Peter Lindsay (Herbert, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

Is that unfair, the member of Cook? I just wonder how fair dinkum the Labor Party is about changing its spots and now saying that it supports choice in education. There is a bit of evidence to support my cynicism—and we have seen it go through the parliament very recently—in the form of the Labor Party’s attack on private health insurance. Again, that is a matter of choice. The former government felt very much that choice should be available to the people of Australia and that we should not seek to influence which service people take up—they should make their own decisions.

We very much supported the notion of private health insurance because if people paid a component of the cost of providing their health it took them out of the public system and they were able to get the benefits that they wanted to pay for. Of course, we saw hundreds of thousands of pensioners scrimping and saving to have their own private health insurance at a time when they really needed it. And we have seen the Labor government take action through the parliament very recently which will see pensioners having to give up their private health insurance. This is the ideology that you get with the Labor Party. And it is driven basically, I guess, by the union movement. The public sector nurses do not want us to have a successful private system and we are seeing moves to gradually take that private system away.

So that is why I am cynical about the bills before the parliament tonight. We have said that this is an attack on choice in education, dressed up in another way. It is the ideology of the teacher unions coming through. There is all sorts of evidence for that, and there can be no better evidence about the ideology that exists in education than in my home city of Townsville. We have the best performing Australian technical college in the country. It has 300 students. It is providing magnificent outcomes. It is providing the best training for apprentices that you could possibly have, and Labor are in the process of closing it for ideological reasons. They want this sort of education to go back into what they call trades training centres in schools.

What are trades training centres? They are nowhere near being a patch on an Australian technical college. They will be a small addendum to a school, with no money provided, as I understand it, for the capital cost. It sounds great to say that there will be a trades training centre in every school in Australia. Yes, there will, but the outcomes from those trades training centres will be nowhere near the outcomes that an Australian technical college could achieve. It was certainly a great disappointment for my community, who knew and understood how good the technical college was, to learn that we may well see the demise of that particular institution.

We have also seen, as part of this debate, comments from the member for Lindsay about the digital revolution and the education revolution. Goodness me, digital revolution! Whatever happened to the national broadband network proposed by Labor? It could have been up and running today—now—but there is no prospect of it even starting yet. That is a fantastic revolution, isn’t it? If I were the member for Lindsay I would not be in the Australian parliament skiting about the digital revolution. In fact, it is the digital disaster. What about the education revolution? Where is it? You have to ask yourself about all of these concepts and see if there is any substance behind them.

The member for Lindsay also said that the amendments we are proposing to these bills threaten the passage of the legislation. They do not. This is the Parliament of Australia. The Labor Party can accept the amendments. The amendments are sensible. As the member for Cook observed over the weekend, Labor is treating the parliament with contempt. We saw it again with the Deputy Prime Minister today refusing to debate the Senate amendments on a bill, saying: ‘We’re the government. We’re going to have our way. We don’t care what the Senate thinks.’ She said that even though the Green senators, the Independent senators and the coalition senators all voted for the amendments. That is pretty high-handed. It is as if parliament were irrelevant.

We also saw that here in question time. The opposition asked sensible questions. They were not politically motivated; they were sensible questions at a time when this country needs a strong opposition asking sensible questions. What did we get? No answers. I think people are starting to realise that the government just simply does not answer questions. The whole tenet of a parliament in the Westminster system is that the government must be accountable to the people through the parliament. In the great democracies of the world question time is one key way you can have the government accountable to the people through the parliament. We are not seeing that happen here in the Australian parliament. You wonder how relevant the parliament is when the government seems to think it can thumb its nose at the parliament and get away with not answering questions.

The amendments we are proposing to these bills look at the attack on choice in education. Local non-government schools in my electorate certainly face an uncertain future under the changes proposed in this legislation. Schools like Annandale Christian School, which is a fantastic non-government school—I love going there; the people are so beautiful and the kids are so polite—Calvary Christian College, Townsville Grammar School, St Margaret Mary’s College, St Patrick’s College, Ignatius Park College and the Cathedral School of St Anne and St James, which I should mention or I will be in strife, are genuinely threatened by the changes made in this legislation.

Of course, the funding that is going through is welcome. The legislation has to be right. Granting extra power to the minister to delay or end funding for non-government schools because of an audit qualified for non-financial reasons is a silly public policy to have in this legislation. Surely, the Labor Party can see that. How can you leave a school with no funding if it suffers an audit qualified for non-financial reasons? The minister can just withdraw the funding. I appeal to the Labor Party: have a bit of sense about this and do not continue along those lines. It has been made very clear in other debates about the required adherence to a national curriculum that, without the flexibility, it puts at risk some of the special non-government schools. I think Labor members too will feel some disquiet about that.

We have the ability to force non-government schools to comply with a requirement to inform the minister of every single dollar that they make, including at the local chook raffle. How bureaucratic is that? The funding of schools under this legislation is not determined by those sorts of factors and yet the Labor Party wants to know how much the local school makes at a chook raffle. We should be about less bureaucracy, not more bureaucracy. We should be about not requiring bureaucracy at all if the information is not going to be used. I think Labor colleagues may feel some disquiet about that. I will be supporting the amendments that will be sensibly moved by the opposition. I hope that my Labor colleagues will support those amendments as well.

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