Tuesday, 28 October 2025

 Ben CARROLL (Niddrie – Minister for Education, Minister for WorkSafe and the TAC) (14:44): I rise to inform the house about some of the education policies that are being discussed in our state. As the minister, I often hear a lot of good ideas coming through. We know on this side of the chamber that we are the party of education and the party of the light on the hill. We are very proud about that. But since there has been a reshuffle, the ideas factory has been well and truly at work. It is nice to see that they are producing ideas, but they are still not doing their homework. We saw the new Shadow Assistant Minister for Education, Mrs Hermans in the other place, wrote an opinion piece only two weeks ago saying that within classrooms distracting mobile phones should be banned. That was two weeks ago. I have reminded Mrs Hermans we did that five years ago. It gets better; there is more. Only a few more weeks ago Mrs Hermans was behind the typewriter, out writing good policy, getting ready for the next election, and she said the Victorian government should back mandated synthetic structured phonics. I wrote back to Mrs Hermans. We have not only backed it, we have mandated it. Speaker, as you have already ruled, we should never pre-empt debate, but I am already pre-empting the next policy idea out of Mrs Ann-Marie Hermans. I reckon she is going to come up with the idea that education should be free, should be secular and should be compulsory.