David Fawcett (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

That is important, because if we are to be a government taking seriously the future of every child in Australia, we should not be in the same situation as Labor found itself in the dying days of that bad government. Then the Minister for Education and the Prime Minister signed even bigger cheques, if required, to try and get states and territories to sign up for a blatantly political reason, so the then government could say it had the support of states. The money given and the conditions under which that money was given therefore differ from state to state, not for any particularly good or sound educational reason or for the future of our children, under agreements reached with those jurisdictions that signed. Senator Conroy rightly interjected that some of those states were Liberal states, but the then federal government's motivation was purely political in that it would do, say and pay anything to get states to sign up. That leaves us a shambles of a system where the money going to support a child in one state is different to the money going to support a child in another state or territory. That is hardly the basis for a national system to benefit our children in the future.

One of this government's early achievements from getting those states on board is that we are now on the path to a national system where we will be putting back into the system $1.2 billion of funding that Labor ripped out of the system.