Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to rise in support of the Tax Laws Amendment (Education Refund) Bill 2008. When addressing an education bill, I cannot avoid the chance to remind the House that in February 2007 the then Prime Minister, John Howard, issued a press release indicating that the Investing in Our Schools Program was not to continue after 2007.

This landmark bill is part of the $55 billion working families package contained in the Rudd Labor government’s first budget—a package aimed at not only easing the squeeze on working families in very difficult economic times, but also allowing working families to build on the skills and the education of their children that will enable them to make the most of their future. This package involved almost $47 billion of tax relief over the next four years. It involved increasing the childcare tax rebate from 30 per cent to 50 per cent, and paying it quarterly at a time when working families need the money, at a cost of $1.6 billion. It included a $2.2 billion package to start to address for the first time, from this parliament’s perspective, the housing affordability crisis that had been building for several years. It involved a Teen Dental Plan at the cost of almost half a billion dollars. It involved tax relief for working families through a fairer Medicare levy surcharge threshold—tax relief opposed by the opposition in the other place.

But for these purposes, it particularly involved the introduction of an education tax refund to help parents with the costs of educating their kids at a cost of $4.4 billion over the next four years. Contrary to the contribution by the previous speaker, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, it does not mandate that parents spend their money on computers. It states quite clearly in the bill that parents can spend money on a range of materials used in their education—computers and related materials such as internet connections, printers, paper, educational software, but also school textbook materials, prescribed trade tools, a range of educational tools not related, in my experience, to computers needed by children today to make the most of their schooling. This working families package has only become more timely given the economic circumstances confronting Australian families now.

This bill is where the two virtuous circles of the education revolution and the working families tax package overlap, and that is the particular beauty of this bill. This not only delivers tax relief to working families, but it helps working families start to build on meaningful education for their children. This is part of an education revolution. I note there has been some debate about that recently. This is an education revolution. In 11 months this government, from a national government’s point of view, has delivered more by way of educational reform than the previous government did in 11 years. We will be rolling out a universal preschool entitlement for four-year-olds across Australia. In South Australia we have been lucky enough for many, many years to have a universal preschool entitlement—15 hours paid by the state government per week—for all four-year-olds, but I know that in many states, including the home state of the member for Bonner—Queensland—there has not been such an entitlement. For many years now we have also seen the research that demonstrates that the first five years of a child’s life are the most important years in brain development. Our government, the Rudd Labor government, is the first government to exercise the responsibilities of a national government in making sure that the sorts of benefits that we have had in South Australia for many years apply across the continent.

For the first time, we are implementing a national program to equip Australian students with the skills that they need for the future. For the first time there will be a National Curriculum Board ensuring that students in South Australia study the same maths and history and language and science and other curricula that are studied in New South Wales. It makes no sense to Australian parents—and to Australian employers for that matter—why students in one state or territory are studying different curricula to those in another state or territory. This is something which the previous government either was not particularly interested in or was not able to achieve progress on. We are particularly making an attempt to improve maths and science education. I know that in a number of schools in my electorate the maths and science education has slipped, not only because of the range of other subjects that are on offer that are perhaps considered more attractive by students today but also because teachers are finding it difficult to keep up with the advances. This is true of teachers of the sciences in particular. Teachers who might have been trained to deliver physics and chemistry curricula find it difficult to get up to speed with the demands of nanotechnology, biotechnology and a range of other sciences that are really the cutting edge nowadays.

We have trades training centres in schools and in response to a question I asked of the Deputy Prime Minister yesterday, I was pleased to see the announcement of a trades training centre in Seaton High School in my electorate. In visiting a number of trades training centres while a candidate for and now as a member of this parliament—it is some time since I have been in a ‘tech study centre’, as we used to call them—I saw that they had not changed in the 20 years since I was at school. The same lathes and other equipment have been there since the mid-1960s. So the work we are doing to update the trades training centres in schools is critical.

The Deputy Leader of the Opposition spent a good deal of her time in this debate talking about the digital education revolution. We obviously have a difference of opinion about this because we see this as the centre of the education revolution.

See this speech in context