, a Labor government will target improvements in teaching skills for men in the Commonwealth's professional development program and in the development of our national teaching standards. Finally, we will introduce student discipline and welfare programs, most of which will target boys.

The House of Representatives committee report Boys: getting it right made some 24 recommendations for action which needed to be taken to address the needs of boys in schools. None of them recommended changing the Sex Discrimination Act. What the report did recommend was the provision of scholarships for equal numbers of males and females to undertake teacher training, all of which would be merit based scholarships. This in fact is what the Catholic Education Office and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission have now agreed to do, albeit on a limited basis of 24 scholarships split equally between men and women for the next five years. As Brother Canavan has pointed out, the 24 new scholarships will be worth up to $2,000 each and will not affect the existing scholarships. He said all candidates would still have to pass university entrance requirements, so there was no question of dropping standards.

As I said earlier, the Catholic Education Office did not, at any point, ask for changes to the Sex Discrimination Act. It tried, as it always has, to work within the system. When its original request to HREOC for an extra 12 male scholarships was disallowed, it lodged an appeal with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. This appeal was overtaken by events when the government introduced this new legislation and the CEO and HREOC reached agreement on an extra 12 scholarships for 12 males and 12 females. All of this was without any necessity to change one word of the Sex Discrimination Act. The act has always been intended to remove barriers where there is entrenched disadvantage, and ignoring this basic point undermines its whole purpose. The new amendments in this bill—this diversion introduced by the Howard government—mean there has been next to no debate on this central point or on the fact that the Sex Discrimination Act already lets organisations take steps to ensure substantial equality between men and women. As I keep saying, we do not need to change the act to add a new exemption. What we need is for people to use the existing act properly and, more importantly, we need to address the substantive issues which Labor has proposed.

The very fact that the Catholic Education Office had its second application to HREOC approved after some minor changes is proof that the act does not need amending to permit the desired outcome. Indeed, this bill as it stands may well limit future action by restricting the use of section 7D of the act for other initiatives. In its original submission to HREOC, the Catholic Education Office acknowledged that the proposed scholarships may have fallen under the `special measures' provision in section 7D of the act. HREOC did not decide on this issue and expressed some reservations about the way the application had been formulated. Because this bill partly duplicates section 7D, it could limit the scope of the special measures that could be allowed under the Sex Discrimination Act to redress gender imbalance in teaching.

The opposition has received legal advice which suggests that section 7D offers an existing and more flexible solution to the granting of scholarships proposed in the bill and that the legislation, if passed, could endanger that solution. The advice indicates that there is a danger that a court could regard the specific provision in the bill dealing with scholarships as excluding that subject from the general provisions of section 7D. This could have the effect of denying the flexible aspects of section 7D to the other proposal for granting scholarships. This presents a potential problem for future initiatives in this area, and that potential should be avoided while we have the chance, here and now.

I am sure honourable members are aware of my longstanding opposition to discrimination in all its forms. Earlier I mentioned CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. I remember in November 2000 expressing concern in the House at the significantly diminished role Australia was playing in the negotiations of the optional protocol to the CEDAW and at the low priority given to that protocol by the Howard government. I called on the government then to take an active role in the process, to promote a speedy ratification of the protocol and to have Australia become a signatory to it. Of course I was ignored—but we can have a simplistic amendment to the Sex Discrimination Act come in within 10 days.

Today we have another example of the Howard government's reluctance to take the proper action on yet another form of discrimination. The Prime Minister has not traditionally been a strong supporter of the Sex Discrimination Act. He spoke in the debate on the passage of the original SDA, and I refer members on the government side to the Hansard. The Prime Minister said:

It really says it all, doesn't it? It really says we are discussing and debating the bill because when it was introduced on 10 March the government thought they could change the whole prospect of what was happening in the debate in the electorate at large. It was a cheap, opportunistic decision that I do not believe the public will accept, nor will the public agree with it. It was formulated into an amending bill that is now not necessary. All it really took was this government and this minister for education, the Catholic Education Office and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission to sit down and negotiate an agreement that they could possibly enter into. This has been done without this government and without this minister for education—yet here we are in this House today still debating an amending bill that is no longer necessary.

One wonders why—and I say this to the people in the gallery—with all the important pieces of legislation that this parliament needs to debate, we are now discussing this bill, which is not necessary, to amend an act which need not be changed at this time. I call on the government, the minister for education and the Prime Minister to come clean with the public of Australia and let them know that the only reason why we are debating this bill in the House today is that this government, in its own cheap, political way, has turned to rhetoric in an area where we in the Labor Party believe action should be taken—and that is to encourage more men into the teaching profession.

It will not work. It will not work today because people will not accept it. I think it is up to all members of the parliament to be honest and truthful when they stand up to debate this legislation in the House. This is not an amendment that needed to be debated. This act does not need to be changed. The problem that existed has been fixed. The scholarships have now been entered into. The Catholic Education Office is happy; the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission is happy. The only people who are not happy are the Prime Minister, the minister for education and the government, because just when they thought they were going to take cheap headlines, all of a sudden it has turned around to hit them over the head—and it will continue to do so. Do not fiddle while Rome continues to burn. There is a large problem out there in the community. There are more important pieces of legislation that we should be debating in this House, yet we have given time to this debate. I believe that I stand with the members of the Labor Party when I say that I am proud to object to and vote against this bill. (Time expired)