Andrew Broad (Mallee, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I stand corrected. I must say that, when it comes to literacy, the Labor Party are better. They are good with their words. So I learnt a word today. But, when it comes to numeracy, I think the coalition probably has one up on you. I have been running a business for a long time, and I know what is a cut and what is a balloon payment that was never funded. I guess what we are talking about today is a balloon payment that was put forward in the forward estimates that was never accounted for and never had allocated funds put against it. What we have done is we have been responsible with our numeracy: in 2016, $16 billion; in 2017, $17 billion; and then $18 billion and $19 billion; and, by 2020, we will be funding $20.2 billion to our state governments for education. We are better at numeracy.

But just because you say something long enough does not make it true. I just want to make the point that money does not always equal outcomes. This is the challenge that a responsible government has to tackle. It has to be: how do we deliver the outcome we want to achieve? The thing that differentiates people on this side of the parliament as opposed to those on the other side is that we realise that throwing money at something does not always fix it. I just want to make that clear. We have focused on how we can deliver that service. We are strengthening the teaching and school leadership. We are developing the essential knowledge and the skills. We are focusing on phonics—the sounding of words.

Opposition members interjecting—

You think it is revolutionary, but this is about delivering an outcome instead of just shovelling money at it. I also might point out that the federal contribution towards education funding is growing faster than the state contribution. And I might also point out that, when you look at the schools that I have, in a third of the state of Victoria, you see that they are largely forgotten by the administration of the state Labor government. They do not even know they are there. Some of the schools are white-ant eaten. This is because the state administration are very poorly administered.

We talked about sausage sizzles. Some of my very, very poor but private funded schools that can get direct funds from the federal government—

Ms Husar interjecting—

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