Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

She was just going to keep it in the top drawer, as the member for Boothby says. She could have said on 21 October, ‘I will commit to not publishing it.’ Instead she said:

The government is committed to transparency.

So every person in the school sector and everybody in the House—not that it was packed on that day; I think it was the minister, me and maybe one other in the House—would have taken from that comment that the government were going to publish it. Yet the minister now says, hand on heart, over and over again, that it was always their intention to not publish it. It is not important to us whether the minister can admit to backing down. That is not important to us. What is important is that the school sector has certainty that their sources of funding are not going to be on the front pages of the newspaper or on the television news at night. It is important to them, and I am glad that the government has adopted the opposition’s amendments in relation to funding disclosure. I welcome it.

We are delighted, and we do not mind at all that the minister cannot admit that she has adopted the opposition’s position and that, again, she has to hide behind the fig leaf of Senator Xenophon in her embarrassment. But we will support those amendments because, as I said, they are our amendments. We will get to the debate, of course, about the issue of the national curriculum shortly—after these debates are concluded. I thank the House.

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