Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

If you want to see the difference between the two major parties writ large, look at education. Look at high school retention rates, for example. During the 12 years of the Hawke-Keating government they rose from around 40 per cent to close to 80 per cent. Then in the next 12 years, under the Howard government, they essentially stagnated. For 12 years children started school and finished school in 12 years. In the biggest global boom in modern memory, at a time when you really could make a difference, they did not. Retention rates stagnated.

We were elected in 2007 and once again began the hard process of increasing retention rates through the Gonski reform, trade training in schools and a number of other reforms. But now the conservatives are back and it is back to the bad old days. We once again have a government with a laissez faire attitude to education, which simply will not do the hard work when it comes to educating our children.

You can tell by the contempt they showed for parents and schools in the lead-up to the election, the deliberate deception in the statements they made that there was a unity ticket on education, that there would be no cuts to education and that there was not a sliver of light between the two parties. They said that, whatever your school would get under Labor, it would get the same under the Liberals. This was all deliberate deception, done because they knew parents cared about the education of their children. It was done in order to get elected and it is a demonstration of absolute contempt for Australian families. You can tell that by the reality of their approach, the total lack of concern about how federal education dollars are spent or not spent once they leave the federal coffers and go to the states.

The Australian Education Amendment (School Funding Guarantee) Bill 2014 addresses a peculiarity of our state-federal system and one that was addressed in Labor's Gonski agreements with the states—the practice of federal governments giving money to the states and the states saying, 'Thank you very much,' and taking money out of the same area. The federal government puts money into the bucket for education and state governments punch holes in the bottom and siphon money out for other purposes.

That is why when Labor negotiated the Gonski agreements we made extra federal funding conditional on states putting in more money as well. Gonski was about lifting every boat, creating greater transparency in funding between state and federal governments, removing the potential for the blame game, increasing contributions from both levels of government and creating certainty for schools and certainty for states in planning appropriate resources, including teacher numbers and infrastructure.

Now this Abbott government has ripped away all that certainty by removing the obligation of state governments to increase their funding or even to not decrease it. We have already seen the results. We have seen cuts to education budgets in Western Australia and the Northern Territory. In the Northern Territory, there have been $47 million worth of cuts and 130 teachers gone. In Western Australia, already there have been $183 million worth of cuts, with 700 educational professionals gone.

This bill attempts to reinstate the certainty for parents, schools and state governments. It requires the minister to be satisfied that a state or territory will not reduce or has not reduced its education budget before federal school funding is provided to states and territories. This is a no-brainer. Without this safeguard, the federal government simply does not have the power to influence the quality of education.

Labor created the Gonski reforms, for school funding based on need, and we have drafted this bill in the wake of the Liberals' broken promises. Before the election, they said they were on a unity ticket with Labor, that no school would be worse off under their proposals. After the election we saw this Liberal government failing to keep its promises to students, to parents, to teachers and to school communities.

It has been encouraging to see in recent weeks that some states still recognise the Gonski agreement, that it delivered the best opportunity for their children, and we have seen the New South Wales, Victorian, South Australian and ACT governments honour their funding commitments for the fifth year of the Gonski agreement in their budgets. These states have called on Tony Abbott to honour his pre-election promise not to cut education funding. They have called on Tony Abbott to keep his word, and so do we. Passing this bill will go part of the way to meeting those promises.

Debate adjourned.

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