Page 2399 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 12 August 2014
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Our priorities will ensure that every child, young person and adult will benefit from a high-quality and accessible education and training system. Underpinning this is a funding system which is equitable and appropriately targeted. Accordingly, this government will continue its commitment to needs-based funding in our schools as per its commitments under the national education reform agreement. This will include evaluating our current funding of public schools. We will direct funds to where they are needed most and to where you can deliver the best outcome to ensure that every child has the knowledge and skills for success through our community and through this budget. Our ongoing focus on measures will make a real difference for students and we will continue to provide the best education system in this country.
MR HANSON (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (9.28): I was not intending to speak to this line but I want to make a couple of points with regard to education funding. Ms Burch talks about the fifth and sixth years of what was referred to as the Gonski funding and says, “Where is this money? Why did the federal government not sign up to it?”, and so on. Let me be very clear here. That money never existed. That money was never in any budget anywhere.
What happened with the funding both in health and in education was that the federal Labor Party under Gillard and Rudd knew that they were heading for tragedy. They knew that. What they did was they thought, “We are going down here. What we will do is promise whatever we want,” but not in the budget years because that would hold them accountable. What they said was, “For the next four years in the budget we will basically have a level of funding which is consistent.” The federal government, when it got into office, made a commitment to sign up to that and has continued to do so. So there are no changes to that.
What you see, if you look at the charts and you look at the graphs, is that in year 5 and year 6, in the never-never, when there was never any money allocated, when it was never budgeted, what the federal Labor government did, in a deceitful act under Prime Minister Gillard and Prime Minister Rudd, was promise astronomical levels of funding which were not sustainable and which, if they had been permitted to, as we were aware, would have taken the levels of public debt up to $600 billion.
When the question is asked of the Labor Party—and none of them have ever been able to respond to this, other than putting health and education spending on the national credit card—where was that money coming from, none of them will engage in that debate. None of them will respond to that because they know it is true that what Gillard and Rudd were doing was promising away the future. This is the most disingenuous thing that they did. They went to the states offering billions of dollars of money that did not exist, that they could not possibly fund. The only way that that money could be secured, the only way that that money could be provided, was by putting it on the national credit card.
I know that lot opposite do not want to hear this and they do not want to engage in this debate, but I look forward to Ms Berry, Mr Gentleman, Ms Burch, Mr Corbell or the world’s greatest Treasurer over there, Mr Barr, getting up and telling us. Mr Barr certainly knows how to squeeze a dollar out of someone. Mr Barr might be able to tell us where all that money was coming from.
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