Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Now he wants to shout, because I guess that is the nature of the parliamentary secretary. It may well be that the parliamentary secretary’s electorate has done very well. I have already suggested to him that I am aware of many applications in other areas that have been successful, but the fact remains that, on average, when you compare coalition seats with Labor and Independent seats, coalition seats have done better.

I invite the parliamentary secretary and the minister to provide a genuine reason at some point in time for that—a reason other than pork-barrelling and looking after their own interests instead of the interests of school children in this country. But, on the face of it, there is on average a disproportionate amount of funding going to those seats, and that has to be answered. I am sure that is of concern to many parents who send their children to primary and secondary schools in this country, because they would expect the government to spend money on schools based on the merit of an application and the needs of the children, not based on such motives as the electoral need of the government to sustain itself in government. That is yet to be answered. It has not been properly answered by anyone on the other side, and the quicker that is done the better off we will all be—but I will not hold my breath for an answer to that.

This is not the only program where money has been disproportionately spent on marginal government held seats in order for the government to maintain those seats. There is no doubt that the government looks after the marginal seats, not the marginalised. It has an obsession with looking after its own, and it is about time it turned its attention to the children of Australia and their schools.

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