Senator ALLISON (5:04 PM) —I rise to speak on appropriations in relation to schools. During estimates two weeks ago, the Minister for Schools, Vocational Education and Training (Dr Kemp) made quite an admission: the $2.3 billion which Dr Kemp has said over and over again would be additional to Labor's 1996 budget over the next four years was, as it turned out, an error. It was an overstatement of some $400 million. The new figure turns out to be $1.9 billion.

Honourable senators will be forgiven for not noticing this announcement. Dr Kemp did drop the $300 million in his speech in the House on 5 March, but we were unsure whether this was simply a rounding off or an admission that what he had been claiming for over two years was a lie. So I sought clarification from the minister for schools in a question without notice which the minister was unable to answer at the time. It seems that Dr Kemp at the time had not advised Senator Ellison of the error or that he was too embarrassed to provide the Senate with the details, and he was unable to shed any light at all on the question of the missing money.

Most of us, I must say, have doubted for some time that this was new money at all or that once you remove the indexation, increase in enrolments, and supplementation it was an increase of any sort of magnitude. And the government has been unwilling to give us a breakdown so that we might be able to check that matter. The 1996 budget shows an increase of $1.6 billion for specific purpose payments over four years.

Even if this figure turns out to be accurate, it is a very small amount indeed when you consider the desperate lack of funds in our education system, the fact that some 80,000 extra students will be in our schools by the year 2000, and the extraordinary lengths schools now have to go to raise money for the most basic educational needs. It is not unusual, for instance, for schools to have to set themselves a targets of more than $100,000 a year just to make ends meet. And yet we know that people would be willing to have the revenue raised to properly fund schools. What we do not know is why successive governments have refused to hear the call.

Of course, much of the government's rhetoric has been about increased spending on literacy. I want to make it very clear that its supposed new money on literacy programs is in fact a rehash of previously folded pro grams. It is not new money and, furthermore, it is about testing and benchmarking, neither of which will do anything to solve the problem for that small group of students who have not learned at the same rate as their peers in the same classroom.

The LAP tests in my home state of Victoria demonstrate just that. The recent results of the second set of tests were just like the first. If you do not deal with the questions of class sizes and you do not address the specific needs of specific students with identification of the problem and follow that with what is often the need for one-to-one help, then you simply do not change the results. I say again in this place: there is no recognition of the fact that 10 to 15 per cent of children have trouble with literacy because of an identifiable learning disability. Some of the best teachers will instinctively identify impediments to learning, but most have neither the time nor the training to diagnose the problem or to deal with it adequately in the classroom, especially one which has 30 or so students, as is the case in so many Victorian schools.

This kind of disability is ignored and there is no funding available to help. It costs more than $200 to get a professional assessment done and it costs time and effort to meet the needs of those students. Of course, simple answers like testing and benchmarking are the hallmark of this government, which is more interested in the bottom line and in shifting students from public to private sector schools.

Curiously, simple answers are the province of the One Nation party as well. One Nation prides itself on being vociferously anti-intellectual and its embryonic education policy—or principles of direction, I think it calls them—bears out this trait. Its web page devoted to this is filled with references to reclaiming the three Rs in our schools, as if they were some precious piece of Australian heritage stolen from the people, leaving a great wound where the collective works of Banjo Patterson should be.

The document, coupled with recent outpourings by the party's Victorian leader, is resonate with the unreasonable nostalgia for the 1950s. This is also something propounded by the schools minister, Dr Kemp, in his literacy campaign. Patriotism, respect for teachers, parents and elders and the three Rs: that is the One Nation recipe for Australia and the clever country. No doubt we can all see Robert Hughes, Bill Gates or Gustav Nossal emerging from such a formula!

One Nation's Victorian leader, Robyn Spencer, claims `A lot of kids don't even know we've got a desert in Australia.' We would be very surprised if any research existed to substantiate that sort of claim. It ranks alongside Dr Kemp's unfounded claim that a third of year 9 students could not read. Basic education in research methods is obviously sorely lacking in both One Nation and the coalition. Ms Spencer should apologise, I think immediately, to the children of Australia for this crude defamation. The rest of us should heed the warning that a One Nation education system would well and truly place us in banana republic league.

One Nation's education principles might look presentable as statements for a developing country in which a large percentage of children are illiterate. With its exclusive emphasis on the three Rs, it is a document somehow curiously lacking in imagination and ambition. As a vision of what Australia—a First World nation—could aspire to, it is intellectually bankrupt. Do we really want to aim so low that our only expectation of children is that they emerge with at least the three Rs—and basic maths at that?

I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies. However, perhaps 20 years ago the aim would have been merely for all children to be able to sign their names on a ballot paper. One Nation has even tacked two Rs of its own onto the original three: it wants responsibility and—perhaps they do not know that Aretha Franklin said it first—respect. This sounds to me like a code for the reintroduction of corporal punishment or perhaps for public schools to be allowed to expel problem students with nowhere else to go. Neither One Nation, with its call for curfews on young people, nor Dr Kemp, architect of the notorious youth allowance, can scratch up between them a single good idea on what to do about the growing class of teenagers who cannot get a job but simply do not want to be or cannot be at school.

One Nation's call for respect sounds suspiciously like unquestioning adherence to old values, no matter how unjust or how irrelevant. Moreover, if we are serious about children learning to be honest, the last thing we should be doing is bending to the public education rantings of a party that spreads lies about the comparative advantages enjoyed by indigenous and non-indigenous Australians and seeks to whitewash the attempted genocide of Aboriginal people. The fact is, in order to gain respect, you must first offer it. One Nation vilifies people from non-English speaking backgrounds and Aboriginal people. Race based supremacy, in my view, has nothing to do with respect and everything to do with pathology.

We were very heartened last week by a demonstration which showed that many students are not taken in by One Nation's agenda. A rally organised by 17-year-old student Matt Wilson drew more than 100 students onto Melbourne's streets in opposition to One Nation's agenda. One Nation is anti-intellectual and knows the value of the education system in catching them young. Robyn Spencer has called for more emphasis on Australian geography and history in school curricula. Yet if this emphasis is to be a rigorous, honest look at our heritage rather than a sanitised package, I doubt that she or her colleagues would be prepared for the consequences.

Much recent Australian history has been devoted to uncovering Australia's Aboriginal past and how black and white histories have been intertwined. Research by Peter Read, Ann McGrath, Henry Reynolds and others looms large in any university course and is gradually changing the way many of us look at the past. No longer is it acceptable to use the once common argument that dispossession was something which happened 200 years ago. It is too late to think we can shove all this history back into a box. The stories of the stolen generation and Aboriginal participation in the workplace—in white homes as domestic labour and as the backbone of the pastoral industry before equal pay was introduced and many were thrown off their ancestral lands—are now the property of the public domain, and fortunately so.

True patriotism cannot be founded on lies. If we ignore black dispossession and the invasion of their lands, then we are engaging in the sort of wishful thinking that has led Japanese schools, for instance, to ignore the atrocities committed in Japanese concentration camps during the Second World War.

I would like to say a few words about Robyn Spencer's claim that migrant children boast an unfair advantage over others in examinations for languages other than English. Children bring all sorts of skills, abilities and experiences, and conversely, disabilities, weaknesses, et cetera, with them to the classroom. Ability in a foreign language, especially at an early age, often has its corollary in poor English. We should not seek to punish children for proficiency in another language, but encourage efforts to see that all children are able to be taught a second language. It is a myth that migrant students can be lumped into one category and described as having an unfair advantage—as Spencer did—in language learning over children with an Anglo-Celtic background.

Within migrant groups there are many attitudes towards children learning their language of origin. Some parents actively refuse to pass on their language to children, under an unfortunate and misguided belief that this is the price of assimilation in this country. They do not think their children will need the language, or their own relationship to their country of origin might be fraught with painful memories that they want to forget. Other parents would like their children to speak the language, but either cannot or will not allow the time and patience needed for this. Many children, especially in the climate created by One Nation, are anxious to fit in at school and are either reluctant to take language classes or they simply do not apply themselves to the task.

Other parents are supportive of passing on the language, but have been speaking English or a hybrid themselves for so long that language gets passed on in such a fragmented way that their children would be hard put to converse fluently. This is exacerbated if older siblings speak only English. Other parents send their children to language school on weekends or weeknights. These are the success stories for their children, if they are lucky, will have access to a rich written heritage. Like those in other English speaking countries, I have thought for a long time that Australian children have the great disadvantage of being largely monolingual, unlike their European and, I should say, their Aboriginal cousins too.

One Nation's supposed commitment to a level playing field is really an unwillingness to allow children to reap the benefits of their heritage. Membership of any non-English speaking background has both its riches and its pitfalls, but the One Nation ranks do not apparently abound with the maturity required to accept that level of ambiguity.