Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Minister Assisting for School Education) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Cunningham for her question. Before she was in this place, she was a school teacher. She understands the importance of education. This government fully understands the need to focus on education, employment and the economy. Indeed, this government, when confronted with the global financial crisis, invested a record amount of money into education. As the Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth just said, we have doubled school education funding in only four years. We did so because we understand that it is absolutely critical to manage the economy to help working families. We understand that we need to ensure that those people in communities across the country who depend upon on us are able to be supported through those difficult times. We had to make a decision as to where we would invest that money. We rightly invested it in education. As a result, with that particular initiative alone, the $16.2 billion, we managed to support or create 120,000 jobs in this country, a remarkable effort when compared internationally with the way other governments confronted this issue.

We know those opposite neglected school funding in their time in government. There is nothing wrong with flagpoles but you have to go beyond flagpoles and invest in school education. By contrast, we built 4,500 new interactive classrooms, 3,100 libraries, 2,900 multipurpose centres and, one other area I was looking at recently, 280 language and science centres across this country as a result of that initiative. This has been a remarkable effort by the government.

In the end it will always be Labor that focuses on the things that matter. It will always be Labor that puts jobs at the centre of public policy. In relation to this initiative, we focused on jobs to protect the workers in this country and we invested to protect the students who are the workers of the future. This initiative was absolutely critical. Look now at the results. As the Treasurer said today and has said before, we have an enviable unemployment rate of 5.1 per cent. Look around the world: we have an unemployment rate less than half that of Europe and a rate much better than other advanced economies as a result of actions of this government. It will always be the case that this Labor government will invest in education and support jobs.

See this speech in context