Anthony Albanese will open the election year with a new $440m pitch to help students and teachers manage the challenges of the pandemic, promising new grant funding for better ventilation, building upgrades and mental health services.
Timing the spending pledge with the imminent return to school, the Labor leader will use a scene-setting speech at the National Press Club on Tuesday to appeal to parents battling anxiety about the resumption of classroom-based learning.
Albanese will declare the nation can emerge from the pandemic stronger and more prosperous if Australians are prepared to elect a government prepared to listen, learn and adapt, plan for the future, and be a “force for good”.
Borrowing Scott Morrison’s oft-repeated declaration that Australia must “push through” the Omicron wave rather than retreat to restrictions and lockdowns, Albanese will argue careful preparation and constant learning from past experience is more important than pushing through challenges.
“We need to learn from [the pandemic], we need to use what the last two years have taught us to build a better future,” Albanese will say.
The new schools policy proposal is a grants-based program. Schools would apply for funding to improve air quality with measures such as better ventilation, building more outdoor classrooms, replacing any boarded-up windows and doors and buying air purifiers.
Funding for ventilation improvements would be available to all schools – both public and private – on a needs basis. But $188m in the program earmarked for broader upgrades of school facilities, including refurbishing school buildings or building trades training centres, would only be available to public schools.
As well as grants for upgrades, Labor will promise funding to support mental wellbeing. Schools will determine how to allocate the resources, but options include funding for additional school counsellors and psychologists, or for activities that improve children’s wellbeing.
The proposal will include a voluntary mental health check tool to help identify students in need of additional support. Funding for mental wellbeing initiatives will be available to both public and private schools.
Albanese will also flag a departmental review of the impact of the pandemic on students with a disability.
Albanese will acknowledge concerns parents have expressed in the lead up to the new school year, and will criticise the prime minister for failing to accelerate the vaccination of students in time for a return to the classroom.
The Labor leader will acknowledge the stress Australian families have faced in 2020 and 2021. “Remote learning, exam chaos, cancelled sport, and now the delays in vaccine supply, have turned what should be some of the best years of [children’s] lives into a cascade of stress and uncertainty,” he will say.
Albanese will note some students have fallen behind academically, while others are stressed and socially anxious. “Parents are [also] stressed from home schooling; anxious about the weight the pandemic has put on their children’s shoulders.”
The Labor leader will argue parents are looking for guidance from the Morrison government, but that the prime minister has failed to exercise leadership. He will contend voters “are waiting in vain for Scott Morrison to come good on his vows”.
He will characterise the prime minister as a “man who stood before the country and promised a national plan for getting our children back to school – but didn’t deliver one”.
“[Morrison] promised a national approach in which his government would work with the states – instead he did what he always does: he palmed off his share of the work on to the states.
“The states have done a great job in picking up the slack of the slackest government in living memory”.
Albanese will declare education is fundamental and essential to the jobs, productivity and prosperity of the future – “and education is the biggest and most powerful weapon we have against disadvantage”.
The opposition leader will tell voters if Labor wins the coming election, he will see it as his “fundamental responsibility” to repay the sacrifices made by Australians during the pandemic – “to reward these efforts, to prove worthy of the generosity and bravery of the Australian people”.
Albanese says a government he would lead would ensure Australians had access to “a strong public health system, with Medicare as its backbone”; tackle the rise of insecure work; boost sovereign capability; invest in broadband and childcare and stop funding cuts for technical eduction.
