Karen Andrews (McPherson, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Vocational Education and Skills) Share this | Hansard source

I am delighted to speak on today's MPI for a number of reasons. Firstly, I am recently appointed to the role of Assistant Minister for Vocational Education and Skills, and I have to say that I am delighted to be in this role because there are so many opportunities for us as a government to do good work in the education sector.

It is important to note that education is like a highway, and we have the opportunity as we go along that education highway to exit at many different points, including at the vocational education destination. But schooling and school education is a critical part of that education highway, and it is very important that we get that right not just for ourselves but also for our generations yet to come. As a member of the government, what I want is a quality education outcome for the dollars that we are spending on education. As a taxpayer, I want value for money, value for the dollars that are spent on education. And, as a parent, I want a quality education for my children and for other children, so that they have the best opportunity to achieve their life goals.

There is outstanding research and a considerable amount of work that has been done on funding. It is important to note that we have record funding going forward in education—$73.6 billion over the forward estimates to 2020. But there is significant research that says that there is no automatic link between high per student funding and student outcomes but that improved outcomes are driven by policies and reforms both in the school and in the wider education system.

I note that the member for Sydney talked briefly today about Gonski, and it has been a recurrent theme. It is important to make it very clear that, contrary to popular opinion the current arrangements are not Gonski; they are a corruption of Gonski, as has been clearly put by Mr Boston. Ken Boston, one of the panel members on Gonski, said:

In the run-up to the 2013 election, prime minister Kevin Rudd and education minister Bill Shorten hawked this corruption of the Gonski report around the country, doing deals with premiers, bishops and the various education lobbies … and they led to a thoroughly unsatisfactory situation.

I do not particularly want to go down the Labor-bashing approach, but I think it is important to put in some sort of context here. There was an opportunity to come up with a national model that met students' needs, but what we got was a hotchpotch of some 27 different agreements.

Having said that, I think it is important to actually move forward, because what we need to be talking about is the quality education outcomes that are needed. We released a document back in May, Quality Schools, Quality Outcomes, which I would encourage everyone to have a good look at. It talks about how important funding is, but it says that what we do with the funding matters more.

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