Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure for me to join the discussion on education funding as outlined by Senator O'Neill. The letter about this MPI was sent in by my colleague from Tasmania, Senator Urquhart, and has us talking about this important issue of 'fully funding public schools, including funding for extra teachers and resources, more individual attention for students, and extra support for kids with special needs'.

I am a parent of three boys, two of whom are in the Tasmanian public education system, which is an excellent education system, and one that is improving every year and receiving more and more funds every year. I will focus on the improvement in funding levels in the Tasmanian public education system shortly, just to provide a contrast with what Senator O'Neill was saying in her contribution. But one thing I do want to point out is that part of the Labor mantra when it comes to dealing with matters of education is, 'it doesn't matter how much money you throw at it, it's never going to be enough'. This letter points that out: 'fully funding public schools'. What does that mean? What is 'fully funding'? It doesn't matter how much is put in, they are always going to be saying that we need more. I think we have to ask the question: are we making sure that we spend this money appropriately?

Of course we should always invest more. As I will outline later on, in the Tasmanian example more is being invested but it is being invested strategically so that we do see results—improvements in student results and retention rates, which have been woefully low. We remind ourselves that in Tasmania, historically, we've had an adult functional literacy and numeracy rate of 48 per cent, an indictment on our education system in Tasmania and something that I'm glad to see is going to be improved by proper investment in the public education system in Tasmania.

So I urge caution on this issue, for those listening to this debate. Money is not the only measure of whether a government supports an education system or not. It's how that money is spent. Of course we should invest as much as possible, but it needs to be done wisely, not throwing good money after bad, based on figures that, as Senator Williams pointed out in his contribution, have been plucked out of thin air—random candidates from across the state of New South Wales, random schools and random communities, with figures of money just being thrown at these schools we don't know what for. I wonder whether Senator O'Neill knows what that money would be used for?

It's important for us to test what's being said in contributions like Senator O'Neill's and others that I'm sure we'll hear today. The best way for us to do that is to look at the facts and consider things in a historical context as well. If you listened to Senator O'Neill, you would think that Labor were the patron saints of education, that they've never cut funding to the education system across this country or misspent. We only have to recall the Building the Education Revolution, where we saw school halls being built at every school in the country. I remember one school hall in the state of Tasmania in a beautiful community called Waratah, at a school which could barely keep its doors open. Sadly, in mining communities where the mining industry has long gone and population numbers dwindle, you would expect numbers of students at schools to also drop. But the Labor government at the time insisted that hundreds of thousands of dollars be spent on building a new hall at this school which barely had a student. The school, of course, closed not long after. What a waste of money. How did students at the other schools in the region benefit from that? They could have used that some other way.

Labor have a record when it comes to wasting money in education, and that's why I say it's not just how much we throw at schools in funding but how we spend it that is important. We have to be strategic, and Labor have proven they cannot be trusted on that. It's important to make sure the money that we allocate to the schools that need the funding is in line with needs, not just where we think it should go.

We saw in the same period of time Australia slip under Labor from 12th in the world to 22nd when it came to the quality of maths and science education and then from 24th to 37th in the overall quality of our education system—sorry, that was from 8th to 23rd in the world in rankings. Labor's track record is pretty woeful when it comes to managing our education system. So when Senator O'Neill comes in here, along with all of her Labor candidates, pretending to be the heroes of the education system, we have to think twice about exactly how they will manage things.

Let's look at what is being invested here in Australia, how we are spending the very limited taxpayer funds available to this government to enhance our education system and ensure that the students of today are better for it tomorrow. We're providing an extra $37.6 billion to schools in the schools package, which means that funding for each student will grow, on average, by 62.6 per cent. Funding for state schools out of that pool—noting that we have state schools and non-state schools, so independent and Catholic schools—will grow by 101 per cent and, for non-state schools, it'll grow by 70 per cent over the term of the package. The government is also providing a record $309.6 billion in investment in recurrent funding to all Australian schools from this year through to the year 2029. The rate of spending is growing fastest in state schools at a rate of 6.3 per cent per student each year from 2019 to 2023.

They are some of the facts federally and, as I said, I would like to spend the last few minutes remaining in my time today to speak about Tasmania. States and territory governments have primary responsibility for education, particularly when it comes to primary and secondary education. They are the ones that administer our schools, that set the policies and determine how funding is spent. In Tasmania, it is a good news story. We're seeing the Hodgman government spend an additional $324 million over the next six years, employing 358 more staff in schools, including 250 teachers—teachers that were cut under the last Labor-Greens government. They're also extending high schools to year 12—38 have been extended. This is the thing: we had an education system in Tasmania where high schools went to year 10. So the attitude of young people was, 'Oh, I'm done by year 10.' They didn't go on to complete years 11 and 12. There were woeful retention rates, with kids dropping out and not doing anything else with their lives. Very few went on to get a trade or tertiary qualification or, indeed, complete years 11 and 12.

They're the sorts of changes we need to make to our education system. Yes, there's a cost attached, but it's a strategic investment—not just throwing money willy-nilly—and it's yielding results in regional communities. We need to focus on those communities. School nurses have been reintroduced into schools, with another 142 teachers and 63 more support staff, including psychologists, social workers and speech pathologists, employed since 2014. Again, those much-needed professions were cut in these schools under the Labor-Greens government in Tasmania. And, of course, the state Hodgman government will provide an extra 400 hours of free early learning for disadvantaged and vulnerable three-year-olds across the state. And that's just the beginning. They have done so much.

I like to compare the pair when it comes to how things are going in Tasmania in areas like health and education. When you look at the record left by the Labor-Greens government in 2014, education investment in the state of Tasmania was $1.35 billion. This year, in 2018, the state Liberal government is spending $1.6 billion. We had 4,202 FTE teachers; we now have 4,345 in 2018. In 2014, we had 787 teacher assistants; in 2018, we have 980. These increases mean that students are getting access to the support they need. Exactly what Senator Urquhart says we need to be doing is happening in Tasmania, her home state, and I hope she looks at this speech today and notices what's happened in Tasmania.

Of course, in 2014, the number of high schools in Tasmania that went through to year 12 was zero. It's now 38, and the apparent retention rate has risen from 70 per cent to over 76 per cent. The rate of attainment of the Tasmanian Certificate of Education has risen from 48.8 per cent to 58.9 per cent. And, of course, funding for students with a disability—another point that Senator Urquhart raises in her letter—has gone from $69 million to over $88 million per annum. That's the set of facts we need to be looking at. Don't believe everything you hear. Labor's tactic is to repeat a falsehood often enough that people believe it, but let me tell you it's not true. Those facts speak for themselves, and I hope, at the next federal election and at any of the state elections that are coming up, people remember this: the Liberals, the coalition, do invest in schools. That was just rubbish.