EVERY year, Victorian schoolchildren are put through the ritual of NAPLAN and VCE exams — a battery of tests measuring everything from rapid-fire maths recall to interpreting persuasive texts. Their results are published, compared, analysed and turned into league tables that can shape reputations for years.
We demand accountability from students, yet the adults running the state, the people deciding school funding, class sizes, transport projects and the health system, face nothing remotely similar.
If students must live with rigid performance metrics, perhaps it’s time politicians did too. Imagine POLPLAN: a transparent, unforgiving national ranking of our MPs based on competence, honesty and delivery. If children can withstand public scrutiny, surely the people writing the policies can as well.
The first test would be numeracy, and many ministers wouldn’t reach the lowest band. Multi-billion-dollar budget blowouts are now so common they barely register. If a Year 9 student submitted homework this inaccurate, they’d be sent for remedial tutoring. In politics, it’s just a revised press release.
Next comes literacy. Politicians often produce 500-word answers containing zero useful information. A student who handed in something so empty would be told to rewrite it, yet in Canberra and Spring Street, such evasiveness is treated as strategy.
On civics, the people making the rules often seem the least familiar with them. Process, transparency and integrity, concepts we drill into students are too often optional extras. A teenager showing this level of understanding would be staring at a red pen.
If politicians were judged like students, half the chamber would be on detention. The shouting, heckling and personal attacks would earn a Year 5 student a phone call home. In Parliament, it’s dismissed as “robust debate.”
And then there’s group work. While teenagers manage to assemble a PowerPoint without leaking against each other, many political teams can’t manage a week of unity. Cabinet solidarity often lasts about as long as lunch.
Politicians love data when it applies to children. They love metrics and “performance improvement” while presiding over exhausted, underfunded systems.
But accountability can’t be a one-way street. If we measure kids, we should measure ministers. If our kids can handle the pressure, surely our politicians can too.
And that’s just my opinion
