Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to be able to tell the member for Swan that we are delivering better outcomes for school students across Australia through this budget. We are doing it by funding our election commitments to the letter, whether they are through teacher quality, a robust curriculum, principal and school autonomy or parental engagement. We are funding all of those commitments to the letter.

Even better, we are keeping the commitment we made before the election that we would fund the new school funding model in exactly the same way as Labor for the next four years and that is what we are doing. We have also put $1.2 billion back into school funding which the Leader of the Opposition took out when he was the ninth Minister for Education in the previous government.

The Leader of the Opposition would like the people to forget that. They would like the Australian people to have the memory of a goldfish, as the Leader of the Opposition has. But we will not forget and we will keep reminding the Australian public that the Leader of the Opposition removed school funding and we have put it back. Ironically, we are spending more in 2017 on school funding than Labor would have if they had been re-elected.

On Thursday night, the Leader of the Opposition will have his opportunity to fess up. He will have to stop being the No. 1 whinger in Australia. He will have to start having solutions rather than being all complaint and no responsibility. If No. 1 whinger in Australia were a reality TV show, there would be no point in any other contestant entering it—because if Bill Shorten entered it, he would win it! But on Thursday night the Leader of the Opposition has an opportunity—

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