Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great opportunity for me and for my colleagues to examine the education and training portfolio budget, but I want to start by making a few general comments in response to the Minister representing the Minister for Education and Training. We, of course, on this side, have no objection to the emphasis on STEM—on science, technology, engineering and maths, as you say. It has been a central part of our education policy both in government and in opposition. We are very great supporters of the emphasis on teacher quality. We know that the most important thing you can do to improve standards in our classrooms is to invest in supporting teachers not just in their early years of training but right throughout their professional lives, when teachers seek professional development and career support.

Aside from the areas the minister was talking about where there is such clear agreement, there are also some areas of quite stark disagreement. This portfolio budget shows us where some of those areas of disagreement are. The minister spoke about disability funding. This is a particular failure of this government. After repeated promises by this minister and the previous education minister that the issue of the disability loading for schools would be resolved, we still see no resolution in sight. The minister talked about removing inequities in our schooling system. The only inequity that the minister could be proud of, the only equal opportunity approach that the government is taking, is to cut funding from every school in every system in every state. These portfolio budget papers show a commitment to a continuation of the $29 billion of cuts that we saw in the Abbott-Hockey budget.

Budgets are about choices. They are about priorities. We know that this government has made a choice to prioritise tax cuts for big business, including the four big banks, over properly investing in our children's education. It has made this pointless expenditure on the big end of town a bigger priority than our kids' education at schools, at universities, at preschools and—as my colleague will discuss—in vocational education. If we want to be a high-wage, First World economy with a generous social safety net—as the Prime Minister said again in question time today—then we need to invest in education. OECD evidence and other evidence from the Australian Workforce and Productivity Agency and the Economic Society of Australia all show that this investment is the best return we can get.

This appropriations bill entrenches the $29 billion of cuts, including a $3.8 billion cut in years 5 and 6 of Gonski—an average of around $3 million in schools. We would like to know why the government believes that a tax cut for some of the biggest businesses in the country is more important than properly investing in our schools and why the government is not prepared to instead, for example, adopt Labor's negative gearing and capital gains tax policies, which would more than cover any additional costs of the school education funding reforms that we would like to see.

I want to make a few very brief comments on universities before I will, unfortunately, run out of time. This budget cuts more than $2½ billion from universities over four years and $13½ billion over 10 years. Some of that will come from very important areas that ensure higher standards in our universities, such as the $18 million cut by abolishing the highly effective Office of Learning and Teaching, which was created to help improve teaching excellence and innovation and support student retention in our universities. There is also the $152.2 million cut over four years—a cut of 40 per cent by 2019—from the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program. We are absolutely committed to getting more kids who will be the first in their family to attend university or to be able to go to university. These are kids from poorer backgrounds—in particular, from low-SES communities and regional areas. We have seen this work. The Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program has helped. We have seen Indigenous student numbers up by 26 per cent, regional student numbers up by 30 per cent and 36,000 extra kids from low-income families going to university. So why is this government cutting this highly successful Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program, which has helped so many people from disadvantaged backgrounds? After 25 reviews, is another review the best thing that this government can think of for our university sector?

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