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

Unfortunately, I am genuinely appalled by the measures which are contained within this government's budget and which we now see in the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2014-15 and related bills before this parliament for debate.

Of course, it is not unusual for people on either sides of the chamber to have slightly different priorities—to have some different ideas about where we should place emphasis and funding. But it is unusual for us to see a budget of the level of cruelty which we see in this budget: a budget which has so many proposals outlining just how out of touch this government is and a budget that is so full of wrong priorities, of inconsistencies and of short-sighted vicious measures which will affect those who are most vulnerable in our community.

There are many measures in this budget which will have a devastating impact on the area that I am lucky enough to represent in this parliament, being the great seat of Adelaide. I will be taking other opportunities to outline specifically some of those measures that will affect our community, that will affect our local pensioners, that will affect our local families and that will affect all of those who are sick and in need of our fantastic universal healthcare system.

But during this particular contribution I want to focus on one area of this budget where I think it outlines as much as any other just how short-sighted this government are and just how deceitful this government were in the lead-up to the election, saying one thing and now doing the complete opposite. That is in the area of education, because education gets absolutely smashed in this budget. This is from early childhood education—where those opposite are now refusing to commit to ongoing federal funding for our preschool system, despite all of the research and all of the evidence that shows that this is the most effective way to make a positive impact on the life of that individual—to our school system, which I am going to address in some detail in a moment, and right through to the higher education system, where what this government proposes is to lock out those from low- and middle-income families—'Let's shut the doors to our universities'—by pushing fees to skyrocket up and by ensuring that debts increase faster than they previously would have on these now massively increased fees and, to top it all off, to make sure that those massively increased fees that are increasing even quicker due to their indexation changes, need to be paid back more quickly. That is the proposal that we have from those opposite to try and make this nation the smart country that we can be.

When it comes to early childhood education, when it comes to schools and when it comes to higher education I will tell you very clearly what our side of the parliament believes. We absolutely believe that investing in education and having a quality education system is the No. 1 most effective way that you can make sure that children have greater opportunities than their parents had and their grandparents had before them. This is the way that we transform our nation; this is the way that we make sure that we are a smarter, more productive and prosperous nation into the future.

But those opposite clearly take a different view. When it comes to education, this is a budget that very clearly fits the Abbott template. That template is: step No. 1—say whatever it takes to the Australian population before the election; step No. 2—break each and every one of those commitments after the election; and, step No. 3—unfairly punish the people who can least afford it. That is what we have seen all throughout this budget when it comes to education.

Just to refresh: before the election we heard some very different messages from this government when it came to education. We saw the now Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, publicly claiming to be on a 'absolute unity ticket' with Labor on school funding. We heard the now education minister saying to the Australian public, 'You can vote Liberal or Labor and you will get exactly the same funding for your school.' And we saw on polling day at the election booths around this nation huge oversized posters making sure that the last thing that voters learnt before they went into the polling booth was from these posters, which said, 'Liberals will match Labor's school funding dollar for dollar.'

Well, what a disgrace! What a disgrace for you to deceive the Australian public to that extent. Tried to convince everyone of the unity ticket and tried to convince everyone that there would not be major changes and cuts to our schools, to our early childhood services and to our universities, because we were all on the one ticket of believing that we needed to improve our education system. Instead, what do we see just months later in the very first budget from this very same government and these very same individuals, who were out there saying this? What do we see in their first budget? We see the biggest cut to schools in this nation's history! We see the $30 billion to be ripped out of Australian schools, making sure that, in fact, every school and every student will be worse off as a result of the fact that they trusted this government to stay to their word and to improve our schools.

What we have seen is that years five and six of the Gonski funding have been dumped, leaving schools $6½ billion worse off in federal funding alone. This comes on top of this government's earlier measure to rip a billion dollars out of the trades training centres program, building trades training centres in our schools so that we could make sure that this nation was equipped with the skills that we need for our future workforce—a billion dollars already gone, the program scrapped entirely.

Now what we see in this budget is very clearly why when this government has been asked to repeat the guarantees that they were happy to make before the election—when they have been asked in this parliament if they will repeat the guarantee that no school will be worse off—they have absolutely refused to do so.

In this budget we see the reason why they had no choice but to walk away from that guarantee. In this budget we learn that they have not only thrown aside the Gonski reforms, the biggest review into Australia's school system in over 40 years. They have just tossed that aside because, apparently, Education Minister Pyne knows better than all of the experts, all of the academics, all of the principals, all of the teachers, all of the students and all of the parents who took part in the biggest review we have got to find the solutions for our education system. But they have not just thrown aside the Commonwealth commitment. What they have also done is that, whilst they promised they would honour the agreements that were made before the election, they have now come out and said, 'Well, actually, we're throwing away those conditions that said that in order for the states to receive federal funding they had to guarantee that they too would boost their funding to their education systems.' In fact, under those agreements the states had to put in an extra $1 for every extra $2 of federal funding they received. No more—meaning every school is worse off.

They have also let the states off the hook when it comes to guaranteeing indexation rates. So what we see right now is that right across Australia this government, this Prime Minister, has given every state and territory government a green light to start cutting school funding. When we were meant to be in a situation where principals were looking at how they were going to use additional resources to improve their schools, we now have them sitting around scratching their heads and trying to work out what they are going to cut as a result of this government's ridiculously short-sighted measures.

Not content with that, they also want to give a bit of provocation to make sure that those cuts start soon and that they start hard. Just over 12 months ago the now education minister was out there saying that indexation of schools at three per cent was a frightening prospect. He was saying that that it could not possibly assist our Australian education sector to be of the quality that it deserves to be. But what has this budget done? This budget has now set in stone an indexation rate at just CPI, which is currently at 2.5 per cent. The education minister who said the prospect of three per cent indexation was 'frightening' has now outlined just 2.5 per cent indexation for our schools. What that means in real terms is a very real cut. We know that the cost of delivering education is running at over five per cent. So what the education minister described as frightening he has outdone by something that is truly terrifying.

In particular I want to outline one of the measures which I think is the most appalling by this government as it betrays some of the most vulnerable Australians, and that is children with a disability. I know from my discussions with principals right around Australia that one of the most immediate challenges they face and the most common funding concern raised with me is support for children with disability. We know that more and more students with disability are moving into our schools right across the community. This is a wonderful change and one which I hope will continue to accelerate in coming years. But, to date, our school systems have largely failed to properly and consistently identify students with disability, let alone provide them with the equal educational opportunities that they absolutely deserve.

When Labor set out to define the needs based funding loading for the students, adequate information was simply not available. We were up-front with the community about that. How many children need additional support? What level of support do they need? How many teachers are appropriately qualified to deliver this support? What training is needed to get them there? And exactly what resourcing is required to ensure that every student gets the support that they need in every school in Australia? These questions could not and, sadly still, cannot be accurately answered. But in government we set out to come up with a solution to this problem, working with school systems to fix it. We set out to collect the data, to standardise the definitions and implement a properly formed loading to support students with disability from 2015, and in the meantime interim funding was put in place.

Those opposite have said that they support this. They have said it was a bipartisan commitment to the 2015 time line and to delivering the necessary resources once that need had been properly defined. So a new loading was supposedly to be rolled out from the beginning of the school year in 2015 with additional resources. It is interesting to ask: what additional funding did this government then put in this budget to support this? Absolutely nothing. In fact, what they did was they cut the more support for students with disability funding that was in the budget and now they have delayed those crucial time frames, meaning that many of the students out there who most need this parliament to be standing up and fighting for their access to quality educational support have been cruelly left behind by this government that has just placed it in the too hard basket.

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