Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

The budget reflects the current policy position of the government. Our position is as we clearly articulated before the last election. We said that we would honour the Gonski funding commitments—so-called—for the initial four years, the period of the published forward estimates at the time of the last election, and of course we did better than that: we put an additional $1.2 billion into schools in WA, Queensland and the Northern Territory, which Bill Shorten, as education minister, had ripped out of those schools. In the period beyond the published forward estimates, in a very tricky way, Labor promised an unsustainable and unfunded, pie-in-the-sky spending growth trajectory—never funded—and what we have done in government is put the school funding growth on a more sustainable, more affordable trajectory for the future. Now Labor is at it again, and none other than the South Australian Labor Premier, Jay Weatherill, has belled the cat. (Time expired)