Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

When we came to government, what did we find? We found that the Leader of the Opposition had left us $1.2 billion short in PEFO on school funding. We found that he had never signed Victoria and Tasmania to contracts for the new school funding model. He had claimed that the National Catholic Education Commission had made an agreement with the government, but they had done no such thing—nothing was signed. We found that three states could properly be regarded as signatory states, and two states and one territory were entirely left out of the school funding model. So, it was not national. We found that he tried to introduce a heavily-regulated model dripping with red tape—with new institutes, new government spending, new bureaucracies—that infantilised the states and territories and treated them not as adult governments, but as children.

We said before the election that we would keep the same funding level as Labor. We have not only done that, madam Speaker, we have gone even further. We have bettered that commitment by putting $1.2 billion more into school funding than Labor would have if they had been re-elected. That is why they are so embarrassed. They are embarrassed that it is the coalition that is delivering more money for students so that we can get on with the real debate in education about quality and standards. That is what parents care about. They care about teacher quality; they care about engaging with their children in a genuine way about their studies; they care about local decision making and principal autonomy that is working so well in places like Western Australia. They want a robust curriculum that does produce students that can read and write, and that does rely on orthodox teaching methods that actually do not see us slipping down the rankings all the time internationally, even against other English-speaking countries.

We also said that we would take away the command-and-control features inherent in the act, and that is exactly what we will do. We will remove regulation; we will remove red tape. It will be a better model. We said we would deliver a national scheme, and, much to the embarrassment of the opposition, I have delivered a national scheme that the Leader of the Opposition was never capable of delivering. We now have a national scheme that applies to every student equally in Australia, because we did not want any second-class citizens in the way that the Leader of the Opposition was prepared to leave it.

The Leader of the Opposition in his address talked about 'no strings attached', as though the previous Labor government had a handle on controlling state spending. We all know that the states and territories make their own decisions about spending, about their own budgets, as they should, because they are sovereign governments. What the Leader of the Opposition did not tell us was that last month in the South Australian state parliament's Budget and Finance Committee of the education department—which I assume is similar to our estimates—it was confirmed that Premier Jay Weatherill has demanded $230 million of cuts to the department of education between now and 2017, and $180 million of them are yet to be identified. So on the one hand we have Labor trying to claim the mantle of putting more funds into schools, and on the other hand we find out that they have cut funding by $1.2 billion nationally. In South Australia, the only mainland state Labor government left, last month it was revealed that they were cutting $230 million from the South Australian education budget. Shame on them.

On top of that, as the Prime Minister said in question time, not only has the Leader of the Opposition failed to change his tactics in question time but he has also forgotten—a bit like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderlandthat it was his government that cut the computers in schools program in the last budget. It was his government that cut spending and funding to trades traineeships and apprenticeships in MYEFO last year, in the PEFO and in the budget last year. It was his government that took a scythe to higher education before the election, cutting $2.8 billion from universities, ostensibly to pay for schools, when we knew they were also cutting $1.2 billion from schools. And it took this government to recognise that the cap on self-education expenses was such a bad policy that we would remove that cap and scrap that measure.

The Leader of the Opposition should be censured. He should be censured for ripping $1.2 billion out of schools before the election and he should be censured because he did not leave a national model; in fact, he was prepared to short-change the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia.

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