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

I do not want to delay the House for too much longer but there are a couple more points that I need to make about the issue before the House. The Deputy Prime Minister thinks that she can blackmail the opposition into voting for these shameful bills by locking in the Commonwealth Scholarships to start on 1 January with the Youth Allowance changes. The minister, I think, has lost sight of the limits of her power. She does not actually control the opposition and she does not control the Greens. It is very rare for members of the coalition to quote senators from the Greens, but Sarah Hanson-Young, Greens senator for South Australia, put it quite succinctly last night when she said:

… the Deputy Prime Minister, in her cruel and twisted way, decided to punish those students because she did not want to fess up that she had stuffed up the policy in the first place …

These are not my words; they are the words of Senator Hanson-Young, from the Greens. She has summed up—in language that I would not have used—the fact that this has all become about the Deputy Prime Minister’s vanity, her pride, her inability to recognise that when she makes a mistake she should fess up to it and work with the opposition, as we have offered, to fix the problem. All through the year—in May, June, August and October—we offered to work with the government to bring about savings measures that would meet our concerns about rural and regional Australians and students in their gap year. In fact, the government voted against the savings measure that we put up in the Senate. So how on earth the Deputy Prime Minister can blame the coalition for failing to come up with a savings measure is beyond me. Clearly, it would have been better if she had supported that savings measure or come up with an alternative and sat down and talked with the opposition about how to make this work so that students who would have been expecting Commonwealth Scholarships on 1 January would have been able to access them. Unfortunately, those students—and there are at least 100,000 of them—will hang around the Deputy Prime Minister’s neck throughout next year as they go without Commonwealth Scholarships because of the Deputy Prime Minister’s vanity and pride.

I understand that the Deputy Prime Minister has had a bad year—she has had a bad couple of years. Computers in Schools blew out by $800 million. There was supposed to be a trade training centre in every secondary school, but it turns out there is one in every 10 secondary schools. The schools stimulus debacle blew out by $1.7 million. The Deputy Prime Minister elevated advertising and praise for the government above spending on special schools and other priorities in her desire to praise both herself and the Prime Minister for the schools stimulus debacle. And now, finally, at the end of this year, there is the Youth Allowance shambles.

The Deputy Prime Minister has shown time and time again, with her slipshod management of the education portfolio, that a part-time education minister does not cut the mustard in a country of 22 million people, which happens to be the 15th-largest economy in the world. It is time for the Deputy Prime Minister to work with the opposition to bring about the kinds of reforms in Youth Allowance that we all support—reforms that are not retrospective, that do not unnecessarily punish rural and regional students and that do not deny students scholarships from 1 January, which is the current position she has adopted.

Question put:

That the motion (Ms Gillard’s) be agreed to.

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