Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

Isn't today just extraordinary! Yesterday, I sort of expected that the opposition would come in and not be able to understand the announcement that the Prime Minister and Minister Pyne made yesterday afternoon before question time. But I thought that, after they had had a day for it to settle in, they might have a sense of shame in that it has taken the coalition to deliver on the promises that both the opposition and the government at the time made to the Australian people. Labor will not be allowed to run away from the fact that in the dying days of their government and in the shadows of the election campaign—hoping they would get away with it—it was revealed, only due to the Charter of Budget Honesty, that they had cut $1.2 billion from education in this country. The previous few years were nothing but a series of bumper stickers and a sham they were trying to pull over the eyes of the Australian people, just like they did with the carbon tax and the litany of other broken promises.

I almost laughed earlier when I heard Senator Carr talk about a six-year plan—I thought he was more enamoured with five-year plans. He comes in here and talks about a plan where people were expected to believe the Labor Party for three elections away in 2018, 2019 and 2020. They could not even be trusted to deliver year 1 of the funding commitments that the Better Schools Plan required. The students in the jurisdictions of Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland were not going to get a needs based funding arrangement; they were going to be funded and penalised on the basis of the states they came from. This is despite the fact that Western Australia funds its students above the levels the federal government wanted.

Now, we have them fall back on the pathetic excuse that somehow, because Canberra will not dictate to the states the micromanagement of their schools, we are not living up to our promises as to education. Labor cannot be trusted to live up to promises it makes months earlier, but this betrays Labor's constant view. As a party of centralism, and as a party that has spent every waking day of its history trying to undermine our federation, they have this view that all of the wisdom resides in this parliament and in this city. They always take the side against our communities, our towns and our cities as they want to be prescriptive about how things like schools are run. That is only because they want the power of patronage. They lack the humility to say, 'I believe these communities know how to run their schools better.' But when we go to the state level and see the Labor Party taking sides, it is always in favour of the AEU, the bureaucracy and the centralisation of schools but, again, against parents, families, students and communities, because Labor has no sense of its own limitations.

For members of the Labor Party—the party of school halls and pink batts—to come in here and say that they are somehow better placed to run our schools than the authorities responsible for them is nothing short of rank hypocrisy. The Labor Party rolled out the overpriced school halls program. If I had said to anyone in Australia in 2007 that they could have a once-off, once-in-a-generation $14 billion investment in schools, no-one would have come up with the idea of overpriced school halls as a solution to that. The Labor Party paid $2 billion more than was necessary and there were no strings attached then about getting value for money. So why on earth would people trust you managing schools and teachers' salaries in the states that know they are responsible to their electorates for managing our schools?

Only the Labor Party would not think that there is a difference between the requirements of a school in Brunswick and one in Broome and that maybe people in Belconnen are not best placed to make those decisions, that we should leave it to those local communities.

The Labor Party on this issue are shameless, but they will not be allowed to run away from their own history. Their own history is that in the dying days of their government, despite all the promises, political posturing, bumper stickers and green buses, they stripped $1.2 billion from school funding in this country. It is the coalition, as always, that cleans up Labor's mess. It is the coalition that actually delivers on the commitments that this parliament has made to the Australian people and to Australian families. The Labor Party will not be allowed to run away from that history.