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

has put parents and teachers and principals in non-government schools through agony for no reason. Last night they would have watched the TV news and thought that they were not going to get funded. This morning they would have woken up to newspaper headlines that said that there was a threat to their funding. They would have listened to the radio this morning and perhaps watched breakfast TV and believed that there was a threat to their funding, all caused by the shadow minister for education because he viewed his cheap and petty politics as more important than giving a quick reassurance to these families that their school choice would be honoured and their children would be able to go to the school of their choice next year.

Well, can I say this: the shadow minister has been humiliated, but what we can say to the mums and dads, the teachers and principals and, most importantly, the children of non-government schools is that they will benefit, from 1 January next year, from $28 billion of resources delivered to them by the Rudd Labor government, worked on constructively by the Australian Greens and Senator Nick Xenophon—and fought every step of the way by the Liberal Party.

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