Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the motion moved by the member for Lalor, and I note that she is not even here anymore in the chamber. This is her commitment to her motion!

Can I just start with Gonski. We have this notion from across the chamber about Gonski and their commitment to Gonski. Gonski was the money we have in the budget at the moment plus an extra 17 per cent. So, whilst Labor want to talk about their commitment to Gonski, what they actually did when they were in government was give their version of what Gonski represented, which was about half of what Gonski was actually chasing. I think the Gonski report was a great document, but it seemed to me, from the bits and pieces I have read of the Gonski report, that the premise of the report was: if money were not an issue—if you did not have to worry about money—what would you do with education?

That is where Gonski came from. It was a great idea but it is one of those things where it would be different if money were not an issue, but money is an issue. No matter what you do, it comes back to money.

The member for Forde summed up our position on education. It comes down to an argument between the two sides of politics. The opposition wants to argue about the quantum of funds, whereas we would always argue that it is the quality of the placement of those funds that is important—getting the decision making closer to where it is needed, getting the decisions made close to the school and empowering school principals to make sure they have the responsibility and the right to attract the right teachers. It is about the quality of teachers and getting parents involved in their school communities. That is how you drive value for dollars.

We can continue to argue about where funds have gone, but, standing here with the member for Forde, in Queensland we are under no misapprehension about what happened to education funding at the last election. In the PEFO, just before the election, Labor took out $1.2 billion. There have been no cuts to education. What we said before the last election was that we were in lockstep with Labor over the forward estimates in relation to funding. Labor pulled that $1.2 billion but we have put it back into the system. In years five and six, Labor had no alternatives available to them because they could not afford to maintain funding. This comes down to the economy. According to Lisa Paul, the Secretary to the Commonwealth Department of Education, in the August 2013 Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook, $1.2 billion was taken out not by us, not by Christopher Pyne or Tony Abbott, but by the previous government. That represented the money that those states had not signed up to in that time.

We have to make sure that education funding is sustainable. We have to make sure that we give kids every opportunity to participate in education. I was reading on the weekend remarks by Peter Walsh, the former ALP senator and finance minister in the Hawke and Keating governments. In his valedictory speech in 1993 he predicted that we would never pay off the debt that Paul Keating had left Australia. He said that the danger we had was that first a country loses its economic sovereignty, and if you lose your economic sovereignty you lose your political sovereignty. That was the danger that Peter Walsh saw in 1993. He said we could not pay back the debt that we had then—the $96 billion that Paul Keating handed over to John Howard. Of course the Hawke-Keating governments' reforms during the eighties had a fair bit to do with this, but through hard work and diligence and making sure that we understood the issues, with Peter Costello and John Howard empowering their ministers to make sure they lived within their means, we paid off that debt. On one side of politics we are delivering for education; on the other side of politics we have these pie in the sky issues—the same is the NDIS—which will be funded so far out that we are no longer responsible for it. (Time expired)

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