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

Let me echo the words of the Minister for Education, Science and Training, seeing that the Leader of the Opposition referred to her remark, and let me endorse emphatically what she said about the bias in the Australian Labor Party, the bias in the trade union movement—the chief bankers of Labor—and the bias in the education unions against government support for Catholic and independent schools in this country. It was Australia’s great Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies who led the breakthrough for the first time in the history of this country, more than 40 years ago, to give direct financial assistance to Catholic and independent schools. And it will ever be to the credit of this side of politics that we have stood, through those years, shoulder to shoulder with Catholic and independent schools and shoulder to shoulder with Australian parents in their right to choose the school they want to educate their children.

We have never had a hit list. There has never been any doubt as to where we stand in supporting local Catholic parish schools. There has never been any double as to where we stand in relation to low-fee independent schools. I remind the Leader of the Opposition, and I remind the member for Perth that, if it had not been for the vote of Senator Brian Harradine in the Senate way back in 1996, the new schools policy of the coalition would never have become law and scores of low-fee independent schools, which are now the schools of choice for thousands of parents in the outer suburbs of the cities of this nation, would never have come into existence. That policy, which we introduced in 1996, was opposed by the Australian Labor Party. They tried to pass a resolution in the Senate to sink the policy and it was only with the support of Brian Harradine—and I record again my thanks to him—that we were able to get that policy through.

The Leader of the Opposition, in a rhetorical flourish, held aloft the flawed OECD report, and he said it represented ‘fail, fail, fail’ on the part of the government. Let me borrow the rhetoric of the Leader of the Opposition and let me say that, when you test him on a knowledge of economics, it represents ‘fail, fail, fail and fail again.’ His first failure was: he does not understand anything about productivity.

See this speech in context