Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

As I said, it should amaze and disgust this House that until we came to government it was not possible to get a list of disadvantaged schools in this country. If you sat in the chair of the minister for education and said, ‘Can you get me a list? There’s 9,500 schools in the country; get me a list of the 2,000 most disadvantaged ones,’ it could not be done. And why? Because no-one who had ever sat in that chair as a Liberal minister for education had ever cared enough about disadvantage to ask.

It was all about themselves. Not one minute of their time was ever spent driving a reform that would make a difference for Australian children. We know exactly what this Liberal Party is about courtesy of the e-mail from the Liberal leader’s office. We know that this opposition is not about policy; it is about dirt-digging. The one thing we should actually remember, though, is that when they were in government, they were not about education policy; they were about inaction. They were about carrying on in public but not one thing that made a profound difference to the quality of school education got done.

We will continue to drive the education revolution because we are about making a difference for Australian kids. And as part of that education revolution we will deliver the biggest school modernisation program in the nation’s history. Over there, looking for their dirt, mired in filth, they can keep carrying on but parents and teachers around the country know that reforms that make a difference for Australian children are being implemented. They know that the biggest school modernisation program in this nation’s history is making a difference for Australian kids.

See this speech in context