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

Yes, $1.2 billion. I do not know where that money went under the previous government. That is a question we will be examining for decades, I imagine. With the funding for Senator Carr's favourite plan, the Green Car Innovation Fund, half a billion dollars was stripped out overnight. We do not know why. Promises were made, promises were breached and promises were never delivered.

So can I say to the people of Australia that a Labor promise is not worth the paper it is written on. Even less so when it is a promise made off the forward estimates. We know the only reason the Labor Party made all the promises for years 5 and 6 was that no-one had to count them. They were not in your budget estimates, they were not in any of the fiscal updates and they were meaningless promises. They were as meaningless as everything else you did in government.

The record of the coalition supports parents and believes in the importance of teacher quality, because we know that what matters more is not just what school a child is in but what classroom they are in. I come from a family of teachers. I know how important good teachers are. So we are supporting teacher quality. We are supporting a school economy that underpins teacher quality. But, to the Labor Party and to the Greens, all that matters is how much money we pour in. They do not care about what happens next.