From the President: Beware reform agendas
Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 125 No 6, 14 August 2020, page no.7
Not all change is bad, indeed change is a part of life. What is bad is change wrought for the wrong purposes, and when any government undertakes a major change process in the shadow of a pandemic, alarm bells should ring.
During its past three terms in government, the Coalition federal government has pursued a reform agenda, with varying intensity, in respect of the federation and associated national architecture. The QTU has made submissions to parliamentary reviews and joined with others to fend off suggestions that major change in federal government responsibility for early childhood education, schools or TAFE would deliver benefits for students or everyone who works in schools. This has been critical in shielding members from further significant workload pressures arising from federal government interference.
In the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, the federal government established a National Cabinet to coordinate state, territory and federal responses to the crisis. Subsequently, the National Cabinet agreed to dissolve the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) and establish the National Cabinet as a vehicle for managing inter-governmental relations across the federation. It may be that the federal government has seen an opportunity to continue its crusade to reform the Australian federation.
The creation of the new National Cabinet has brought into question the status of the various Ministerial Councils established under the COAG umbrella. Of particular concern to the QTU are the Ministerial Councils on skills and training, disability reform and education. The National Cabinet statement of 26 June provides for a process of review of the COAG councils and ministerial forums, founded in consultation with a narrow group of federal, state and territory ministers and officials. The outcomes of the review will be considered by National Cabinet in September, a relatively short timeline.
The Queensland Department of Education briefing (17 June) on the most recent Education Council meeting on 12 June indicated that the issue of the future of the Council had been discussed and that there are specific regulatory responsibilities that the Council performs that will need to be preserved in some way.
The role of our state Education Minister has always been critical in efforts to shape or neutralise the interventions of the federal government in the state responsibility for education. Our sister unions in other jurisdictions rely on similar engagement with their state and territory ministers to influence Education Council in the absence of any other engagement with the teaching profession by the federal government. We have had even less engagement with, or impact from, the skills and disability reform councils, but they are nonetheless critical to national policy formation and can have a moderating effect on agendas.
The National Cabinet statement indicates agreement that the review process will “make recommendations on a streamlined structure, scope and reporting arrangements and on focused regulatory and policy work programs”.
For the QTU and other educator stakeholders, the crux of this issue is the almost complete lack of engagement by the federal government and its various agencies with the teaching profession on matters impacting on our profession, on teachers and leaders alike, in early childhood education, schools and TAFE. These proposals and eventual outcomes stand to make this situation worse, not better.
One clue to the true intentions of the federal government is the multiplicity of channels it has so far used to attempt to achieve its policy objective of off-loading the costliest policy areas onto the states, without surrendering the capacity to raise revenue to fund the costs associated with such high-profile areas. While we face an ongoing process of starving public education of much needed resources, we hold genuine concerns that the federal government will only be satisfied once all responsibility for public school education is shifted to the states and territories.
Each and every one of us needs to be alert to the potential for surreptitious changes that do nothing to address our concerns re voice and influence, and much to magnify the impact of barriers. We will play a key role in raising these concerns with the Premier and her Ministers, to ensure that the federal agenda is thwarted to the greatest extent possible. The illusion of transparency in consultation must not deflect our push to ensure that the government embraces our professional voice and our right to self-determination, expressed through professional autonomy, as a key element of change in education.