QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

Mr CLARE (Blaxland—Minister for Education) (14:15): I thank my friend the beloved member for Banks for his question. The PISA results are out today and, once again, Singapore has hit it out of the park. We've come in at 11th in reading in the world, 11th in science and 17th in maths.

But it's the United Kingdom's results that really stand out. They've jumped three places in the world in reading, four places in maths and seven places in science. That truly is spectacular and it is hard-earned.

It's 20 years in the making. The Poms mandated phonics in their schools in 2006, 20 years ago. They introduced a phonics check, like we did this year, in 2012, and in 2014 they made changes to their curriculum.

You can see the results of all of that today. As education minister, I normally don't condone copying someone else's homework, but in this case I'll make an exception because what the Poms have done here shows that education reform, while it's hard and while it takes time, is not impossible. They did the sorts of things back then that we are doing now—phonics checks and changes to the curriculum, starting with maths.

These are the sorts of things that should have been done here more than a decade ago but are happening now. The PISA results today also point to something else. They show the more kids are online, the more likely they are to fall behind.

Other tests show the same thing. Students who use screens a lot score lower than those who don't. What I think this shows beyond any doubt now is that our schools need a digital detox.

The other research that is terrifying here is this: more young blokes today have backward views about women than blokes my age. Young men are almost three times as likely as older blokes to think a wife should have to obey her husband. Why is that happening?

It is because of things like this and because of the slop that is force-fed to young men online through algorithms by big tech. We've got to protect our kids from this. We've got to help mums and dads that are battling and living with all of this.

And that's what the digital duty of care that the Prime Minister and the Minister for Communications announced yesterday is all about.