Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Tax Laws Amendment (Education Refund) Bill 2008, the thrust of which I support. This is a bill which comes out of a promise made during the last year’s election campaign and what was a battle of tit-for-tat on several major policy areas. It amends the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 by introducing a 50 per cent refundable tax offset for eligible education expenses, the education tax refund, up to a maximum of $750 for children undertaking primary studies and $1,500 for children undertaking secondary studies. As I understand it, it is for families who get family tax benefit A.

The bill limits eligible education expenses to laptops, home computers and associated costs, computer related equipment such as printers and disability aids, home internet connections, computer software, school textbooks and other paper based school learning material and tools of trade as prescribed by the course. It is a promise which does go a long way to helping those Australians who want to give their children the best chance at the start of their lives.

Of course, in our country we are very fortunate to have a very strong education system. It is something our country should be very proud of. It gives people an opportunity to do better, to grow, and to make the dream of their parents for them to live a better quality life than theirs come true. It is something that I think both sides of this House support. I listened earlier to the member for Blair, who talked about the importance of education, and I support his comments absolutely.

But I think we need to look at the history of how this bill has come into being, and to do that we need to go back to 1996. We hear a lot from the other side about what we allegedly did or did not do for education when this side of the House was in government. We must understand that this $4.4 billion over four years could not have been delivered in 1996 because on coming to government in 1996 we found that there was $96 billion of debt. There was a $10 billion budget deficit. The hard work that was done between 1996 and 2007 has allowed a promise like this to be made, which is a good thing for our country. It is a good thing for Australian families that the government can assist with education expenses, and it is something I support. But it is based on the legacy of the hard economic decisions that were made in 1996 and the years that followed. If those hard decisions had not been made, this bill could not have been implemented. That is just a simple fact. Balanced budgets with surpluses and $60 billion in savings in the Future Fund is a legacy which has allowed these types of investments to be made. So it is really to the credit of the former government, the former Prime Minister and the former Treasurer, that we are in the position that we can have a bill such as this today.

This bill came out of the last election campaign, as I mentioned earlier. It was a version of a policy that was announced by the coalition. Unfortunately it is an inferior version of a policy that was announced by the coalition. Our policy was universal; it was not limited. Our policy also included—and this is a very important point—government and non-government school fees, preschool fees and expenses. Preschool is often forgotten in the education debate. We focus much in this place on university education, and the Labor Party focuses very much on school retention rates because it suits their state premiers to have that debate. But we do not focus on the building blocks of education, those early years. I have a very strong view that we need to do more as a federal parliament in this space. It is an area that has been neglected by state governments for years. It is an area which has suffered under the maladministration which is occurring in many of our states today. It is an area where increasingly the federal government will have to step up to the plate.

Our policy also included important items such as school uniforms, textbooks, stationery, calculators, and camps and excursions—camps like the school from my electorate which came to visit Parliament House today to enjoy and understand what we do here, a great opportunity for young people to understand how our democracy works. Camps and excursions can teach much more than can be learned in the classroom. Being in this place, being in the Senate and doing a tour of this place is much better than reading about it in a classroom or being told about it by a teacher or, indeed, a politician. Being in this place can teach so much more. So our policy included camps and excursions. It also included laptops, broadband and software, and extracurricular school activities such as sport, music, dance and drama.

I am on the Standing Committee on Health and Ageing in this place and we are looking at obesity at the present time. One of the things that has struck me in this committee inquiry is the lack of opportunity for school kids now—and primary school kids in particular—to do physical education, to get outside the classroom and to have a run around like we enjoyed when we were kids. There are many reasons for that. I think that largely there have been mistakes of policy in the past, that a focus has been taken off these extracurricular activities encouraging kids to get outside, to get away from the TV and, dare I say, the internet and to actually undertake a game of footy or netball or some other sort of physical activity and run around each day so they can get enjoyment out of being outside. Equally, it is the case with other important things like dance, music and drama.

Our policy had a slightly smaller amount of $800 annually for each student but it covered a broader field. It was not restricted to those on family tax benefit A. Where we are critical of Labor’s policy in this respect or in this bill is that it only covers a small cost of a computer. It does nothing to address the basics of a good education to support families with the real day-to-day costs of schooling, such as school fees and those camps and excursions that too many kids have to miss out on because they cannot afford to pay for them. I think that school fees is the biggest area of mistake in this bill. School fees are so important not just in the non-government sector but also in the government sector. I spoke to a couple of principals of public schools, not of private schools, in my electorate last week. I will not name them for fear of reprisal from the state education minister.

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