Ms LEY (12:27 PM) —I quote Dr Tim Hawkes, headmaster and education expert. He said:

We are talking about a very important subject but I think the amendments we are proposing are fairly unremarkable. The Sex Discrimination Amendment (Teaching Profession) Bill 2004 amends the Sex Discrimination Act to provide that a person may offer scholarships to persons of a particular gender regarding participation in a teaching course. The new section would apply only if the purpose of doing so is to redress a gender imbalance in teaching—an imbalance in the ratio of male to female teachers in schools in Australia—in a category of schools or in a particular school.

This bill means that education authorities and others can offer scholarships to encourage male teachers into the profession in a manner consistent with the Sex Discrimination Act 1984. The bill is drafted in gender-neutral language which means that the amendments would allow discrimination in favour of females if a gender imbalance in favour of males were to emerge generally or in a particular regional sector.

I speak today to address the issue of the gender imbalance in teacher recruitment and in the classroom, especially in rural and regional areas of Australia. I also want to say something about the upbringing of our boys and young men. An example of this, as we know, is the Catholic education system in New South Wales where the number of male teachers has fallen to a level of only 14 per cent. The gender profile of teachers is of increasing concern to parents, schools and departments of education, and the Australian government are keen to discover what is deterring male school leavers from enrolling in teacher preparation courses and what we should be doing about it.

The 2002 inquiry of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Training into the education of boys recognised that women and men can be equally competent teachers of boys and girls. The committee agreed that the quality of the teacher is the most important thing and that that is more important than the gender of the teacher. However, the committee determined that more male teachers are needed because male teachers as role models do matter.

I think it is true that there is a crisis of masculinity in our schools. The majority of teachers in both primary and secondary school are female and the proportion of male teachers is declining. Between 1992 and 2002 the proportion of male school teachers in a full-time equivalent measure in Australia declined from 25.8 per cent to 20.9 per cent in primary schools, and all the indicators are that this trend is set to continue. Looking at teacher education classes, females make up the bulk of students enrolled in teacher pre-service education courses in Australia. In 2002 females represented 77 per cent of the 53,908 domestic students enrolled in initial teacher education courses.

The lack of male teachers in the Northern Territory is worrying those in the Territory. A story in Monday's Northern Territory News said that, out of 1,080 general primary school teachers in the Territory, only 176 are male and most schools are lucky to have one male teacher in their ranks. If you look at the number of trainee teachers in universities you will see more of the same. Clearly, the situation is going to persist and it is only going to get worse. Across Australia, one in five primary school teachers is a man. In Catholic schools in New South Wales and the ACT in 2001, there were 937 male teachers and 4,265 female teachers.

Reading through the discussions and comment, it seems that there are three reasons for this situation: the perception that teachers are poorly paid—and I think that is quite a reasonable perception; the idea that somehow teaching young children is women's work; and the microscope that men feel they are under as teachers regarding their physical relationships with children. I think state and federal governments, between them, can do something about all three of those things. We in federal government are taking some clear initiatives which I will talk about a bit later.

We have heard about opposition to the government's announcement that we plan to amend the antidiscrimination act. Some of the responses have centred around the argument that other measures should be used—such as increasing teachers' pay, targeting potential male students, and selling teaching as a career so it will appeal to more students and shed some of its negative imagery. I say: bring them all on. We should use whatever measures we can to get the number of male teachers higher than it is today. And we need all levels of government to work on the issue.

The member for Gellibrand said that 12 teachers are not enough—we need thousands. We would agree, but 12 is a very good start. If you look at the figures I just quoted from the Northern Territory, you will see that 12 would make a difference in that territory. Other speakers have said that this measure will not make young men take up the career of teaching. On its own, possibly not—probably not—but, in tandem with other measures, it is a start. The member for Prospect does not know why we are discussing the bill. She quoted the United Nations convention stating that women suffer and continue to suffer discrimination because they are women and suggested that this amendment bill may breach that convention. That is an argument right outside this debate and I think it trivialises what we are trying to do.

Most of the people I represent would not accept that that is a valid argument. They do not necessarily object to the existence of these international tribunals that deal with matters of equal opportunity, but they certainly object to their interference. I would say that there are serious human rights issues around the world that the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission should be concerning itself with greater priorities than this issue, rather than looking through the microscope at Australia's Sex Discrimination Act.

Others have said that we should be introducing a package of measures, including increasing teachers' pay. That is definitely something that state governments should address. We have put other initiatives in place relating to the ongoing funding of the education of boys and of male teachers. We funded around 230 schools in 110 projects to examine best-practice models in relation to the education of boys. Under the government's Teachers for the 21st Century initiative, there is a $159 million quality teacher program which aims to update and improve teacher skills and understanding in priority areas and generally enhance the status of teaching for both young men and young women.

The government has committed up to $3.5 million to the Boys' Education Lighthouse Schools Program to identify and showcase successful practices in the education of boys. Under stage 1 of the program, primary and secondary schools from across Australia have been awarded grants of up to $5,000 to document their successful practices in the education of boys. Stage 2 will commence in 2004, when approximately 30 cluster school zones will be established across Australia to support best practice in boys' education. Funding of up to $60,000 will be provided to a Lighthouse school to develop, facilitate and implement a professional development program for teachers in a cluster of surrounding schools.

The Commonwealth is also initiating research into significant areas of education relevant to boys, including pedagogy, curriculum, assessment and students' perceptions of teaching as a career. Funding of up to half a million dollars in the current financial year builds on the solid base of research which the government has undertaken in recent years.

The gift of teaching is, I think, a peculiar talent. It is a calling, a vocation, as alluded to by the previous speaker, who has a brother-in-law who, she says, clearly finds teaching a fulfilling career. I think it is a calling because, in being able to teach, the teacher answers a need in himself or herself, and this can lead to an extremely rewarding profession. We should encourage all those who are called to answer the call, and we should do this in a number of practical ways and by sending a clear signal—just like the one we are sending now—that the government values young men becoming teachers.

Steve Biddulph, the well-known author of Raising Boys and other books on bringing up boys and male education, talks about the sheer loneliness of being male in the 20th century—`so far from nature, so long pretending'. There is a lot of literature about angry young men. Angry young men start by being angry young boys in schools. We only have to look at the statistics and the underperformance of boys in schools to know that this is the source of our problem. Boys, particularly low achievers, receive eight to 10 times the reprimands of their female classmates. They are removed from classrooms and they serve more time in detention than girls.

Boys comprise 71 per cent of all school suspensions and are expelled at even higher rates. They drop out of school four times more than girls. They receive more failed grades and have lower grade point averages, more grade repetitions and more failures to graduate. The majority of school violence victims are males, and they also represent about three-quarters of all assaults, homicides and suicides. Girls outperform boys in reading and writing by much greater degrees than boys ever outperformed girls in maths or science. I think these are fairly startling statistics which we should pay some close attention to.

Something we hear about is the feminisation of schools. Clearly that means that we have a greater number of women in schools than we have men. Respected feminist Dr Josephine Milne-Home says:

whereas with women—

I want to quote from a letter from a single mother of a 12-year-old concerned about the lack of role models. She says:

As all members do, I try to attend as many end-of-year functions in my electorate as possible. I have sat on many school stages and watched with pride the presentation of awards at speech nights at both primary and high schools. It comes as no surprise that the girls win more awards than the boys; that has always been my general impression. But that is not the main thing that concerns me. What worries me is the boys' presentation, compared with that of the girls. I noticed this very starkly the first time I attended one of those functions. It is not that I looked for it at subsequent functions, but I still notice it in just the same way as I did at that very first function. In primary schools—in the younger years, anyway—both boys and girls look happy, pleased and proud as they walk up to the stage to collect their awards. But the change creeps in late in primary school and in high school. The girls walk up with backs straight, heads high and smiling with confidence at the world. But the boys tread much more carefully, their shoulders are often slumped and their eyes are usually downcast; they are not looking the teachers, the officials or the world in the eye.

More than once, it has occurred to me that there is something uneasy and troubled about these young men; they are not secure in who they are, in their place in the world—how they fit into the world around them—and that troubles me. I think that as a society we have some ground to make up with our boys and young men. The most dramatic symptom of something going wrong in boys' culture is the growing suicide rate. There is a reluctance by governments to specifically address the problems that boys have. The New South Wales government had a national action plan for the education of girls. But, when boys started to lag behind, did they have a national action plan for the education of boys or for boys' problems? No; they had just a gender equity strategy. They were very careful about not specifically aiming measures at helping boys in schools. But they should have been, and they do need to.

Another letter I recently read in the press said, `We are becoming a society that fears it will never cross a bridge built by a woman but couldn't care less that its children may never be taught by a man.' That quote has not been pulled out of the air. In 2003, the University of Melbourne's engineering faculty was granted an exemption under the equal opportunity legislation to create three postdoctoral positions specifically for women.

I think many of us live our whole lives with the pain of what our parents could not be for us. Boys and young men live with the pain of what their fathers did not say or do or show, and they have fewer strategies for dealing with that pain. Steve Biddulph, who I mentioned previously, said, `If you don't examine your own wounds, you wound your children.' I think that is relevant. Which is the better option: having boys learning from good male teachers who are also good role models about how they should get in touch with their feelings, how they need to express themselves and how they should learn to manage the things they do and the things that they perceive are done to them; or do we put that to one side and say that, after a life of not having the opportunity to connect with a man they can relate to, disturbed teenagers should be directed—as they are now—to a web site to help them cope when life delivers the inevitable kick in the guts; or, as the medical and criminal system does when it comes across an adult man whose life has fallen to bits, should we refer them to a counsellor? I am afraid that by then the damage has been done.

There are homes and families without fathers. There are homes and families where a man is present who may be a role model but not the sort of role model you would want. The man at home may demonstrate qualities, but these may be the qualities of violence, drunkenness, idleness or disinterest. He may be the only man the children in that home associate with. All these negative qualities can apply equally well to women, but it is most likely that the children see a woman at school or elsewhere in their lives who is a positive role model. That enables them to think that the man they have most to do with represents what it is to be a man. That is the problem we are facing.

It is all very well to talk about ideals and how we should have this and we should have that, but it is not a perfect world. We really do need to recognise that these are the home lives that many of the young boys who attend our schools come from. If we have the opportunity to do something in those schools to present them with a more positive role model—which, as I said, can show them that men do exist who do not treat them the way they may well be treated at home or the way they see characters in movies, Nintendo and computer games treating women and treating the world in general—then we should do so.

I have spoken very much in favour of boys. I think there are other times and other places to speak in favour of girls and of women's issues. I do feel that the opposition has trivialised this debate to a great extent. I do feel that this is a simple and commonsense measure. It is not going to answer the whole problem clearly. As I said, a suite of measures at all levels of government is needed to do that. As I watched the Leader of the Opposition listening to the Prime Minister and the Minister for Education, Science and Training introduce this bill and talk about it in question time, I think he actually approved of it and appreciated it. I am sorry that forces within his own party and possibly within the teachers unions have prevented him from taking this on. I am sorry about that. As I said, I think it is a commonsense measure, a straightforward measure. I commend the bill to the House. I want to end with a quote in favour of the teaching of boys from Ralph Waldo Emerson. It states: