Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member opposite refers to the Investing in Our Schools Program. If he is patient I intend to come to that. I said earlier that the run-down state of many of our public schools is the result of years of neglect, particularly during the Howard government’s years in office. Sadly, one of the outcomes of that neglect, as I pointed out a moment ago, is that parents continually have to contribute funding for the most basic of school resources. I will give a couple of examples of where I have seen parents do exactly that in public schools.

I will come back to talking about some schools in Makin in just a moment. I first want to refer to something that was published in the Australian by reporter Matthew Knott on 13 October 2008, when he wrote about the issue of parents having to pay to send their children to school. The article was headlined, ‘Cash-poor schools “running raffles to pay for textbooks”’. The headline exposes the shocking truth of how our schools have been neglected. It is a sad indictment of a country like Australia, which is generally affluent.

I said earlier that I wanted to allude to some of the schools that I have visited recently in my area. I visit schools in the electorate of Makin whenever I can. I speak to teachers and parents and I see the needs of individual families and schools. Only last Friday—7 November—I attended the Modbury West Primary School, which is in the Makin electorate, for the official opening of the school’s new landscaped frontage, which the students have appropriately named the Garden of Dreams. The entire funding for the project—this is a public school—which amounted to about $15,000, came from the school community, and the work was then carried out by volunteers. The net result was a beautifully landscaped garden which lifts the appearance of the school and lifts the pride of the students. If the work had been outsourced it would have cost around $50,000, but thanks to the school community they were able to do it for around $15,000. What the school community have achieved in the garden is a credit to the whole of the Modbury West Primary School community.

It is also typical of what I see at so many other schools. In the same week I also attended Para Vista Primary School, Modbury Primary School and The Heights School—a reception-to-year-12 school—when these schools also officially opened improvements to their schools. Like Modbury West Primary School, Para Vista Primary School, Modbury Primary School and The Heights School have a committed staff team and a supportive school community. Each of these school communities contributed thousands of dollars of funds that they had raised towards their own school projects. Certainly in those cases the projects were assisted by funding from the federal government and other sources, but the school communities had to raise a substantial amount of the funds themselves in order to ensure that those projects became a reality. Again, the fundraising primarily came from the parents of the schoolchildren.

This highlights the costs that are being faced by parents when they send their children to school. The Rudd government understands that, and that is why this measure has been put in place. That is why the Rudd government announced, in December, a $1,000 payment for each child of parents who come under family tax benefit A. That is why the Rudd government introduced tax cuts in July and why the Rudd government has committed to a range of education expenditure measures which will ultimately give children their best chance in life.

I want to come back to a couple of comments that have been made by members opposite. I will address the question of Investing in Our Schools, which most of them seem to want to allude to. It is interesting that members opposite support that program—and rightly so, because it was money that was used to assist schools—but why did the Howard government ever have to establish that program? It was because, after 12 years of being in government, the schools had become run-down to such a state that they needed every penny that they could get in order to get improvements just to provide basic education services. If the federal government had provided the states and the schools with the appropriate level of funding the schools would never have got to that state in the first place. When I walk through those schools and I see some of the conditions that they are in, I believe that it is a sad indictment of the previous government that they were allowed to deteriorate to that level. The program was simply a bandaid measure to pretend that the previous government cared about schools when the reality is that they could have done much, much more.

It is interesting that those opposite come into this place and talk about how this government is now doing all of this because it is possible as a result of the good economic management of the previous government. If the previous government was managing the economy so well why didn’t it invest in education and end up with a much stronger economy than we have? And why didn’t the previous government, when they had a surplus in their budget, commit to these projects? Why didn’t the previous government, when they had the funds, go into an election and commit to any of the measures that the Labor Party did?

The previous government had the same opportunities, but they were not prepared to give education the priority it deserved and they were not prepared to give education the priority that the Rudd government does.

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