Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm going to break with tradition and say that I don't agree with the motion. I will speak on it but merely to demonstrate the absurdity with which it was moved. The motion moved by the member makes the biggest list of grab-bag calls for every single thing under the sun as a way of perpetuating relevance for an opposition that simply has no agenda but complaint.

The reality is we all have empathy. The foundation of equal opportunity is, of course, education. It was Prime Minister Gladstone, the great liberal Prime Minister, who introduced in the UK the universal Elementary Education Act. It's liberalism that believes in the power of education. We Liberals, encourage people to realise the fullness of their lives regardless of their background.

I'm not pretending that, from time to time, other political philosophies don't co-opt liberalism. In fact, when you have no political philosophy that anchors or guides you, as with the opposition, I can entirely see the alluring attraction of liberalism. But to give the speech that the member just gave he would have to have gone not to education but to re-education to distract himself from the realities of what this government is doing. There is apparently, according to the member who spoke before, no money spent on education in this country, which would come as a bit of a shock, I think, to most parents who send their kids to schools. One of the things that makes it so absurd is not just that we fund education to record levels—and we do—but that actually we fund public, Catholic and independent education to record levels that have never been seen before under a Liberal or a Labor government.

But, even more than that, we have a skills package investing $525.3 million through a range of measures to try to confront the challenges that young Australians face to give them the best chance in life. There's the National Careers Institute, the national careers ambassador program, the Foundation Skills for Your Future Foundation, the streamlined incentives for Australian apprenticeships, the additional identified skills shortages payment, industry training hubs, the national partnership with the Tasmanian government to enable Tasmania to train a skilled work force, 400 Commonwealth scholarships to young Australians, a national skills commission and pilot skills organisations, an extension to the National Rugby League’s VET Apprenticeship Awareness Program, phase 3 of the jobs and education data infrastructure program and an extension to the unique student identifier service.

In fact, what we have done at every point under this government is actually meet the expectations of the country and the challenges it faces. Our focus is on what we need to do not just to secure the retirement of Australians who came under direct assault from the opposition and not just to provide the record funding for education and improvement in standards which is the heart of our package—and you will see more about that through the life of this government—for young Australians. It is to make sure that at every point we try to improve the standards to make sure that, once people finish school and choose to go into tertiary education, they then have pathways to choose for the rest of their lives.

Again, like economic growth or lower taxes, these are foreign concepts to our political opponents. Perhaps that's a reminder of why they sit on the other side of not just this chamber but the big one downstairs. It's because they simply do not appreciate or understand the challenges that Australians face. This is the gift and the opportunity of this government off the back of a strong budget position and off the back of a surplus which members like the member for Chifley call a vanity project. I wonder whether the members opposite think that a budget surplus is a vanity project or not. They rhetorically say they support the idea. Swannie even promised it. But the easier thing to do was to get rid of Swannie rather than have him around musking up like a bad smell.

Ms Kearney interjecting—

What we can do with a prudent budget position is actually underwrite the funding that we need to help young minds grow and see them succeed. I know that the member for Cooper mocks that very proposition. That's the sadness— (Time expired)

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