ADJOURNMENT

Senator BLYTH (South Australia) (20:58): AUKUS promises billions of dollars of investment, thousands of highly skilled jobs and the opportunity to establish South Australia as a global centre for advanced manufacturing, engineering and defence technology. But delivering on that promise will require more than just shipyards; it will require us to get our education system right.

It's easy for governments to make announcements. It is much harder to build the skilled workforce required to make those projects successful. Nuclear powered submarines are amongst the most technologically sophisticated machines ever built.

Designing, constructing and sustaining them requires highly skilled individuals, and those people do not simply appear when a project is announced. They begin as children sitting in classrooms. That is why South Australia's educational outcomes should concern every person who cares about AUKUS and Australia's future.

For years, we have watched education standards decline while governments point to increased spending as evidence of success. Australian students have gone backwards in key areas of mathematics, science and literacy, and too many young people are leaving school without the foundational knowledge required to pursue technical careers. Every student who struggles with mathematics today is potentially one fewer engineer of tomorrow.

Every child who leaves school unable to read proficiently faces greater barriers to training, employment and lifelong learning. Every teacher who leaves the profession is a loss not only to our schools but to our future workforce. And this is not a workforce challenge that will last for a few years.

AUKUS is a generational undertaking. The decisions we make in our schools today will shape whether Australia has the skills it needs in 10, 20 or 30 years time. We cannot wait until shortages become critical and then scramble for solutions.

We have to build that capacity deliberately, beginning with the basic knowledge and discipline that allow young Australians to move into apprenticeships, technical training and higher education with confidence. The truth is that sovereign capability begins long before a young person enters an apprenticeship or engineering degree. It begins with literacy, numeracy, discipline, effort and high expectations.

For too long, debates about education have focused on processes, frameworks and ideology rather than outcomes. We have spent too much time arguing about how education should look and not enough time asking whether our children can read, write and think. That must be the first responsibility of an education system.

South Australia already faces significant workforce pressures. Defence, mining, construction and the broader economy are increasingly competing for many of the same engineers, technicians and skilled tradespeople. The answer cannot simply be to import talent indefinitely.

AUKUS was never intended to merely be an infrastructure project. It is about strengthening Australia's security, resilience and self-reliance. That objective can only be achieved if we develop the next generation of Australians capable of designing, building and sustaining these complex systems.

That requires a renewed commitment to educational excellence. It means restoring high expectations and discipline to our classrooms, and it means giving teachers the support and authority to teach. It means treating literacy, numeracy, mathematics and science as national priorities.

It means removing ideological nonsense from our classrooms and ensuring we teach in grounded evidence, reality and fact. It means restoring a sense of pride in our country and confidence in what Australia can achieve. It also means valuing vocational education alongside university pathways and recognising that highly skilled trades are every bit as important to Australia's future as professional occupations.

Above all, we need to recognise the connection between education policy and national security. The workforce that will build, maintain and sustain Australia's future submarine fleet is sitting in our classrooms today. The children learning mathematics today may become the engineers designing Australia's next generation of defence technology.

The young people learning science today may spend their careers solving problems we cannot yet imagine. But we have to give them the foundations first. If we fail our children, we will ultimately fail on AUKUS.

The challenge before Australia is not simply to build submarines. It is to build the generation, and the generations to follow them, capable of building and sustaining them.