Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

In respect of the question asked by the member for Herbert, apparently the new black in this parliament now is the government applauding itself, not just in rhetorical terms but in physical terms. The member for Adelaide, the shadow minister for education, deeply regrets not being able to be here, because she particularly enjoys sparring with the Minister for Education during consideration in detail. She would desperately like to be here, but she and all members on our side understand that the education part of this budget will be assessed by parents, by students, by teachers, by early childhood educators against the very clear promises that the Prime Minister and the Minister for Education made during the last election campaign. They remember it very clearly—they remember the Prime Minister saying that there would be no cuts to education. They remember the Prime Minister saying at a press conference during the election campaign, or just before it started, that the Liberal-National coalition was 'on an absolute unity ticket when it comes to school funding' and the minister, then the shadow minister, said only a week or two before the election:

So you can vote Liberal or Labor and you'll get exactly the same amount of funding for your school.

The Liberal Party even went so far as to prepare bunting and other election material to put up at polling booths—I do not think it came as far as Port Adelaide but I have certainly heard that it went to many seats—promising voters as they walked into the ballot box that the Liberal Party, if elected to government, would deliver exactly the same dollars to state schools, to independent schools and to Catholic schools as had been set out in the agreements negotiated in the aftermath of the Gonski agreement.

So educators, parents, students and the general community are looking at this budget. It was presented, by the Prime Minister and the besieged Treasurer, as a kinder, softer and gentler budget than the 2014 budget—not that that was a hard bar to get over—and yet, when we look at the education portfolio, all of the worst aspects of the last year's budget are still there. The $100,000 degrees are still there. This minister, as will be explored in more detail during this consideration in detail, is hell-bent on achieving the university reforms that were rejected so fulsomely by the Australian community last year and by the Senate as well. In school funding, the $30 billion or so of cuts that were proudly proclaimed in the 2014 budget papers presented and published by the government are still there. They are still there—and they are there in full colour now, after the 2015 budget, because from 2018 onwards the Commonwealth will only index school funding to the tune of CPI, putting the lie to the election posters that were bedraggled through so many different electorates—not mine, for reasons I still do not understand; you could not come at publishing them down in Port Adelaide, but they were everywhere else—saying that not a single dollar would be different under a Liberal government. But we know that only CPI indexation will apply from 2018.

Everyone who has even a passing acquaintance with the education system knows that this will have a very serious impact on the ability of schools, school managers and teachers to provide the best possible education for Australian students. The National Catholic Education Commission has said that indexation at CPI levels will lead to very serious impacts. Fees will rise, they have said, and schools may well close, as a direct result of the breach of that solemn promise that the minister and the Prime Minister made, while in opposition, to the Australian people, particularly to Australian school communities, that there would be no difference under a Liberal government to the arrangements that were being put in place in the later period of the Labor government.

So I think we would all like to know, given that the minister, under this 'kinder, gentler' budget, has kept every single aspect of the awful budget from last year in the education portfolio: what sort of election bunting is he proposing for 2016?

See this speech in context