Pauline Hanson called Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples “the most primitive race on Earth”. She said they had achieved nothing in 60,000 years and described teaching Indigenous history as a “complete waste of time”.
She made the comments on a podcast in September 2025. They surfaced this month. Her target was the school curriculum. She complained that children were learning about Aboriginal culture and language and asked what Aboriginal people had contributed.
I have spent 20 years in those classrooms. I founded Kreative Koalas, a program that ran across New South Wales. Primary school students studied the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, chose a challenge facing their community, designed an action project and painted their solution on giant koalas.
Those koalas remain in school foyers and gardens across the state. Many carry Aboriginal designs and stories chosen by the students.
Before that, I founded Young Farming Champions and sent young people working in agriculture into schools to talk about the country that feeds us.
I have watched what happens when young people take a big idea and act on it.
Hanson is right about one thing. The curriculum is crowded. Teachers have spent years dealing with trying to cover more content than a school year can hold. Every new demand consumes time that must come from somewhere else.
Cutting Aboriginal history, sustainability and Australia’s engagement with Asia will not solve that problem. It will remove the content that helps children understand where they live and the world they will enter.
The Australian Curriculum contains three cross-curriculum priorities: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures, Sustainability, and Asia and Australia’s Engagement with Asia. They are taught through existing learning areas rather than as three extra subjects.
Under the earlier curriculum, teachers often found these priorities through curriculum tags and optional elaborations. The teachers I worked with wanted to teach all three and ran out of hours.
Version 9 strengthened their connection to specific content descriptions and made the links clearer. Teachers had greater authority to teach what many had been trying to fit in for years.
That is the change Hanson objects to.
A Year 4 class learning how Aboriginal people used fire to manage this continent leaves knowing more about the ground beneath its school.
A Year 8 class tracing trade routes through Asia leaves understanding Australia’s neighbourhood. We share a maritime border with Indonesia. Our students will trade with Asia, work with Asia and travel through Asia.
Sustainability is the century they will inherit. They will spend their adult lives dealing with its consequences.
These priorities exist because Australian children require more than a collection of dates and facts. They require the knowledge to understand their country, their region and their future.
I watched classes across New South Wales debate which Global Goal their community should tackle, then develop projects and act. They asked direct questions about Country, culture, food, water, waste and climate because those subjects connected the classroom to the world outside it.
Within a day of the comments resurfacing, Hanson said she would apologise “if people were offended”. She claimed she had been describing Aboriginal people at the time of European settlement.
Hanson blamed the offence on those who heard her rather than the words she chose.
I have watched nine-year-olds paint 60,000 years of care for Country onto a giant koala, then stand before their school and explain it.
The children showed the curiosity, knowledge and respect missing from her argument.
The crowd loved the didjeridoo performance by Quinten Dingo-Donovan – a moving tribute that connected the past and present.
Aunty Dr Joyce Donovan is presented with a certificate by Kiama District Historical Society president Sue Eggins, marking her appointment as the Society’s first Aboriginal Elder Patron — a recognition of more than 15 years of collaboration and contribution to keeping Kiama’s shared history alive.