BARRIE CASSIDY:
Back to Canberra now, and our guest this morning joining us from our Parliament House studio is the Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. Good morning and welcome.
JULIA GILLARD:
Good morning, Barrie.
BARRIE CASSIDY:
What's the best idea you've heard so far?
JULIA GILLARD:
Well I've heard a lot of them. I've been working in the productivity session, and there's been a real focus on early childhood development, which is terrific but we've got ideas right across the board. There’s been a focus on schools; I raised an idea about a partnership between the top hundred businesses and secondary schools around the country, that's been expanded to include partnerships with universities and vocational education and training. There are some very specific ideas about teacher quality, some specific ideas about encouraging the study of maths and science in school. And our group went right through to the innovation end as well, talking about research and there were some fascinating discussions bringing business leaders and scientists together.
BARRIE CASSIDY:
What do you say to what we've just heard, that in a sense, it was an opportunity for ministers to go on display on
national television?
JULIA GILLARD:
I spent the full day there yesterday, and I spent overwhelmingly the day listening. We of course had some opening statements at our group when we kicked off. I made a very brief one. My co-chair, Warwick Smith, made a very brief one. But we were predominantly listening to people in the group. We had a noted Indigenous educator speak to us, a noted researcher speak to us. People who could stimulate ideas, and then it was off into small group sessions, where I moved from group to group listening.
BARRIE CASSIDY:
So up until now, how do you think the process is going? Is it all you thought it would be?
JULIA GILLARD:
Look, I think it's intense. It's a different process. When people walked in the door, I think there was a sense of anticipation and maybe a little bit of trepidation too, about how it was all going to pan out.
What we've got is a thousand people, each with at least one idea, some with many ideas. And it's an intensive process to capture that, to kind of put it in a funnel, to get people listening to each other and then to try and distil it out the other end to the big ideas that we want community debate on. So it's been an intense process but I think it's working well. And there's been certainly a great sense of energy around it. People are really engaged in the process. And we've got to remember, this is kind of the tip of the iceberg. Under all of this, we've had the community summits, we've had school summits, a youth summit, a summit with the Jewish community and so on. And all of those things have fed into what's happened yesterday, and will happen today.
BARRIE CASSIDY:
There's not much point in just having big ideas if we've had these debates already. You need some original ideas, don't you?
JULIA GILLARD:
I think you need a mix of both. Of course, the future is something that builds on the past. So I think it is important that people are assessing what we're doing today, assessing what we used to do 10 and 20 years ago, and then looking forward and saying, "Well, what are the new challenges, what needs to be different in the future as we build to 2020? And what of the past, do we need to bring forward with us?"
BARRIE CASSIDY:
One theme that seemed to come through no matter what the group, and that was education. People seem to be looking for new and innovative ways to deal with education?
JULIA GILLARD:
I think that's absolutely right. The feedback session last night, where there were snapshots of what had happened in each group, of course education is central to the group I'm in, but education was also talked about by the economy group and the climate change group and the creative Australia group, and I think there's a real frustration that education has been viewed through the prism of our current institutions, and there's been the sense from the institutions, if you like, that education is something that starts at around about five and depending on how good you are at it, finishes at 16, 17 or maybe if you go to university, 24, 25, 26.
And the message loud and clear is people want to bust through that. They want our society and our institutions to recognise that education starts from the moment a child is born, and what happens in those early years can be such a predictor of the rest of life's chances, and education can never finish because the jobs of the future probably haven't even been thought of yet, and people who are born today are going to have to go back, and back, and back for training and retraining and career changes during the course of their working life.
BARRIE CASSIDY:
And they're also making the point that education ought to be about really basic skills like basic housekeeping skills, really, and they gave one example of how to choose a mobile phone package. Do you think that's the kind of basic life skills that people ought to be taught in schools?
JULIA GILLARD:
I think schools have to cover the full range, from the moment basic literacy and numeracy, obviously if you can't read, if you can't write, if you don't have any understanding of the sciences, then the rest of the world of knowledge is lost to you. So the basic skills are very important.
But I think people are also asking education to teach those basic skills and then demonstrate their use in the real world, and at the end of the day, comparing mobile phone packages is about doing some maths and accounting against some assumptions about how you're going to use the mobile phone. So you need that numeracy, or you're not going to be able to get that job done.
BARRIE CASSIDY:
With the republic, and they're asking for another vote within two years. Is that asking too much?
JULIA GILLARD:
Well, it's certainly a very quick time frame and I suspect that that will be a matter of great debate. What the Government has said is that we are committed to an Australian republic. Obviously the Prime Minister has been committed to this, I'm committed to it, Labor is committed to it, but it has to be a process that takes the community with us. It's also not been a top order priority for the Government. There's been a lot to do but the sense coming out of the Summit has been a sense of urgency, and I suspect that that will be the subject of more discussion today.
BARRIE CASSIDY:
And the minimalist model proposed by Bob Carr, that you simply amend the constitution to make the Governor-General Head of State, do you think that has merit?
JULIA GILLARD:
Well, I think we're going to need a debate on models. I mean, if we look back at the last republic debate of course crashed because there wasn't agreement about the model. And people have therefore talked in the future about a two stage process, where you test the idea about a republic first and then work your way through to the preferred model.
Now, these things will be the subject of more discussion today. And of course, the conversation about the republic in the nation is not just a conversation amongst the thousand people who are here today. It's a conversation right across the community. And I suspect the Summit is accurately reflecting a new sense of engagement and interest with the republic debate.
BARRIE CASSIDY:
An 'Australian' editorial on Friday said it would be dangerous to consider anything that emerges from the Summit to have
national consensus. That's true, isn't it? It's the consensus of a thousand people hand-picked by the Government, but that doesn't make is a national consensus?
JULIA GILLARD:
Well, the aim of 2020 has been about capturing those big ideas and sense of vision for the nation's future. We've never said that we expect a grand consensus to come out of this, even one that involves the thousand, let alone a grand consensus across the nation. But what we are hoping will come out of it and what I think we are seeing come out of it is a sense that people in this forum of a thousand, in their local forums, in the youth summit, in the schools summits, have stepped forward to say, "I think this about the nation's future." And the job the Government has set itself is we want to build a modern country that is equipped to deal with the challenges of the future. The task we've set the Summit is to say "Help us think about what that future will be like in 2020, and what are the ideas that could take us to the best possible future?"
We don't want the future to be something that just happens to us. We want the future to be something that we shape, and that shaping needs to start now.
BARRIE CASSIDY:
The idea that Kevin Rudd floated before the Summit, that is, the one stop shop for preschool kids, what's the timing on that? What's the best you could hope for in terms of implementation?
JULIA GILLARD:
Well, we took to the last election some important promises in this area, and the Prime Minister's new vision and bigger vision is consistent with those promises.
We talked about - and we're going to deliver - universal preschool, early learning in every setting that children are cared for, so whether your child goes to a stand alone kindergarten or preschool or goes to child care, they will have the opportunity for early learning. We talked about delivering up to 260 new child care centres, which would also be centres of early learning.
BARRIE CASSIDY:
Just on that, on the 260...
JULIA GILLARD:
The Prime Minister is inviting the Summit the bigger issue of whether beyond that we should also be having in these centres health services, parenting support, community development services that can make a difference to how children live and learn.
BARRIE CASSIDY:
That's the policy that you took to the last election. The question was, what's the time frame on this new idea?
JULIA GILLARD:
Well, the Prime Minister has put the new idea into the Summit for debate. He made it very clear last week that it wasn't a
costed proposal from Government. It was an idea for the Summit to discuss. It was certainly the subject of a lot of discussion in the Productivity Stream. And it was the subject of a lot of discussion because we are responding to the research that is now powerful right around the world, that what happens in that nought to five age range is amongst the most important for what will later happen in people's lives. So how do we join up Government so that we are delivering the best possible outcomes from children from nought to five? And it does require a new way of thinking. Because it's about health, it's about child care, it's about education, it's about parenting support, it's about welfare payments. And the Prime Minister is catching an idea which is bringing that infrastructure together.
BARRIE CASSIDY:
But it's not a new way of thinking at all, though. It's a thought bubble with Kevin Rudd, but in Victoria it's actually been implemented. They haven't just talked about it, they've gone on and done it.
JULIA GILLARD:
Well, the new thinking that I'm talking about and the new thinking the Prime Minister is responding to is the new scientific research about the way children's brains develop. And a doctor in my session yesterday made a very sort of powerful statement. He said, if you take a child, obviously their organs grow as they grow, your heart grows, your lungs grow, those organs grow, but the only way the brain grows is if it's in an environment that is stimulating its growth. So we have to provide that environment. That's the snapshot of the modern science, and the Prime Minister is responding to that with this idea.
BARRIE CASSIDY:
And is he responding though, to something that Maxine Morand, the Victorian Children's Minister, she said she had conversations with you about this and you were impressed with what Victoria's doing. Is that where the idea came from or was it from Tony Blair?
JULIA GILLARD:
Look, I think around the world, whether it's Tony Blair in the UK, Maxine Morand and in my home state of Victoria, Kevin Rudd on behalf of the Australian nation, politicians and decision makers around the world are looking at this new scientific research and saying, "Gee, we used to think about health being over here and education being over there and child care being somewhere else. Now we're going to have to think about putting it together." And there are different models and ways of doing that, but that's the core concept, that people are thinking their way through, and that the Prime Minister has put out for the nation to consider as a national plan.
BARRIE CASSIDY:
Just finally on performance based pay for teachers, that came up during the week at another summit, that assumes doesn't it that the base rate will rise for some and it certainly wouldn't, I would imagine wouldn't fall for any. That again assumes overall there will need to be more money for salaries?
JULIA GILLARD:
Well, the issue of performance based pay, of rewarding merits and excellence in teaching, is coming up through the summit process, but Barrie, it was also the subject of a very direct discussion at the ministerial council I had on Thursday and Friday with the ministers of education right around the country. And we've agreed to work together towards entering a national partnership arrangement at the end of this year, a national partnership payment arrangement with new resources, to look at how we reward quality teaching.
The Commonwealth is going to invest some money in research of different models. The point you make is right. No one is talking about taking away what is there now, but people are talking about how do we keep the best teachers in front of classrooms, rather than having them go off to other careers, or go into administration, which is what tends to happen now, because it's the only way of getting a salary advance.
Now, teaching is a vocation. People do it because they love it. But they've also got to make a living and in most professions, we say excellence should be rewarded, performance should be rewarded, and we need to think through how that can happen in teaching. Because once again, if I can talk about the research, at the risk of sounding like a scientist for the course of the interview, but the research is very clear. There is nothing more important to the quality of learning outcomes in a school than the quality of the teaching. If we want kids to have a great education, we've got to have great teachers.
BARRIE CASSIDY:
Again that implies, more money. Will that responsibility fall to the states, or will you take up some of that responsibility?
JULIA GILLARD:
Well, we've signalled to the states that this is an important reform project. And like in other areas of public policy and public life, where the Commonwealth has been prepared to bring some resources to secure reform, we are prepared to bring some resources to secure reform, and to ensure that we've got the best possible quality teaching in our schools.
Exactly how that's going to be done is going to be the subject of a conversation between me and my state ministerial colleagues and ultimately, of course, between treasurers and first ministers, the Prime Minister and the Premiers at COAG. But it's a big job that we've got to get right.
BARRIE CASSIDY:
Thanks for taking a break from the Summit. We appreciate it.
JULIA GILLARD:
Thank you very much Barrie.
ENDS