Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Labor has done this through its ‘Education Revolution’ platform. At its core, the platform identifies education as a key building block in securing Australia’s economic future. It draws on Labor’s longstanding commitment to education as one of the most important pathways through which all Australians, no matter where they come from, are given the opportunity to start life on an equal footing and strive for self-betterment.

The Australian people know when their government is playing catch-up, with policies made on the run for short-term political gain, and that is precisely what the government’s budget announcements on education amount to. Whilst education spending has increased on average by 48 per cent amongst all the other OECD countries, in Australia it has fallen by seven per cent since John Howard became Prime Minister. Similarly, whereas higher education spending per student has gone up on average by six per cent among OECD countries, in Australia it has actually fallen by six per cent. These figures speak for themselves. They clearly delineate the massive gap that exists between words and action when it comes to the Howard government’s abysmal record on education and tell us that any ‘education revolution’ put forward by the Howard government is an education revolution in name only—and one of sheer convenience.

Under the Howard government’s watch, Australia has tumbled to last place among OECD countries when it comes to investing in early childhood education. And after all the pomp and ceremony of Tuesday’s budget blows over, Australia will still be in last place. In contrast, Labor’s Early Childhood Education Plan will, amongst other things, give every four-year-old in Australia the right to 15 hours of early childhood education a week, for up to 40 weeks per year, delivered by a qualified teacher. In contrast, the budget provides only a $700 private tuition voucher for children who fail to achieve national literacy and numeracy benchmarks in years 3, 5 and 7.

Seven-hundred-dollar literacy and numeracy vouchers are not the answer to building an early childhood education framework in Australia. Just how far, you have to ask, will $700 really go? And why wait until grades 3, 5 or 7 before trying to identify and address potential learning problems? They need to be addressed at that critical stage of preschool education. Rather, as anyone who is interested in education knows, the solution is to invest earlier in Australia’s education system and build up its capacity, services and programs to avoid at a later stage the literacy and numeracy problems which the government purports it will fix with these vouchers.

The Howard government now claims that it has an education revolution of its own. But, at a time when Australia is experiencing a chronic skills shortage crisis, how can you have an education revolution that sidesteps Australia’s TAFE colleges altogether? Over the next five years, Australia faces a shortage of 200,000 skilled workers. TAFE colleges make up 70 per cent of all vocational education and training in Australia—that is, they play a key and fundamental role in skilling-up Australia’s future workforce—yet this budget provides no additional recurrent or infrastructure funding for TAFE colleges.

Labor has also consistently argued for a significant increase in recurrent and infrastructure funding for the higher education sector. Commonwealth recurrent funding for Australian universities stood at 0.9 per cent of GDP in 1996. And after Tuesday’s budget, recurrent funding to universities will still make up only 0.6 per cent of our GDP. This gives some indication of just how bad the Howard government’s funding record has been over the last decade.

Today, students face a university system where demand for university places far outstrips the number of places actually available. They are faced with rising HECS fees and record levels of HECS debt. In my electorate of Calwell alone, students owe a staggering $58.5 million in HECS debts. And after Tuesday’s budget, HECS fees for students studying—(Time expired)

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