Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

The need to suspend standing orders to deal with the matter before the chair is more urgent than ever. Since the time this motion was first moved in this chamber, the following words have been said by Senator Abetz in the other place: 'You might actually find some schools are worse off courtesy of various state government decisions.' They are the words that those in this chamber wanted to avoid, but everybody who has a relationship with a school, everybody who cares about a child's education around Australia, knows exactly what is going on with the weasel words that were used by the Prime Minister immediately before question time today.

The guarantees that were given—and this is why it is so urgent—time and time again prior to the election were guarantees that no school would be worse off. They were guarantees that did not say, 'not worse off because of us, but we'll let the states do what they want'. At the exact same time that you have state governments in places like the Northern Territory and Queensland firing teachers and closing down schools, the games that will be played as a result of the announcements made today by the Prime Minister are not lost on anyone—not anyone at all—and it is urgent that we bring this issue on. For a government that promised to be a government of no surprises and no excuses, we have seen the exact opposite.

It takes a very special Liberal Prime Minister to have a bad interview on Andrew Bolt's program—not many people can achieve that. Yesterday we heard from the Prime Minister, 'I think Christopher said schools would get the same amount of money—'schools', plural—will get the same amount of money.' Let us have a look at that little word game and see that it is indeed urgent for us to bring this debate on now within the parliament, because it was not the Leader of the House, the Minister for Education, who was using Leader of the Opposition letterhead before the election. When that statement was made we had the words: 'We want to end the uncertainty by guaranteeing that no school will be worse off over the forward estimates period.' So maybe he can say to Andrew Bolt, 'Well, that's what Christopher meant,' but everybody knows what the Prime Minister meant. Everybody knows the guarantee that the Prime Minister was giving and everybody knows now that the Prime Minister did not mean a word of it when he said that to the Australian people.

We then had, from the Leader of the House, the Minister for Education, on his own letterhead, in a media release: 'Every single school'—that is an unusual way to describe a plural, I have to say—'in Australia will receive exactly the same Commonwealth funding over the next four years whether there is a Liberal or Labor government after September 7.'

We then go back to letterhead that came out from the Prime Minister when he was Leader of the Opposition, when he did a joint media conference with Barry O'Farrell—hasn't that relationship gone well!—and the Leader of the House, where the Leader of the House, now Minister for Education, said, 'You can vote Liberal or Labor and you will get exactly the same amount of funding for your school.' There is no line there saying, 'Oh, but if the states make the cut it won't be our fault.' There is no line there saying, 'Oh, but we are going to give them permission to do exactly what they want.' As published in TheSydney Morning Herald, the then shadow minister for education and now Minister for Education said:

… no school will be worse off, whether it is a Liberal or Labor government in the next term.

This issue needs to be brought on urgently not only because of the dishonesty we have seen from those who now occupy the treasury bench in the commitments they made and promises they have now broken but also because there is no issue that drives both productivity and equity harder than decent, fair investment in the schools of the nation.

The Better Schools plan, a proud legacy of the former Labor government which at the election the coalition wanted to sidle up to so closely, actually guaranteed for the first time that we would end the debate between independent, Catholic and government systems—a debate that those opposite would love to drag us straight back to. The Australian public know the dishonesty that they are hearing from those opposite, and there should be a free vote and a free debate on that here on the floor of the parliament.

See this speech in context