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

I do not know where one begins with the member for Adelaide asking me dorothy dixer questions and then accusing the government of doing the same thing, because the consideration-in-detail process is supposed to be an opportunity to elicit detail out of the budget—out of the appropriations. The member for Adelaide has chosen to give set piece speeches in each of her contributions, with all the rhetoric that she could really save for Q&A or 7:30 or even in parliament speaking on the bills, rather than wasting the time of the Federation Chamber in consideration in detail by giving rhetorical speeches and not actually asking questions.

So if she has run out of time and not managed her time well it is because she has wasted the time of consideration-in-detail process by giving pointless and asinine speeches about the government's policies rather than actually asking questions. I suppose it is because she does not have as much experience in the opposition as she should have. But, nevertheless, I will attempt to help her with the misunderstanding that she has about how the school funding agreements work.

School funding agreements go for four years with the states and territories and the non-government sector—whether that is the Catholics or the independents. The forward estimates go for four years as well. So there is a coincidence: there is a four-year funding agreement; there are four years of forward estimates. Over the forward estimates, spending on schools increases very substantially. As I said in response to the member for Eden-Monaro's questions, spending in all schools, including recurrent and capital spending, over the next four years is: an 8.7 per cent increase in 2014-15; 8.9 per cent in 2015-16; 8.9 per cent, again, in 2016-17; and 6.6 per cent in 2017-18. So there are no cuts to school education in the federal government's budget. In fact, the opposite is true. We are increasing spending and we have our own programs such as: programs like the independent public schools initiative costing $70 million; programs like the response to whatever the curriculum review hands down; programs like $1 million a year to help us with parental engagement; and when the TEMAG, the Teacher Education Ministerial Adviser Group, hands down its report to me, funds have been set aside to be able to respond to that. So we are increasing spending.

The Labor Party's rhetoric is not matched by the reality of how they behaved in government. In the Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Outlook, the previous minister, the now Leader of the Opposition, ripped $1.2 billion out of schools. So, ironically, while the shadow minister pretends that they were funding a new school funding model, in fact in Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory they were defunding the school funding model. It took me as the Minister for Education not only to deliver a national agreement on the national school funding model over four years, bringing the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia into the model, but also to find the $1.2 billion so that the model would work. And I did so.

Beyond the next four years, the member for Adelaide likes to raise fantastic figures. I will tell her that in 2017 we will sit down with all the jurisdictions and renegotiate a new school funding agreement. That will lead to more money in 2018 and more money in 2019 because obviously spending will increase on schools in line with the CPI and enrolments. But I am not sure that the Labor Party can continue to pretend that the rivers of gold, the fantastic amounts of money that they used to talk about in government, will ever materialise, in spite of what the Leader of the Opposition said on 31 March in Perth in answer to a question from a journalist:

JOURNALIST: You have committed and you still will commit to the next election for those years five and six?

SHORTEN: Yes.

JOURNALIST: That will cost I think about $7 billion additional is that what you're prepared for that?

SHORTEN: We budgeted for this when we were in Government and furthermore, what does it cost Australia if we short change our kids?

He likes that kind of rhetoric. Unfortunately, this was not followed up. On 22 May at Moonee Ponds he was asked: 'If you're bent on restoring this funding, what's the solution for finding the savings to provide it, or would it be deficit funded?' Mr Shorten said:

We'll reveal all our policies in good time before the next election.

So he has stepped away from that commitment.

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