Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We all think we live in the best electorates; but, when it comes to education, I really do. I doubt that there is another electorate in the country where people are as committed to lifting themselves from where they are and putting themselves in a place with greater opportunity. I can actually prove it. You just have to look at my University of Western Sydney, where we see the extraordinary efforts by local families to build better lives for themselves and their children.

My electorate is incredibly diverse. People actually cross oceans to get to Parramatta to build better lives for their children. But whether they are born here or whether they have migrated here, there is extraordinary attention to building better futures for their children. Fifty per cent of the students at the University of Western Sydney are the first in their families to go to university. There is an old saying that the greatest determinant of education level is the education of the parents. In Western Sydney and in Parramatta, 50 per cent are the first in their family to go to university. Seventy-two per cent of them have to work their way through—so they work and study. One in four students come from a low-SES background, which is the highest number in any Australian university. Thirty-two per cent are mature age. They have come in after a period of work to get additional qualifications, and 15 per cent of them did not make it out of high school. They actually came in through training pathways and education and vocational training. Again, they did it the hard way—an extraordinary cohort of students in Western Sydney who demonstrate this amazing commitment to building better lives for their children and themselves.

So I was pleased when the Abbott opposition immediately before the last election committed to no cuts to education and when they committed to a unity ticket with Labor on Gonski. I doubted it at the time, but I was hopeful. But, as we all know, once they were elected, it all changed. They broke those promises and they proceeded to cut funding to early childhood education and schools; and, of course, they are still endeavouring to cut funding to universities. In fact, $30 billion was cut out of schools in that first budget, and every student in every school in Parramatta will be worse off as a result of that budget. The government's own figures show that Parramatta schools will be $231 million worse off over the next decade. That is $231 million in my electorate alone that could provide extra teachers, special music or art classes or more literacy and numeracy programs The average school will be $3.2 million worse off, and those cuts will affect every school in Parramatta—public, independent and Catholic.

There are over 27,000 Parramatta schoolkids, and their parents are counting on the increased funding as recommended by the Gonski report to give our kids the best education possible. In an electorate as diverse as mine, we have a very flat bell curve when it comes to socioeconomic matters. There is quite a long tail at the poorer end and quite a long tail at the wealthier end, so we need that needs based funding to make sure that the funding goes where it can be most used.

Many of my schools are extremely distressed about this. We have Delany College in Granville—a Catholic school with an extremely diverse student base from some 38 different nationalities, which adds an extra layer of complexity to teaching as that school tries to find programs that compensate for and exploit the differences that those students have had in their life experiences and their educations prior to joining Delany. It is an extraordinary school that is noticing already the effect of these cuts.

But it is not just schools; we have also seen, of course, cuts to Youth Connections in Parramatta. Youth Connections was a fabulous program. We have 16.8 per cent youth unemployment in Parramatta. That is a crisis. This particular organisation worked with kids who had lost their way. These were young people who were on the street, who had dropped out of school, who were not in work or looking for work and who had essentially lost their way. It worked with those young people for sometimes up to two years. Two years after those young people had left that program, 80 per cent of them were either back in school or in work. That is an extraordinary contribution by an organisation which lost its funding in December last year.

The Liberal state government is no better, with cuts to TAFE. We have seen enrolments in cert. III plummet by 18,000 students, according to the budget papers, and cert. IV by 10½ thousand fewer enrolments because of those cuts to TAFE. The Liberal Party, whether it is state or federal, has an appalling record on education. (Time expired)