Jane Prentice (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Okay. The Labor Party continue to deliberately scare the Australian people. They repeat their scaremongering in the hope of being taken seriously, and repeatedly they will achieve the same result: failure. The reality is that funding for education, opportunities for young people and the quality of our schools, training institutions and universities are all going up under the coalition government. Those opposite must be on some powerful hallucinogens and living in an alternate universe if they cannot understand that the coalition government has, in fact, put more funding into schools than the previous Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments did.

The coalition government is expanding opportunities for more people to study through our reforms to higher education. Australian universities will be able to compete with the best in the world by having the freedom to innovate, a greater ability to invest in world class research, and the capacity and flexibility to respond to the needs of students and business. Education is our fourth largest export—after coal, gold and iron ore. Our universities have been held back and are starting to be outdone by our neighbouring countries, meaning fewer students are coming to Australia and, therefore, billions of dollars annually are being removed from our economy.

The government's education plans will help our    universities become more competitive with those in the United States and Europe. I would like to stress again that, contrary to the scaremongering by Labor and the Greens, the coalition has not cut any funding to schools. In fact, we have increased funding to schools by $1.2 billion in the forward estimates—after Labor snuck it out in the lead-up to the last election to hide the true state of their budget disaster.

The $50 billion dollars alluded to by Labor was never in the budget. It was a pie-in-the-sky pipedream of funding Australia could never afford and was never budgeted. The legacy of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments is that we are now wasting $1 billion a month paying interest for their debt—money that would be better spent on health and education but, because of Labor's poor and reckless financial mismanagement, the priority must be to fix the economy. You cannot fix the economy without fixing the budget.

The coalition reforms to education mean that our nation has a future as a country with universities of such calibre as to rate in the top 20 worldwide—to be among the class of universities such as Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge. But it doesn't stop there. Not only are these reforms removing the glass ceiling for our top universities; they are allowing all of our universities to focus on delivering the courses and programs they do best.

These reforms will expand opportunities for students who would not otherwise have gone on to higher education. By expanding the demand-driven Commonwealth funding system for students studying for higher education diplomas, advanced diplomas and associate degrees, more students will have the opportunity to undertake the level of higher education that is right for them.

The massive expansion of the Commonwealth scholarships initiative will see more opportunities for students from low socio-economic backgrounds and from regional areas. For the first time in our nation's history, the Australian government will provide for all students in all higher education institutions, be they universities, colleges or those TAFEs registered as higher education providers, whether in the cities or the bush. Under these reforms, the days of Australians having a limited choice in high-quality education will be gone.

To be at the forefront of this new initiative to change our education system for the better is truly exciting, but these initiatives are being threatened by the small-mindedness and selfishness of those opposite to stand in the way of improving our education system. On this side of the chamber, we believe in strengthening our education to provide our future generations of Australians greater opportunities and access to genuine world-class education.

We believe that it is our most fundamental duty as parents, adults and community leaders to give our children, our future generations, the best opportunities and best potential for success. It is a shame that those opposite want to deny these opportunities for future generations. They continue to stick their heads in the sand and deny that the reason the budget needs repair is as a direct result of their financial incompetence—the greatest financial deterioration in our country's history.

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