Paul Clitheroe

And financial literacy is one of the things that a country can choose to participate in.

So I'll ask time to make that choice.

And there's all sorts of stuff you can choose.

You can't have everything all the time.

But basically, I wouldn't say we've been dreadful, but we've sort of, with a fairly...

significant issues going on at government levels.

I think financial literacy in amongst a whole bunch of other problems has become a bit of a softer subject matter.

So it's seen as, well, gee, maybe that's more the sort of thing that happens in the home with mum and dad and grandparents and so on.

which is all very well for kids whose parents, because many parents also have not been taught financial literacy skills.

So it is a bit of a vexed argument.

I do fundamentally agree that where the kids will come to this a bit later, where kids will learn most is the home.

But the schooling system can really reinforce that knowledge.

And so I'm particularly keen for that to happen.

Look, I think what we need is, I mentioned earlier on, we've got a system with some 320,000 teachers across primary and secondary schools across the country.

We've kind of got a lot of the key steps we need.

We sort of had the big battle 25 years ago and with strong agreement right across the community and the Department of Education and politicians to get financial literacy in as an embedded matter in the curriculum but not as a separate subject, which we discussed previously.

So basically what we are at the moment relying on really, James, is we're really relying on the goodwill and enthusiasm of principals and teachers to take that and embed it in the teaching in the schools.

So to be at a core level, we're getting mixed results, James, because we haven't been able to train the hundreds of thousands of teachers in this area.

We've trained

a bit over a thousand over time, thanks to a $10 million grant from the Gillard government many years ago.