Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Bass who, like Labor members on this side, has seen such incredible investment in education in his electorate: $86 million, 25 classrooms, seven libraries, seven science or language centres refurbished, four trades training centres, eight schools benefiting in Bass, 7,200 families benefiting from the Labor schoolkids bonus that Mr Abbott wants to take away. So the budget did make a clear choice about investing in a national plan for school improvement. We choose to invest $9.8 billion in the future. Add that to states' investment and you will get over $14 billion in additional investment in schools around Australia linked to the reforms that we know make such a big difference in schools. So I welcome the Tasmanian Labor government's decision to allocate some extra resource funding in the state budget for school reforms. If they agree on a national plan for school improvement with the Commonwealth with the amounts that we put in here, Tasmanian schools would see about an extra $400 million in funding over the future for things like literacy and numeracy coaches, homework clubs and the like, things that are entirely geared to making sure that Tasmania has got a well-trained, well-educated workforce for the high-skilled jobs of the future.

I am asked about the impact on this investment and what happens if it does not flow, which of course is the policy of those opposite. The fact is that Tasmanian students will not get that support under Mr Abbott's proposals at the moment. There has been a lot of confusion about the opposition's views on education and the National Plan for School Improvement but I could not help but notice their discussion paper called Building a strong, prosperous Tasmania. The Leader of the Opposition put together a working group, went down to Tasmania and listened to the community to come up with a vision for the future.

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