Jackie Kelly (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

That is right. ‘Can we get the rest of this straight to the schools where it is needed?’ My people come to me and say: ‘I can’t see the money. You say you are putting in all this money.’ I can show you budget after budget over 10 years where we have invested in schools. The amounts have gone up and the allocations have increased but, somehow on the way through the states, the money just gets gobbled up in administration costs in these monolithic state education departments. I do not know what they produce, but they seem to cream off this administration fee, which gets bigger and bigger and the finances fail to make it to the grassroots level where they need to be.

You can see this in the child-care sector as well. For 10 years, the New South Wales state government, in particular, have totally rejected their primary schools. They have done nothing in this area and I reckon they will do nothing in this area until the next state election. They have said they would, simply because the state opposition in New South Wales came out with an excellent primary schools proposal for more investment in preschooling. But, again, you see the federal government coming in with child-care subsidies, and they just walk away from it. Instead of increasing their expenditure so that, overall, we get a benefit, it just seems that the more money we put in the more ways they find of taking their money out, and the end result is that we end up carrying the can for things.

I would not like to see this happen with the technical colleges. I would like to see the technical colleges boosted and be the source of overall additional funding to address our skills based shortages. I would almost like to bet you—if that is at all appropriate, Mr Deputy Speaker—that somehow the state governments will withdraw their funding from the VET programs and withdraw their funding from some aspect of our schooling so that the overall funding for skills in our schools will decrease. It is one of the classic, shameless exercises of governments under fire when they do not have their economies right and are failing financially.

I commend this bill to the House. It will go a long way to addressing Australia’s skills shortages at a time of the lowest unemployment in 30 years.

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