Colleen Harkin On The Rita Panahi Show – 15 April 25

In this interview, Colleen Harkin appeared on The Rita Panahi Show – Sky News Australia to discuss the IPA’s research into the National Curriculum.

All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.

Below is a transcript of the interview.

Rita Panahi:

Welcome back, joining me now is Institute of Public Affairs research fellow and director of the IPA’s schools programme, Colleen Harkin. Colleen, you wrote last week about Australia’s bloated mathematics curriculum, you say the fact that it is 3500 pages long is, “Not a sign of sophistication, it’s a symptom of confusion, ideological ambition,” and the reason it’s so lengthy is because it is “Cluttered with politically charged cross-curriculum priorities, such as sustainability and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and culture.” Now, compare that to Singapore’s maths curriculum, it’s only 80 pages long compared to 3500 pages, let’s have a look at the image. It’s there on the right, and on the left is our massive curriculum. And as you say, “Singapore ranks number one in the OECD PISA results, and produces some of the world’s best maths students.” What does that tell us? We’ve got a model of what works, and yet we seem to be doing the opposite.

Collen Harkin:

Rita, that photograph is a picture taken on my desk, and it took us days to collect that document, it’s not something that you can actually just readily get. We’ve asked ACARA for it and they say it doesn’t exist, and why would you want that? So, it did take days to download all the content descriptors, the elaborations, all of the “rabbit warren that becomes the maths curriculum.

Rita Panahi:

Wow.

Collen Harkin:

And as you just said, Singapore’s curriculum is entirely different, It is single sentences that tell something like, write a number, in numerals and writing, numbers to 10 million, for example. And that’s it. There’s no ideology, there’s no politicisation, it’s just that is the task that the teacher has to do.

Rita Panahi:

Surely maths should not have any sort of political ideology, maths is something that is, you’ve got right answer and you’ve got a wrong answer.

Collen Harkin:

Correct.

Rita Panahi:

It’s not up for discussion.

Collen Harkin:

Yeah, correct. And there are extraordinary circumstances where teachers are expected to go off and study things, like how aboriginals measured footprints, for example, and that’s in maths.

Rita Panahi:

Oh great.

Collen Harkin:

So, the political activism within the curriculum has arrived, and that’s how we end up with a document that is unwieldy and unusable, and the amount of extra work that it puts on teachers is extraordinary.

Rita Panahi:

And the amount of work that’s gone into producing those 3500 pages, at our expense.

Collen Harkin:

Expense.

Rita Panahi:

And you wonder why the expenditure in this area keeps going up whilst results are stagnating or going backwards.

Collen Harkin:

Yes, it is a bureaucratic document, written for bureaucrats, to keep bureaucrats in jobs, it doesn’t serve any real purpose in the real world of education. And you’re right, the increase in budget is up now about $78 billion a year in our education. And results have gone backwards year-on-year. Our students are now give or take 16 months behind where they were 20 years ago. So, the doubling of the budget is a significant decline in our education system results.

Rita Panahi:

And when it comes to universities, we know that we’ve got a lot of junk degrees, a lot of kids being sold false hope, being saddled with student debts for degrees that really aren’t going to get them jobs, and we’ve got the Greens now pushing for uni fee subsidies to be increased. They basically want everything to be free.

Collen Harkin:

Everything free.

Rita Panahi:

How’s that going to work? And again, are we going to have people doing university degrees that they shouldn’t be doing university degrees because it’s not in their interest to do so?

Collen Harkin:

Well, this seems to be the election of everything free. Have what you want, it’s all free. But in terms of entry into university courses, there’s a very significant concern in students who are entering courses that they just are not capable of doing, and it not only lowers the standards for everyone else in the course, but it means that if they eventually get out into the workforce, they’re not capable of doing the job. University of Tasmania has accepted a student on a ATAR score of 39.5, which is the bottom 4% of student results.

Rita Panahi:

Into a teaching degree.

Collen Harkin:

Into a teaching degree.

Rita Panahi:

That’s useful.

Collen Harkin:

So, it’s a double-edged sword, if you make it free, you’re only going to lower the standards, and we’re not encouraging students to consider the course that’s actually right for them and the competencies that they have.

Rita Panahi:

Now, we’ve had an update on the University of Queensland senior law lecturer, who warns students, first year students, who protested her inclusion of indigenous perspectives, it wasn’t much of a protest… They basically walked out of the lecture. She told them, she remembered their faces, and they should watch out, what you say and what you do, if they ever wanted to work in the legal fraternity, or if they wanted to get decent marks in her course. The university acted completely initially, but now the vice chancellor, Deborah Terry, says that the institution is taking appropriate action after considering the student comments in the story, and looking further into the matter, the university acknowledges that if it had been aware of the full details, we would’ve taken steps to understand and address the concerns that have come to light, and better support students and staff at the time.

But we don’t know what these appropriate measures she’s taking look like. This is rife throughout universities, I hear so much from students that they have to self-censor, they have to write rubbish, they have to regurgitate rubbish to get decent marks, because if they actually articulate their position, even if it’s backed up by facts, the university lecturer, the academic will mark them down because it doesn’t match their ideology.

Collen Harkin:

Correct. And they’re playing the game in order to get the score to get out the door.

Rita Panahi:

Exactly.

Collen Harkin:

But it also means that it’s compromising what they should be learning, the skills that they should be gaining during that time. This situation’s terrible, it sort of smacks of an entire lack of integrity, because had they have taken it seriously in the first place, they would’ve investigated and had a good look at it, and why are they indigenizing the curriculum in the first place? And so, now, a week later, to be able to say, well, we are taking it seriously, well, what actually is happening? What is the consequence of this?

Rita Panahi:

Exactly. We need some transparency, accountability, we need to know what is this appropriate action? Is a lecturer going to be counselled? Have they got a warning? Are they going to vow not to do this again? Because to have first semester, first-year students being told that, “Remember your faces, and you’re not going to get work, you’re not going to get decent marks, watch your politics and watch what you say,” that is not what university is supposed to be about.

Collen Harkin:

And the comment that they’re going to support students, the support students need is access to an authentic, uninterrupted education that is not full of activist ideology, that’s what they have a right to, that’s the support that they need/.

Rita Panahi:

And that’s probably what they’re paying for. Colleen Harkin, thank you for your time.

This transcript of Colleen Harkin talking on The Rita Panahi Show – Sky News Australia from 15 April 2025 has been edited for clarity.