Instead of focusing on the basics, children are forced to learn from the latest list of woke obsessions. Consider the fact that some schools consider Bruce Pascoe's book Dark Emu to satisfy the Indigenous history curriculum. Anthropologists have utterly debunked his fiction as cherry-picked nonsense, yet in many schools this is taught as indigenous history as if it's undisputed. 

A Sydney primary school sparked debate after telling pupils to place their hands on the ground and repeat in unison, 'Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land,' before each assembly. At some schools, allowing schoolchildren to identify as animals like cats and even providing litter boxes in classrooms is starting to become accepted.  

Boys and girls at a very young age know the difference between men and women and between cats and humans. When a teacher says that girls can be boys and everyone can be a cat, the students know it's ridiculous and they turn off. 

All of this is happening as Australia's education rankings are plummeting. Parents aren't stupid, they know that schools are not doing their job. They really woke up when children came home to do their lessons over Zoom during lockdowns. Parents were listening and didn’t like what they heard.  

That's why the rate of homeschooling is exploding and parents are taking responsibility for their children's education. Between 2019 and 2024, Queensland homeschool registrations surged by 229 per cent.  

While I support homeschooling, parents shouldn't have to take schooling into their own hands for children to get what they need. The basics of reading, writing and numeracy must be the number one priority. 

One Nation supports the concept of charter schools. At the very least, government funding should follow the child, not be doled out on conditional grants by some bureaucrat. If parents want to send their children to a particular school or a particular type of school, the funding should go there. That would return control to principals and parents and provide accountability. 

We have a federal education department in our country costing $184 million each year in bureaucrat wages alone and while it has some responsibilities for universities it doesn't operate a single school. We need to disband and shut down the duplicative federal education department and focus the national curriculum on the basics, nothing more. 

Get rid of the waste and get back to four Rs: reading, writing, arithmetic and responsibility.