Kate Ellis (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

But on this particular occasion, I say to him that if he wants to prove the point that this is not a government that is only focused on North Shore Sydney, that this is not a government that has absolutely and totally overlooked South Australia, then there is no reason why this funding, which is apparently on its way, will not ensure that the Torrens to Torrens road upgrade of South Road gets back underway and that we see this project delivered for the community that I am so proud to represent.

We know that the economic case stacks up. We know that there is far more policy rationale for doing this than the Darlington upgrade, which politics has persuaded the government to prioritise instead. We know that it is long overdue and we know that it will not just benefit South Road; it will not just benefit those who are using it as a corridor—the trucks and the like—but it will actually benefit the whole area. All the studies have shown that it will decrease massively the amount of traffic which is utilising Churchill Road and a number of other areas.

So whether it is on fighting for the South Road upgrade or whether it is on fighting for the funding which the Abbott government has already stripped away from the Adelaide community, I am delighted to be here to fight for those residents and to make sure that we continue to see real results.

Of course, I have been given a task on top of just looking after the people of Adelaide, and that is to serve as Labor's shadow minister for education and early childhood. They are two areas that I am deeply passionate about; in fact, the area of education was the very area which inspired me to look towards politics, knowing that education has the power to transform individual lives more than any other area of investment. It is a job that I take on with quite a sense of responsibility because I am incredibly proud of the huge amount of progress that we made in the education area under the Rudd and Gillard governments.

This was an area that was transformed. We saw new policies come into place: a national curriculum, which had been talked about for so long, finally became a reality; we could shine a light on school performance through national testing and making results available through accountability at a school level; and, importantly, we undertook the biggest review of the Australian school education system in over 40 years, under the panel led by David Gonski. Throughout that process, we had those opposite saying: 'There is no problem. There is no equity issue in Australian schools. There is nothing to see here; the funding model is not broken.' But, of course, the Australian public knew better. The Australian public sees the overwhelming evidence that there is far too big a gap between those schools which are high performing and those schools which are struggling, that this is a gap which is increasing.

There is far too big a gap between the performance of a student who is enrolled at a metropolitan school and one who happens to live in country Australia. There are far too many huge equity gaps in the Australian education system, and the Australian public know that, because whether you are a student, a teacher or a parent you see each and every day what is happening in our school system.

We saw on almost the eve of the election those opposite finally recognising that this was a critically important issue to the Australian public. So what did they do? They had a total reversal of policy, where they came out and declared that they had seen the light—they, too, agreed that we needed to see these school reforms. And in what has already been shown to be absolutely the biggest fraud committed on the Australian public, we now see that that was just not the case. They stood up—and not just on one occasion but time and time again—like the now Prime Minister, talking about how he was on a 'unity ticket' with Labor when it came to school funding, and the now education minister, saying:

You can vote Liberal or Labor and you'll get exactly the same amount of funding for your school.

He said, 'Well, we've said that we will adopt the new school funding model from 1 January next year for the next four years. So, it yes, we've accepted that there is a new school funding model.' The Prime Minister also said:

So, we will honour the agreements that Labor has entered into. We will match the offers that Labor has made.

The minister also said, 'Funding will be the same under the coalition as under the Labor Party.'

What is truly shameful from this government is that they stood at polling booths around Australia saying this. They had posters, 'Your school will receive the same amount of funding under Liberal or Labor.' But we already know that that is absolutely not true, and it was a sham that they tried to pull on the Australian public. It is our job on this side of the House to say: 'We will not give up on these reforms. We know that our school system is too important to let those opposite just throw away all of the progress that has been made.' But what we will also do is to point out, each and every day, to those who still come in here crying about broken promises on carbon tax, that every pamphlet they sent out to their communities and every sign in a polling booth about school funding has been shown to be utterly false in the most disgusting attempt to trick the Australian public that I think we have probably ever seen.

We now know that there is a huge difference in the amount of funding that schools will get under this government. What we were talking about under Labor's Gonski reforms would see $14.65 billion in additional funding flowing to Australian schools. Under the model put forward by those opposite, that figure is just $2.8 billion. Worse than that, those opposite, who claimed that there would be 'no difference in the amount of funding that your school would get', have then come in and said, 'Actually, we're going to throw away all of the conditions that were placed on state governments.' Even though our reforms had finally changed a system that saw too many state governments cutting funding to schools, not keeping up with indexation and not making co-contributions for additional federal funds, those opposite have come in and said, 'Yes, we'll send out a no-strings-attached blank cheque to the state governments but we will do absolutely nothing to stop them from cutting from their school education budgets the same amount in additional money that they're getting—or, indeed, more.' The government have said that they will do nothing to require state governments to put in co-contributions for the dollars in federal funding that they have received, which shows that there is absolutely no way that any member of the government, any of those opposite, can repeat the promises that they made at polling booths on election day. We have seen it from the Prime Minister. We have seen it from the education minister. They can no longer say, 'Your school will receive the same amount of funding under us,' as the school would have under the Labor Party, because they know that it was a sham the entire time.

We also heard that there would be no cuts to education, yet we have seen $1 billion stripped from the trade-training centres program—because, at a time when we are losing jobs, at a time when we are seeing youth unemployment, those opposite think it is a smart idea to cut the very programs that were put in place to skill young Australians. And now there are alarm bells ringing about the Youth Connections program, a program that was put in place to help young Australians who are at risk of being disengaged and falling out of our education or employment systems to stay engaged. There are huge question marks about whether those opposite are just going to cut another program.

I say to all members of this House: it is our responsibility to fight against the youth unemployment figures that we are seeing in this nation. Now, I do not claim that there is one silver bullet that is going to turn that around—and those opposite are being dishonest if they claim that there is—but I do say that you do not keep a single young person in employment by cutting the programs that are already in place to try and support them. There is absolutely no rationale for that. On this cut and on a range of other cuts, I am proud to be here in the parliament representing the very good voters of Adelaide, and I pledge to work my hardest each and every day to do just that.

See this speech in context