Today, I have submitted to my Senate colleagues,
Bills designed to address some important issues facing our society, and they both deal with ensuring our children are furnished with knowledge and educational opportunities.
The first is a side-arm, and being largely forgotten element of the current controversy enveloping the Senate, sex education. I understand the issues that people have when it comes to children knowing about sex and sexuality. But I cannot help but be perplexed at the issues that people who want fewer abortions have with a concrete step that is proven to work to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
We've heard a lot about the straw-man of 'teach kids about sex, then they'll be having it'... I've got a potential shock for them, they're having sex already. Sex education does not encourage children to have sex, it encourages them to have sex safely.
We are already seeing renewed growth in STI's up to and including HIV and the biggest growth has been in young people. The realities of unprotected sex are starting to be lost on them, it is time to take this issue seriously. We have a responsibility to legislate for the world as we find it, not for how we'd prefer it to be.
The other Bill deals with educational advancement. It will create a national educational framework, with five core elements. $450 million will be provided to each region on the proviso that they adjust their educational requirements to streamline them.
There will also be additional funding available to regions that boost their IT education capacity.
We might reside in regions, but many of us move and in order for kids around the nation to compete nationally and internationally in the future, we need to have more uniformity in what we expect our kids to be taught.
We also want to create a structure to ensure that kids who want to drop out of school, have some way of generating a qualification. This will not be the same as having graduated High School, far from it, but along with counselling and literacy and numeracy testing, we need make sure that these kids are serious about leaving and that we don't leave without a net.
Both of these Bill do not dictate to the regions. While they are important, each region will have the choice whether they sign-up or not. It's pretty simple really, you don't want to participate, you don't have to, and therefore you'll lose out on nearly half a billion in additional education funding.