Jason Clare

Mark Butler is a competent administrator in a government where you could count on one hand the competent government administrators.

I'd put him in the top three, Jason Clare, Education Minister, Don Farrell, Trade Minister, and then the rest fall off a cliff.

So Mark Butler's got ability, but he's done nothing to earn or deserve this certificate.

The kind of award your mum would give you, Peter.

And so I think that what the government could do is just start to recognise that in a much more substantial way.

invest in communities invest in the collective is help teachers come together to collectively problem solve and come around the table with different kinds of community members different kinds of professionals and yes politicians and policy makers and I did feel you know initially when Jason Clare took the portfolio there was a maybe a signal for this you know bringing teachers around the table but what's happening is we've gone back to kind of pointing the finger at the individual teacher or the individual school to really lift their game and change all these issues that are going on and improve things.

And I think we just need to, again, think of ourselves as a community with schools as part of that larger collective and all come together, back our teachers and support them.

Can all start with our own experience as well.

This, this report is saying that, um, uh, the government, uh, mandate, um, ha- Sorry, this is su- suggesting that the government mandate screen time, uh, because 41% of 15,000 Australian students that have been, uh, surveyed in this report are saying that they have been, um, disrupted with noise and, uh, uh, disorder during lessons, and that's actually 30% more than the average across industrialized, the, the industrialized world.

Now, I understand my very good friend Jason Clare is, um, uh, made some commentary about this, and we might be able to play, uh, his grab and hear that.

I've said there's a good argument that our kids need a digital detox.

The PISA results out today say the same thing.

Now, it doesn't mean that there's no place for technology in our schools, but I think it does point to the need to wind it back a bit.

Yeah, so well said, Jason.

Um, and you know that I'm, uh, I'm, uh, chairman of the Liberal Friends of Jason Clare.

He grew up down the road from me.

They don't care about wear it purple day or encouraging students to walk out for climate change or for Palestine.

They are focused entirely on giving students the best education they can and the basics, reading, writing, arithmetic so it is little wonder to me that we see countries like Singapore and other Asian countries topping the international rankings while as you showed there Australians are lagging behind at 16th in mathematics and 12th overall they've actually fallen in the last few years despite us throwing so much money at this more than we ever have in the education system something is going terribly wrong and I've been speaking about it for many years because it is not a new problem but the Education Minister Jason Clare continues to blame things like smartphones and AI, which Asian countries have as well.

Newsflash.

It's not just a technology problem.