Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to thank the honourable member for Moreton for bringing this motion forward. He is one of the people who have truly earned the moniker 'honourable'. I'd like to think the members for Cooper, Calwell, Cunningham and Mayo for their contributions to this debate, as well as my colleague from Goldstein—I think he is a frustrated teacher or maybe even a lecturer; he is more in the didactic model of Socrates—and the members for Berowra and Fisher, who brought their own particular interests and knowledge to this area.

I think where we have got to in this debate is a great shame, and I mean that sincerely, because there is no doubt that I'm going to stand here and tell those opposite who remain that their arguments that we have cut spending are just wrong, and they're going to argue until they're blue in the face that I'm wrong, and all of us are going to engage in mathematical models that would put quantum physicists to shame. But the truth of the matter is that this is about more than funding. We know that education is the golden bullet. As a member of the Liberal Party, which believes primarily in equality of opportunity above equality of outcome, I know that access to education for everyone is the most important thing that any society can provide if you are to live that creed which you say you live by. So, for me, this is just the most critical thing that any government can do.

We want to break the cycle of poverty. I know the member for Cunningham and the member for Moreton see in their community, as I see in mine, a third or fourth generation of children repeating the mistakes of their parents. They are going to live terrible lives, because we cannot break that cycle. It is heartbreaking to go to school presentation nights and see people with enormous potential. There is no reason why they cannot be so much more, but they are trapped by the environments into which they were born. No matter what we do to try to break that, we have failed. Frankly, too often the policies of this parliament have made that even worse. Education is the golden bullet for breaking that cycle. We have a choice between being the parliament of interest groups in education or the parliament that delivers for the children of this nation and their families.

So I really want all of us to put politics aside, because this subject is too important. The member for Mayo ended her speech by saying it's time to get out the chequebook. More disappointing words will be spoken in this chamber, I know, but that was just so disappointing, because too often we boil education down to how much money we can throw at it. We know from overseas that money is not the answer. It is an element of it, but Singapore, which has an education system that leaves ours for dead, funds its students at 30 per cent per student of what we do in Australia. We know that, as we have increased funding in Australia, education outcomes have gone down. I know correlation is not causation, I know that there are underlying factors, but, as I or anyone who stands in this parliament today knows, there is a negative correlation between education funding and outcomes. It's not good enough. Singapore have chosen to trade off class sizes. They have much larger classes than we do, with higher pay for teachers and better support for those teachers, like master teachers and other specialties that they can provide for teachers in planning to make those things. We know that there has been too much stress in our education environment on getting people to universities. In some of the most successful nations in the world, with the lowest levels of youth unemployment, such as Germany and Singapore, they have 80 per cent of people going into trades and technical colleges.

There is so much more that I want to say about this, but there is politicisation of education. In my area, there are public schools that have fair funding on their things. There are principals who throw out my congratulation notes to students who've won awards—because they can. They can make sure that I'm not allowed to speak to students. That politicisation has to end. (Time expired)

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