COMMITTEES

Senator ALLMAN-PAYNE (Queensland) (18:22): As a former classroom teacher for over two decades, I know how overworked and time-poor our classroom teachers are and that public schools are still not fully funded, leaving teachers to make up the shortfall with their own time, energy and resources. Unfortunately, it's not surprising to me that, when fossil fuel corporations with their own self-serving agendas hand out lesson plans, educational programs or money for sponsorships, public schools take them up on their offer.

Right across the country, our kids are being taught lessons that are written by fossil fuel companies and corporations. In their recent report, as my colleague Senator Hodgins-May said, Comms Declare identified over 260 fossil fuel linked programs in our schools funded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, including the fossil fuel companies' take on climate change.

It is likely that this is only the tip of the iceberg. It's honestly downright dystopian that we've outsourced our kids' education on science and technology to corporations that directly benefit from distorting the facts on this existential crisis of our time. Our schools are being used as platforms for greenwashing propaganda and corporate promotion.

Climate education is being branded with the Woodside logo, and the content of that education is minimising the role of fossil fuels in the crisis. These corporations are not paying tens of millions of dollars to get these programs into our schools out of a sense of charity. They are buying the ability to propagandise children with greenwashing and self-promotion smuggled into their classrooms.

Living in regional Queensland, I recognise this pattern of behaviour really well. Fossil fuel companies leverage trusted institutions and they use their billions to buy social licence for their pollution and climate degradation. They buy sponsorships at sporting clubs and local schools and they try to parlay that into a licence to extract our natural resources and to keep the enormous profits for themselves, ruining our planet and our kids' futures in the process.

These shocking revelations about the fossil fuel industry's influence in education are just the most audacious example of a far-reaching strategy by these corporations to capture our civil institutions, and Labor should be concerned about that. But what can we expect when the government is still pushing off the adequate resourcing of our public schools into the next decade?

When teachers are overworked and time poor, how can we be surprised when they take on these ready-made lesson plans? We've also heard from Comms Declare and from teachers that, in some instances, they're not being given a choice as to whether they use those materials and they're having them foisted on them by the people above them. Schools and teachers should not have to look to fossil fuel companies to fill the gaps left in the resourcing of our public schools by this government.

I support the call of my colleague Senator Hodgins-May and the Greens for an inquiry into this fossil fuel propaganda in our schools. That is a call that this Labor government should support because we need to understand how deep this influence goes. We also need to urgently fully resource our public schools to alleviate the workload of teachers and to allow them to deliver the science based, factual, unbiased education that our kids deserve.

I want to reiterate the points made by Senator Hodgins-May. These are big corporations making bank off an industry that is destroying our planet and our kids' futures. Their social licence is ebbing away.

In order to stop that, to buy themselves time to keep digging up coal, to keep fracking gas and to keep destroying our climate, they are using our kids, to get them on board before they have the ability to critically evaluate what is being put in front of them. We have heard that parents are horrified by this. I have two grandkids, a four-year old and a six-year-old.

The idea that in their childcare centre or their classroom they are being fed fossil fuel corporation propaganda under the guise of science lessons is abhorrent to me, and it should be abhorrent to every single person sitting on the government benches. We would not allow tobacco companies into our classrooms. They're not writing lesson plans on health.

This inquiry needs to happen. Labor needs to stand up to fossil fuel corporations and vested interests. They need to be prepared to let a light shine on what is going on in our childcare centres and schools and what teachers are being told they have to teach in their classrooms in relation to this stuff and let the community know and understand what is happening and how far it goes.

For that reason, I reiterate Senator Hodgins-May's call. Labor should support this inquiry. The DEPUTY PRESIDENT: The question is that the motion moved by Senator Hodgins-May be agreed to.