John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

of the Leader of the Opposition, if we had, as I said, a proper narrative teaching of Australian history instead of it occasionally being slipped in under some amorphous title such as ‘Time, experience and mood’ or something like that. Having set the framework, let me just remind the House of a couple of facts and a couple of statistics about my government’s investment in education. I do so against the background, when it comes to university education, of a statement made in the education supplement of the Australian in January by Professor Gerard Sutton, who is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wollongong and the President of the Vice-Chancellors Committee. He said, in substance, that the number of HECS places now available in Australia was adequate to the demand. That is not me and it is not the Minister for Education, Science and Training. It happens to be the President of the Vice-Chancellors Committee who is saying that.

Let me remind those who sit opposite that, under our Backing Australia’s Future policy, we will create an additional 50,000 places in universities by 2011. In 2006, 90 per cent of year 12 applicants who applied for a university place in their own state received an offer. That happens to be the best result for 20 years—90 per cent who applied received an offer and that is the best for the last 20 years.

Between 1996 and 2006, the period of office of the Howard government, funding for both government and non-government schools has increased by 158 per cent to $9.3 billion in the current school year. It includes—listen to this, Mr Speaker, and I hope the teacher unions of Australia will listen to this—a funding increase for government schools, public schools as we call them in New South Wales, of 118 per cent while enrolments in government schools over the same period have gone up by only 1.1 per cent. Yet people like Pat Byrne of the Education Union still write articles dishonestly asserting that this government has cut funding to government schools. It is a slur on the commitment that my government has made to the future of young men and women who go to government schools in this country. We are proudly supportive of both the government and the private sectors in education. We are the true believers in choice in education. We are the true believers in excellence and we are the true supporters of returning to a period in Australia when a high-grade technical qualification is as prized an asset as a university degree.

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