John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

No, because the answer to that question is that I confirm all of the figures in the budget paper, and those figures reveal that expenditure on education is going to increase in real terms very significantly over the next three or four years as a result of the measures announced last night.

What I think the Leader of the Opposition is getting at is the proposition that, although there has been an increase in expenditure on education, in other areas of government expenditure there may have been an even bigger increase than has occurred in the area of education and, therefore, the percentages of total expenditure from one year might be lower than in a later year, or the other way around. That does not prove, as the Leader of the Opposition is trying to allege, that we have cut government spending. The whole point of this tawdry exercise—and it is a tawdry exercise—by the Leader of the Opposition is to try to establish that we have  reduced spending on education. We have in fact done the complete reverse, and education spending is going to rise over the next four years by more than 3.5 per cent a year in real terms as a result of the measures announced by the Treasurer last night.

I say to the Leader of the Opposition: yes, I confirm these figures; yes, I confirm that from one year to the next, because there will be differential rates of increase in expenditure, there may be a situation where a given area as a percentage of total outlays will fall from one year to the next without the real level of that expenditure falling at all. There is nothing remarkable about that, and the Leader of the Opposition is just trying to be too clever by half.

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