Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this matter of public importance about the immediate need for bipartisan support to improve our schools and give our children a better future. The first thing I will say is that this MPI is typical of the government. So obsessed with spin over substance, they have put up an MPI about the need to improve our schools and give our kids a better future. Talk about the bleeding obvious. Of course we the coalition support our kids and want a better future. It is a given.

What the Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth needs to do is to come into this chamber and explain to the parliament why the government is wasting our time on pointless politics and spin instead of actually getting down to the job of improving education in Australia. This whole debate reminds me of an article written about the federal government by a WA public servant in 2010 which argued that 'an education policy that can't be delivered isn't worth the paper it's written on'. Sadly, the government still does not seem to understand this, even after four years of waste and education policy stuff-ups. The government is not shy when it comes to flashy policy announcements and big press conferences on the subject. But, when it comes to actually delivering, this is a government that time and time again is found wanting. In that article, a story was used to illustrate the importance of implementation in the policy process, and I will repeat it for the benefit of the members present and for the young people whom the member for Kingston acknowledged earlier in the chamber.

It is the story of the owl and the mouse. The mouse, faced with the constant threat posed by other animals in the forest, asked the owl how he could avoid being eaten. The wise old owl, known as the smartest animal in the forest, replied that the best way would be to join him atop one of the branches of the many trees high above the forest floor. The mouse saw the wisdom of the owl's thinking and over the next few days proceeded to try everything he could to get to that lofty branch. He clawed, jumped up and climbed his way up the tree but never got very far before falling back to the ground. Weary and beaten, the mouse finally asked the owl how he could get up to the branch. The owl replied that he was just the policy person and did not concern himself with implementation.

The moral of the story is that it is not enough for the government just to say it will do things—to say that every child will get a laptop or that the number of training colleges should be increased. The real worth for Australia is in actually delivering on those promises. The laptops were raised by members opposite in terms of how good they think that laptop program is. I would just remind them of some of the waste involved with that. There was a particular public school in Western Australia where it was compulsory for every student to have their own laptops. But this government, in its wisdom, still delivered over 300 laptops to that school, and I think they are still sitting in their boxes, because they did not need them: 'Let's not get down and make sure we work efficiently; let's just deliver a policy and a box of laptops, and we can go out and tell everyone how great we are because we've delivered laptops that probably never got used.'

Sadly, the Prime Minister doesn't seem to realise that promises actually need to be delivered on. As with the carbon tax, which is supposed to be an environmental policy but fails to stop emission increases, this government has consistently placed spin and media opportunities over the need to deliver on policy. This MPI merely insults the many voices that have cautioned the government against their wasteful policy approaches over the last four to five years. The reality is that only the coalition is genuinely committed to across-the-board increases for both government and non-government schools, inclusive of full indexation, which sees funding rise by approximately six per cent per year. Every school knows that under the coalition they would not have their recurrent funding cut and every school would get real funding increases, allowing them to properly plan for the future.

We know that under modelling leaked over the weekend, one in three schools will be worse off under the government's policy, including 2,330 government schools.

Labor Senator Cameron on the ABC last night declared new taxes should be imposed, which would cost more than $26 billion. Yet again we have the government reverting to type. This is a government that thinks new taxes can substitute for good policy and, as we have seen with the carbon tax, this attitude is not limited to the education portfolio.

This government, when they cannot fix a problem, just throws money at it—and, when that does not work, they blame someone else. After the four biggest budget deficits in Australia's history, the government have already cooked the books to claim their imaginary surplus next year. It would not be surprising if the government put new spending measures on the nation's credit card to prop up their education promises. The Australian public can be confident that the coalition will not cut funding for any schools, and that we will give those schools the certainty they need to plan for the future. Even if the government were to deliver the additional $5 billion a year, in 2009 dollars, proposed by the Gonski review, 3,254, or one-third of all schools, would be worse off, including 2,330 public schools.

The government are not being upfront with the public. They are not even talking to their state counterparts. I refer to comments made by the WA education minister, Peter Collier, who said today:

I am getting more than a little frustrated with the federal government! We have one of the most significant changes to funding in education on the horizon through the Gonski Report and the states are being informed of federal policies through the media.

I think it is often glossed over by this government that it is actually the states who own, operate and primarily fund state government schools, yet we see that even the states are being kept in the dark on education reform. Perhaps the government is not communicating with Minister Collier to avoid revealing the $305 million funding to be cut from WA, hitting hundreds of public, Catholic and independent schools. That was reported over the weekend. If those reports are true, it would appear the federal government is again treating my home state of WA as a cash-cow for a federal government spending binge. According to the reports, WA is listed as the only state who will lose cash overall, with 688 schools to potentially emerge as losers.

Over the weekend, the Sunday Telegraph went as far as to describe the debate as having an Alice-in-Wonderland quality, as it said:

… down, down the rabbit hole, talk of fairness, lollipops, teacher quality and promises of a "no loser" policy abound—

Given the spin and political games played by the government on this issue I would say the Sunday Telegraphcould be forgiven by being a little bit cynical of the government's policy direction. Much of the education policy debate is skewed by popular myths put out there about school funding. Proponents of the government's policies often use biased statistics to misrepresent the funding situation to claim that Australia lags behind the OECD average on overall school education funding. The reality is that, when parental contributions are included, Australia spends around the equivalent of 3.6 per cent of GDP on school education, a total investment only marginally below the OECD average of 3.8 per cent.

Much of the reporting in the media does not fairly represent the state-school funding situation. The statistics do not take into account the state and territory funding available to state government schools. Government schools receive 78.7 per cent of the total funding from all governments and educate 66 per cent of all students in Australia. Non-government schools, on the other hand, receive 22 per cent of funding and educate 34 per cent of students.

Often the claim is made by those who want to run our school system down that Australia is a low-equity country in comparison to the OECD. Again, this is a false claim. Since 2003 Australia's PISA results have been in the high-equity and high-performance quadrant. As is common with those government members who cut their teeth as far-left political activists when at university, the Prime Minister often frames education debate through a social-equality lens. This obsession by the government over many years continues to misdirect policy priorities, as the government pursues an ideology out of fashion since the 1980s instead of good policy. This is why we often see reports of funding cuts for private schools, as the government itches to return to a divisive 'class war' education policy.

The Gonski report itself states that 86 to 87 per cent of student performance is linked to factors other than socioeconomic status, such as the quality of the teachers, parental engagement, the school and principal autonomy. The coalition believes that, while additional support to disadvantaged students is important, it is also equally important to concentrate on the other policy areas known to be linked to student performance. There will be a clear choice for Australians at the next election: sincere, practical policy proposals from the coalition that do not just look good on paper but are able to be implemented, verses a record of waste and political trickery from this government. Thank you.

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