Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Reid for that question. The reforms of the past have helped deliver the prosperity that we have today, and the reforms of today will help deliver the prosperity of tomorrow. That is why, for example, the mining resource rent tax is so important to deliver those reforms that I was talking to the member for Lyne about before. The $6,500 instant asset write-off is a fundamental reform for up to 2.7 million small businesses. We are all proud of that. We on this side of the House are proud of putting a price on carbon so that our children and our grandchildren can have a clean energy future. I am proud of what we have done in terms of workforce participation—a tripling of the tax-free threshold, a fundamental reform to lift workforce participation. I am proud of the doubling of investment in infrastructure—most particularly the NBN but also road, rail and port. All of these are very big reforms.

But there is no reform that I am prouder of than what this government is doing not just in skills and training—including the $3 billion on the table in the last budget—but in education more generally. We have got an additional 150,000 students in our tertiary system. It is about what we are doing and will continue to do in our schools, both primary and secondary. Nothing matters more to our future prosperity than the investment in the education of our young people, and that comes through primary and secondary education. In those areas, in those schools, not only do we get the productivity of the future, what we get is opportunity for all of our students.

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