Senator ALLISON(7.54 p.m.) —I wish to again draw the attention of the Senate to the matter of literacy in Australian schools and to the ongoing remarks of the Minister for Schools, Vocational Education and Training (Dr Kemp) to the effect that 30 per cent of Australian 14-year-olds lack basic literacy skills.

As the Senate will know, the data on which the minister so irresponsibly based his claims was not a literacy test at all. It was a small part of a 20-year longitudinal study of the transition from school to work of a group of young Australians. Not only was the test irrelevant to the minister's claims, but the study is not due to be finished until next year. Even after this had been pointed out to the minister, he continued to accuse schools of hiding the data. He said parents were entitled to know their children did not have basic literacy skills. In short, he continued to scaremonger, to put fear into the hearts of every parent with children in school.

This morning we heard more of the story on Radio National. Commentator and journalist Brian Toohey was asked how he thought the minister would have handled the test himself. He said:

The test is incredibly difficult and it is totally misleading to suggest that what most people would regard as lacking in basic literacy skills, was actually being tested here. For example, I think there's a strong suggestion that people can't get a job. Maybe when they're a storeman and packer they're told to go and get 12 boxes of Kelloggs and they come back with 12 boxes of Uncle Toby's or whatever. It's not testing that sort of thing, it's testing some very difficult questions about, in one case, a passage of writing about war which is really an extended metaphor.

Brian Toohey put the test to its author, Melbourne Age journalist Martin Flanagan. The test said:

The story the writer tells us suggests the causes of war are often complex, invisible, justifiable or insignificant.

That was the question. Mr Flanagan answered with the word `complex'. That is what he meant to suggest when he wrote that piece. But the examiner, in this case, came up with quite a different answer. To get 100 per cent on this part of the test, the student had to say that the causes of war are often insignificant. Martin Flanagan says that is the last thing that he intended. But the very question and the use of the word `suggests' gives the game away. As Brian Toohey says, `It is not a matter of what the author said; it is a matter of what he was suggesting.'

There is nothing unusual about this kind of test of comprehension. Such a test is meant to be difficult and to make students think. You might well argue that the examiner's interpretation was incorrect, but who knows? In tests of comprehension, the answers are very often not black and white. It is not like finding out if a student can read, where you can say he or she can recognise and read that word or sentence. Comprehension is an entirely different matter.

This comprehension test, which the minister deliberately chooses to pass off as a test of literacy, is in fact a concept called mastery. Back in 1975, when I understand the test was started, you had to get 80 per cent to pass.

Will the minister now attempt to blame his advisers for this debacle? Mr Toohey offers the view—and I am very much inclined to agree—that the minister, who has a PhD from Yale University, should have known better. He says the minister has the gall to talk about 14-year-old students failing.

The minister has been the instigator of a beat-up of the most appalling sort: `shock findings', `alarming' and `a major cause of Australia's high youth unemployment'. As Mr Toohey points out, shock findings are not the cause of anything and they are certainly not the cause of youth unemployment.

So what is the problem of literacy that schools and teachers in this country are dealing with? I do not say it is not a problem. But I think it is extremely unlikely that the problem is worse now than it has been in the past, and there is plenty of evidence to show that literacy levels have improved over time.

If the minister were not in such a hurry to make these alarmist pronouncements, we might be in a better position, if we have a problem, to understand its extent and how it might be addressed. The minister is well aware that we are now in the middle of the national survey of literacy. This survey was designed to provide the minister with just the sort of information that he says he needs to form policy.

This morning Senator Vanstone changed the government's tack somewhat. She now claims that there have been no improvements in literacy skills over the past 30 years. This leads me to wonder what sort of research the minister now draws upon to reach this latest conclusion. It falls a long way short of an apology and it certainly does not repair the damage that has been already done.

Let us return to the government's commitment to literacy in this country. The Senate will have seen the budget papers and seen that $45 million is to be provided by the federal government for a literacy program. The government is making much of this commitment. I need to point out, however, that this $45 million works out to be about $5 per student per annum. I sincerely hope that this amount will be useful but I suggest that we should not hold out too much hope. There is one truth about literacy; that is, that there is no simple answer to the question of how children best learn to read and write. In any case, it is not all that we expect them to be able to do.

Undoubtedly there are students who are not literate when they leave primary school. I have taught some of these children. There are very complex reasons for their failure to grasp what their peers do with some ease. If the answer was as simple as to reschedule more English classes, doesn't the minister think that schools would simply do this? Why some children do not learn to read as well as others is a complex question—and so is the remedy. You cannot force children to learn and you cannot force them to value knowledge.

Why is it that some parents read to their children from infancy and provide them with books—and others do not? Why is it that even this is not an absolute indicator of literacy levels in school? It would make much more sense for the government to stop making these wild pronouncements, to stop bashing teachers and schools, to stop alarming parents with such outrageous claims and to work towards the common goal of improving educational opportunities and improving outcomes for our students.