Christopher Pyne warns teachers against impeding reform

COALITION powerbroker Christopher Pyne has warned the teachers union he is up for a fight.

Christopher Pyne

COALITION powerbroker Christopher Pyne has warned the teachers union he is up for a fight if it tries to stand in the way of an Abbott government's education reforms.

The opposition education spokesman yesterday said a key part of this agenda was a review of the national curriculum, amid criticism it had been politicised to the point that Coalition prime ministers had been airbrushed out in a rewrite of history.

"The curriculum is not a static document and the teachers union is not an unbiased observer in education," Mr Pyne said.

"The union has campaigned heavily against the Coalition and they've been selling an untruth, that the government is implementing the Gonski report, when it is doing no such thing.

"I am not opposed to unions, they have an important role to play, but they're not also the be-all and end-all in every sector or industry. I will treat the teachers union with the respect they deserve."

He said students came first and he expected teachers to respect a Coalition government's mandate for change.

The first draft of the history curriculum had not even included the Magna Carta.

"We are a society based on Western civilisation . . . it still does surprise me the curriculum has an emphasis on the role of trade unions and progressive movements but very little emphasis on the role of commerce and industry in building the country that we have today, and it mentions the Labor Party but not the Coalition, which does seem unusual, as the Coalition has been in power for two-thirds of the last 60 years," he said.

He said the Coalition was committed to the same level of funding as Labor for the nation's schools, "dollar for dollar for the next four years . . . which is what you can rely on".

Mr Pyne, 45, a 20-year veteran of federal parliament, said he had never experienced such a poisonous atmosphere as that of the past three years, although he acknowledged his role as an irritant to Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.

"It has felt like a three-year rolling election period, and in those three years I've been manager of opposition business and shadow minister for education in a hung parliament, so it's been a very different role to previous parliaments because every day the parliament sat was a day the government could've fallen," he said.

There is little attention this time around on his seat of Sturt, which he admits was almost lost in 2007, as attention focuses on Labor seats in South Australia that could change hands, including Hindmarsh and Adelaide.