John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library Anniversary Lecture "Looking Ever Forward"

I start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet and pay my respects to their elders past and present.

I also start by acknowledging that today is Remembrance Day.

107 years since the end of World War One.

This year also marks 80 years since the end of World War Two.

Particularly poignant given where we are gathered today.

Because that means it is also 80 years since Australia lost its war time Prime Minister.

It is a very real privilege to be asked to deliver this year’s John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library Anniversary Lecture.

And that privilege is made so much more profound by the presence here of his family.

His grandson John and his wife Josephine.

His granddaughter Barbara and her husband Gary.

And his great granddaughter Rebecca.

Can I also acknowledge the many Members of Parliament and former Members of Parliament who are here today:

• Hon Dr Tony Buti MLA
• Zaneta Mascarenhas, MP
• Hon Dr John Cowdell
• Hon Gary Gray AO
• Hon Bob Kucera APM
• Hon Dr Cheryl Davenport
• Hon Kay Hallahan AO

I also acknowledge the Honourable Chris Ellison, Chancellor of Notre Dame University.

Professor Clare Pollock, Vice-Chancellor of Edith Cowan University.

And the extraordinary Harlene Hayne, Vice-Chancellor of Curtin University.

Let’s begin.

In Act Two Scene Five of Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’, Malvolio receives a letter from who he thinks is Olivia.

The letter is a trick but in it is a message.

It tells him:

“Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them”.

It presumes greatness comes in different ways.

From circumstance, from effort or from destiny.

Mario Puzo’s classic ‘The Godfather’ puts it differently:

He says: 

“Great men aren’t born great, they grow great”.

I like that better.

What he’s saying is that real greatness isn’t about titles. It’s about choices. It’s about character. And it’s about what you do.

However you measure it, John Curtin fits the bill.

Of course he had feet of clay. We all do. He was tormented by the bottle, by depression and by self-doubt. He made mistakes.

But he also bore burdens none of us will ever know.

He made decisions that shaped the war and still shape the country we are today.

He changed the way Australia worked.

He was a practical man who thought deeply.

He had that most elemental of virtues that all great leaders need. Courage.

And he acted with intent.

That’s why he is arguably the greatest Prime Minister we have ever had.

And why this university carries his name.

The kid who left school at 13, whose first job was as a message boy, still has a message for us today.

He certainly has one for me.

A few weeks after starting this job I came here to Curtin University and Harlene gave me a book.

It was a collection of Curtin’s speeches and writings.

What stood out to me is what you would expect to stand out.

Curtin’s argument about what makes a university great.

He said a university:

“should find its heroes in the present, its hope in the future, it should look ever forward. For it the past should be but a preparation for the greater days to be.”

That's what great universities, at their core, are.

They are not just about the past.  They are about the future.

Looking ever forward.

They don’t just focus on today’s problems. They anticipate and solve the ones that lie ahead.

They're not just about rankings. They're about students.

And they are not a place of privilege. They are a place of opportunity. For everyone.

Curtin also said universities should be:

“a friend of the reformer, the host ever willing to receive the initiator, the champion always ready to defend the poor and the obscure”.

And:

“Above all things, the university must have a soul.”

There is my compass.

In the first speech I made as Education Minister I read that quote out.

And I said let that be our guide.

It is mine.

It is, I think, what the Universities Accord is about.

That’s about building a higher education system that’s built right for the future.

And a big part that is opening the doors of our universities wider.

I don’t want us to be a country where your chances in life depend on who your parents are, where you grow up, what school you go to, or the colour of your skin.

No one in my shoes should.

But the truth is we are.

And it’s what we do here in education that holds out the greatest hope of changing that.

John Curtin understood that.

So has every Labor leader since.

And more importantly they acted on it.

Curtin created the Commonwealth Office of Education and the Universities Commission.

He was also a strong supporter of the idea of an Australian National University.

When he died, his great friend Ben Chifley brought that idea to life.

Whitlam abolished university fees, created the Schools Commission and significantly increased funding for schools.

Hawke and Keating doubled the number of students who finished high school and almost doubled the number who went to university.

In many ways they built the university system we have today.

Rudd and Gillard built the national curriculum and NAPLAN.

They also built a formula for how we should fund our schools and began the work of implementing it.

A formula we all know by the name of its author. David Gonski.

They also uncapped funding for undergraduate university places and set a target that 40 percent of young Australians aged 25 to 34 with a university degree.

We hit that target and passed it.

All of this, is the education legacy of Labor Governments.

And all of it has changed us. You can’t imagine the country we are today without it.

It’s the massive increase in the number of Australians finishing school then going onto TAFE or university, that’s the rocket fuel propelling the businesses and the economy we have today.

I mentioned Whitlam a moment ago. Gough gave the first of these lectures 27 years ago.

We all know what today is. Some might even remember the day itself.

That fracturing moment in Australian politics.

I am not going to dwell on the dismissal, other than to underline the point that Gough made many times.

That the House of Representatives is where governments should be made and unmade.

That is certainly how Curtin came to power. Because of the numbers in the House of Representatives not the Senate.

If it was control of the Senate that was so important, John Curtin would never have become Prime Minister.

I think most people here know that, so I won’t labour the point.

I do want to talk a bit about Gough though.

He was different to Curtin.

He didn’t leave school at 13. He went to Knox and Canberra Grammar. He studied Arts, majoring in classics, and Law at Sydney University.

He was never a message boy. More of a modern day Gracchi.

In his brilliant new biography, Troy Bramston describes Gough like this. He says he:

“Enjoyed a privileged middle class upbringing yet stood with the ignored, the disadvantaged, the marginalized and the poor against the entitled, the wealthy and the establishment.”

Take out that bit about a privileged middle class upbringing and you can see Curtin in that sentence too.

The two of them, Curtin and Whitlam, might have been born into different worlds, but they carried the same compass, they knew where they wanted to go, the sort of country they wanted to create, they weren’t shy or half hearted about it.

Both of them were what Manning Clark called “enlargers”.

Clark figured that Australia was shaped and forged by two types of people: “straighteners” and “enlargers”.

Curtin and Whitlam were both enlargers. The people who bring big ideas to life.

One was Prime Minister for less than four years. The other less than three. But you wouldn’t know it from the legacy they have left.

It’s all around us.

I grew up in the part of western Sydney that Gough represented.

Home was just around the corner from where Gough and Margaret and the kids lived before he became PM.

Gough didn’t grow up there, but a lot of what shaped his thinking, and what he did, was forged by what he found there.

And in those suburbs were a lot of people who looked a lot like that young message boy that John Curtin once was.

Smart young people who too often didn’t get a chance. Who weren’t expected to finish school, let alone go to university.

People like my mum and dad.

They didn’t finish school. None of their friends did either. It wasn’t what you did. It’s what other people did.

Gough helped change that.

Our Prime Minister today is part of that change.

A generation of working class kids who got the chance my parents didn’t.

When Gough was elected 22 percent of Australians finished school. Barely two percent had a university degree.

Today about 80 percent finish school and almost one in two go on and get a university degree. 

Abolishing fees was part of that. It opened doors for kids who had previously been locked out.

It might seem counter intuitive, but HECS, the system Bob and Paul and John Dawkins and Bruce Chapman built, opened those doors even wider.

It meant the system could expand and educate a lot more people, and because you didn’t have to pay upfront, you didn’t have to have rich parents to get through the door.

That’s real reform. Opening the doors of our universities wider.

But they’re still not wide enough.

And that’s now my job.

To make them wider.

Not just because it’s the right thing to do. That’s obvious. But because it’s what we have to do.

Think about the world our kids and our grand kids will inherit.

The sort of jobs they will do, and the sort of skills they will need.

Sixty percent of the jobs people do today require a TAFE qualification or a uni degree. By 2050 we expect that will be 80 percent.

80 percent of the workforce with a certificate, a diploma or a degree.

That’s a big jump.

How do you think we are going to get there?

Some of this will happen organically.

The economy is changing. Most of the fastest growing jobs are in areas that require tertiary qualifications.

Healthcare is just as one example.

If the forecasts are right we are going to need another half a million healthcare workers in the next ten years.

And most of those jobs will need a tertiary qualification.

But we still need people  to get these qualifications.

And that means helping more of the people who aren’t in our universities today to get there.

We are not going to hit that 80 percent target by helping more people from Mosman or Toorak or Peppermint Grove get to uni.

They are already here.

Where this has got to happen is in our outer suburbs and the regions. In poor families.

In breaking down that invisible barrier that still makes many Australians feel like university is somewhere else for someone else.

And doing that means reforming our whole education system.

It’s not going to work if we just change the way universities work.

And that’s because a lot of the kids who aren’t making it to university, also aren’t making it to the end of high school.

And they are almost always the same the kids who fall behind at primary school. Or start behind. And never catch up.

It’s all connected.

And that means reform has to be connected too.

It needs to follow the evidence. And it needs to follow the child.

And the money has to follow them too. Based on need.

So let’s start at the start.

The first time a child meets a teacher who isn’t mum or dad.

That’s our early education and care system.

I think we know now that’s what it is. It’s not baby-sitting.

This is the time when most of the brain develops. Everything we see, hear, every meal, every smile, every book shapes the people we become.

We know a child who goes to pre-school is one and a half times as ready to start school as a child who doesn’t.

We also know it’s children from the most disadvantaged of families who get the biggest bump, get the biggest benefit, from it, and that they are the least likely to get it.

Think about that for a moment. The children who we know will benefit the most from early education and care are the ones who aren’t there.

The result is they tend to be the ones who start behind when school starts.

One of the reasons for that is the way we fund child care at the moment.

To get real access to the Child Care Subsidy you really have to be working or studying.

What that means in practice is that the children of the poorest families in this country miss out.

Their parents don’t get the subsidy.

So they don’t get access to early education and care.

That’s now about to change.

In January those rules get ripped up and replaced with a three day guarantee.

A guarantee of three days a week access to the Child Care Subsidy for the children who need it the most.

No one blinks when you say every child has a right to go to school and government has a responsibility to help fund it.

The same has got to be true today for early education. 

That’s what this is about.

It’s a half a billion-dollar investment over the next four years.

More important than that, it’s the sort of change that will change lives.

Where it’s really needed.

Now let me take you to school.

Primary and secondary.

13 big years where every second counts.

Where kids become adults.

I said a moment ago, no one blinks that government has a responsibility to help fund it.

But the truth is we still haven’t it funded properly.

In his “It’s Time” speech at Bowman Hall in Blacktown in 1972, Gough talked about funding schools based on need.

As Prime Minister he began the work of doing it.

But we are still not there.

David Gonski gave us a formula to do it properly almost 15 years ago.

But it still hasn’t been fully implemented.

And it shows.

The truth is we have one of the most segregated school systems in the world. Not by the colour of your skin but by the size of your parent’s wallet.

And it’s accelerating.

And that has consequences.

If you are a child from a poor family and you fall behind, and you are surrounded at school by other children from poor families who are also behind, it’s harder to catch up.

These are the kids who need our help the most.

And it’s their schools that haven’t been funded at the level David Gonski said they should.

It’s our public schools that do most of the heavy lifting in our education system.

That educate the vast majority of disadvantaged children in this country.

One in 10 children today are below the minimum standards we set for literacy and numeracy.

But it’s one in three children from poor families who are below that standard.

And most of them never catch up.

80 percent of children who are below the minimum standard when they are in third grade and still behind when they are in Year 9.

In other words, most of the children who start behind or fall behind, stay behind.

Disadvantage is cemented in.

And most of these children are in our public schools.

There has never been an agreement to fund these schools at the formula that David Gonski set.

Until now.

Until the agreements that were signed with every State and Territory in the last 12 months.

It is the biggest new investment in public schools by the Australian Government ever.

It means an extra $16.5 billion over the next decade.

And an extra $49 billion in the decade after that.

This money alone won’t fix the problems I have just described.

What we do with it also matters. And that’s why it is tied to reform.

The reading wars are over. We know what works. We know the tools and techniques that work to teach children to read.

We also know the earlier you identify a child who needs help, and provide them with that help, the better.

Eight is too late.

And we also know this.

Kids who fall behind can catch up if you get them out of a classroom of 30 and into a class of two or three a couple of days a week.

What’s called small group tutoring.

And so that is what these agreements will help fund.

Evidence based teaching. Explicit teaching.

Phonics checks and numeracy checks in Year 1.

And small group tutoring.

Here in WA 350 schools are rolling out small group tutoring this year with this extra funding.

There is also an obvious link between health and education.

If you are struggling with your mental health your education tends to suffer too.

By Year 9, students experiencing poor mental health are on average 1.5 to 2.8 years behind in literacy and numeracy.

That’s why some of this funding will also be focused here. To support a range of different health and wellbeing services.

Here in WA that includes funding complex behaviour support coordinators in 192 schools.

And a pilot next year of full service schools, where you can potentially have nurses, psychologists, speech therapists, occupational therapists, all on site.

The first thing I did when I got this job, before I came here, was to go back to my old primary school and give Mrs Fry a hug.

Cathy Fry taught me in Year 1. And she is still there at the same school today. Changing lives.

I did that for a reason. I wanted to make it clear what I think is important. Who I think are important.

There is no more important job in the world than being a teacher.

John Curtin didn’t live long enough to meet any of his grandchildren.

But I am sure he would be very proud to know that amongst them were two primary school teachers, Barbara Davidson and Beverly Lane.

And a great granddaughter Bec Curtin, who has a Masters In Teaching and now leads the Rising Scholars Program at the university that bears her great grandfather’s name.

Whitlam called teachers the nucleus of the education system.

Nothing works without them.

Incidentally his sister Freda was also a teacher, and a principal.

We need more teachers, and we need to give them more support.

That starts at university.

This year Paid Prac has started. Financial support for teaching students while they do their prac.

And next year the core content of their teaching degree will also change.

This is a big change.

We want to make sure that students here at university are being taught the same evidence based, explicit teaching techniques to teach every child to read and write and count, that we are rolling out in schools across the country.

Next year we will also do some keyhole surgery on the national curriculum to make it simpler and easier to teach.

We are going to start with maths.

And we are going to start with the first three years of maths.

This is why.

A basic grasp of maths is critical for work and life. 

If you get maths, it helps to set you up for success.

And it’s really important that you get the basics early. 

If you don’t get the basics right at the start, you can’t build on it. 

Learning maths is cumulative. You learn it step by step. 

Thats why we have got to get the first three years right.

A number of principals and teachers have told us the current maths curriculum is too complex. 

Others have told us teachers need more support to implement it, with clearer advice on what to teach in what order. 

That’s why we are starting here.

It’s the first part of the curriculum we are going to work on, but it won’t be the last.

A couple of weeks ago Education Ministers also agreed on the need for another important reform.

Something that has also been talked about for a long time.

And that’s bringing together the bodies that are currently responsible for the national curriculum, national testing, national teacher standards and independent research under one roof.

An Australian Teaching and Learning Commission.

Something that has the potential to be bigger than the sum of its parts. To do all of this work and more.

To improve coordination.

To oversee and drive the reforms we are making to initial teacher education in our universities.

And to help us implement the reforms and hit the targets that every government in the country has signed up to.

And the big one is this. Turning around the decline in the number of students finishing high school.

About ten years ago it was about 85 percent. Now it’s about 80 percent.

That’s overall. In our public schools it’s dropped from 83 percent to 74 percent.

We have got to turn that around.

That’s ultimately what this is all about.

If more jobs are going to require a TAFE qualification or a uni degree we need more people to finish school.

That’s just a fact.

That’s why in these agreements we have signed we have set ourselves the target to lift the percentage of students who receive a year 12 certificate by 7.5 percentage points in the next five years.

If we hit that it will be the highest proportion of Australian students to finish high school ever.

It won’t be easy. But nothing worth doing ever is.

And that brings me finally here, to university.

Everything I have talked about today will help open the doors of our universities wider to more Australians.

But on its own it’s not enough.

Reform doesn’t start at the university gate, and it doesn’t end here either.

That’s what the Accord is all about.

It’s a blueprint for how we reform our entire higher education system over the next decade and beyond.

To break down that invisible barrier that stops so many people from giving university a crack, it recommends a number of things.

One of those is increasing the number of free university bridging courses.

The courses that give you the skills to start a university degree.

Let me give you an example.

Zee Johnson did one of these free courses when she was 48.

At the time she was on a carers pension, looking after her husband, who’d had a stroke.

Now she has a degree in Biomedical Science.

This year she completed an honours degree in Ovarian Cancer Research.

Next is a PhD.

From a pension to a PhD.

That’s what these courses do.

That’s why we are uncapping funding for them. It means about an extra $1 billion over the next ten years. More importantly it means more people like Zee.

The Accord also recommends setting up more university study hubs in the regions, in the bush and in our outer suburbs.

These are places that bring university closer to where a lot of people live.

It’s all part of breaking down that invisible barrier.

When uni is closer to where you live it saves you time and money. It makes it easier to get to your part time job or pick up the kids from school.

That’s why we are more than doubling the number of them - from 34 to 69.

That includes one that opened a couple of months ago in Ellenbrook here in Perth, one that opened in Mandurah a few weeks ago, another one in Northam that I opened this morning, and another one that will open in Armadale in the next few months.

More students will start a university degree next year than ever before.

And even more will start one the year after that.

Over the next decade we will fund an extra 200,000 commencing places at university.

And they will be shaped and supported by two big reforms.

The first is what the Accord calls demand driven equity.

We currently provide universities with a capped amount of funding for Australian students.

The Accord recommends we uncap that for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

In other words, if you get the marks for the course you want to do, you will get a place at university.

The second big reform is Needs-based Funding.

Think Gonski for universities.

The school funding system provides schools with extra funding based on where they are located and the needs of the students they educate.

Students who come from economically disadvantaged families receive additional support. 

So do schools in the regions and the bush.

The Accord recommends we do the same for universities.

It means extra funding for mentoring, academic and other support to help students make it through university.

There are already programs like HEPPP that do this.

But this is different.

This isn’t a capped program.

It is demand driven.

The money follows the student.

The more students a university has that meet the criteria the more funding they will receive.

In the next 12 months or so we will turn both of these big equity engines on.

Needs based funding starts in January.

Demand driven equity starts a year after that.

Here at Curtin at least 25 percent of students already come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The great ambition here, with all of this, is to make that true nationwide.

I am not naive.

I know how hard this is.

But countries aren’t changed by people who just say it’s too hard.

Doing this will take more than one budget, one Minister or one Government.

This is a national project.

It needs bipartisanship.

And it needs something to drive and sustain the sort of reform that is needed over the next decade and beyond.

Something that makes sure the rest of the Accord doesn’t gather dust.

That’s the task of the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, and I will introduce legislation to formally establish it in two weeks’ time.

Its job will be to craft compacts with individual universities, setting out the number of domestic and international students they will teach.

To get the sector to work more like a system.

To get the vocational and higher education systems working more closely together. More joined up.

To plan for the future.

To provide expert, independent advice.

And to help drive real and lasting reform.

The first Universities Commission, you might remember, was created by John Curtin.

In a sense he is the progenitor for everything I have talked about today.

What every Labor Government has done since him and what we are now seeking to do too.

To build a better and a fairer education system.

And through it, a better and a fairer country.

In his book ‘Curtin’s Gift’, John Edwards makes the point that great reformers like Franklin Delano Roosevelt remade his nation before the war.

Clement Attlee did it after the war.

Curtin did it while the war was raging.

Which makes you wonder, what if.

This is Gough Whitlam speaking about John Curtin in 1974:

“If ever a man was born to lead this nation into a time of peace and in the paths of peace it was John Curtin.

“If ever a man was born to apply his vision of what Australia at peace could be, his vision of what Australia at peace should become in his time, he was John Curtin.”

I started by talking about how we measure greatness.

And I quoted from Shakespeare and ‘The Godfather’.

Let me end by quoting my favourite author Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway said:

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self".

He goes further in ‘A Farewell to Arms’:

“The world” he says, “breaks all of us, but some of us get stronger in the broken places”.

There is a bit of obvious self-reflection here from a brilliant and broken man.

But there is wisdom too.

That there is a greatness that lies within all of us.

And that we should judge someone not by a mark, or a rank, or a title, or their job.

But something deeper and more important than that.

By a determination to be better tomorrow than we are today.

It’s what Whitlam meant when he talked about “uplifting the horizons of the Australian people”.

And what Curtin tells us too.

To “Look ever forward”.

The motto of this university.

A message from a man who understood the power and the purpose of education.

A man who got stronger in the broken places.

And we are all the beneficiaries of that.