Ken O'Dowd (Flynn, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on today's MPI on the issue of education, an issue which is undoubtedly important to all members of the public. An effective education system is vital to ensure that we have a capable and intelligent workforce to fill the jobs of the future. It is critical to maintaining an internationally competitive economy. Above all else, we must provide a first-class education to our children. I am sure that all members of this House would agree on that.

The Labor Party's attempts to discredit the coalition's commitment to education are based purely on fiction. The suggestion that the coalition government has failed to properly invest in education is baseless and untrue. This is clearly demonstrated by the record increases in Commonwealth funding over the forward estimates. The Turnbull government is committed to providing the highest level of need-based school funding—a record $69.5 billion over four years to 2018-19. This is an increase of $4 billion, or 27.3 per cent, from 2014-15 to 2018-19. This is pure scaremongering by the Labor Party. In my electorate alone, one school, Trinity College—I have been out there in the last 12 months—has benefited from two different funding programs amounting to about $1 million for the one school. Only last weekend, in Gladstone, the Queensland government, in their wisdom, announced a new high school for Calliope. So they do not see the threat of government cutbacks—otherwise, why would they be building more schools? It is not the case that there have been cutbacks.

The state governments tried to work with the Labor federal government when they were in power, but that all ended up in disaster too. Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory suffered unfair treatment by the then Gillard-Rudd government. This is the story we have; yet the Labor Party will not admit that we are doing a good job. They just hate the fact that we are succeeding. They hate the fact that you cannot just throw money at a problem to fix it. It will not fix it. It is naive to think that funding alone is the answer, but this is what they think. Past analysis has proven that increased funding does not necessarily lead to quality education and better outcomes. From 1987 to 2012, education spending increased 100 per cent, yet students' outcomes have consistently declined. The current school funding model, which Labor advocates to extend, was complex and contained serious inequities between the states, and I have already mentioned that Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory suffered under the Gillard-Rudd government. The previous government took the fair and well-intentioned recommendations of David Gonski and turned them into a quagmire of side-deals and one-off arrangements with the states, which failed to rectify historical funding imbalances between the states. So we had a situation where the states ran the schools and they could not even get their funding right to make sure that all states were equal in the handouts. The extension of this model is merely entrenching those inequities and results in some states being severely and unfairly disadvantaged, and I believe they are still suffering from those policies of the Gillard-Rudd regime.

The Turnbull government has already increased funding to some states that was removed by the previous Labor government. So we have tried to rectify that in our last 2½ years of government.

The Labor scare proposal follows the classic Labor logic: if you have a problem, throw a bucket of money at it and hope it goes away. The proposal completely ignores the need for schools' autonomy and a needs based approach. Labor's addiction to spending at all costs is clearly evident in their latest school policy, which commits them to spending $37 billion on replicating their past mistakes. (Time expired)

See this speech in context