Karen Andrews (McPherson, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Vocational Education and Skills) Share this | Hansard source

What I would like to do at the start is put some context around this debate and to make a few things abundantly clear. Labor made unfunded, unbudgeted promises in the lead-up to the 2013 election. Those promises remain unfunded under Labor's current policies. The Labor government lost the 2013 election, which was a somewhat predictable outcome given what was happening in the lead-up to the 2013 election. As everyone would recall, Labor actually installed Mr Rudd as the Prime Minister in an effort to save the furniture—that is, to lessen the losses at the 2013 election. In the lead-up to that election when the Labor Party were facing the very real prospect of not being re-elected, they made a series of promises in education that were unfunded. They did that knowing that there was a limited prospect that they would ever have to deliver on those funding promises.

Funding is important. I do not walk away from that at all. But it is important to put some sort of context around what is happening with funding. The Commonwealth overall provides one-third of all school funding. The Commonwealth recurrent funding for schools will continue to grow, year on year, from an estimated $16.1 billion in 2016 to more than $20.2 billion in 2020. Over the last decade, Australian government per-student funding for government schools has been growing faster than state and territory government funding. State governments are actually responsible for 82 per cent of school funding for public schools and the Commonwealth provides the remaining 18 per cent of funding through to public schools. So Commonwealth funding to government schools has been growing faster than state funding to government schools.

I would like to go through the stats for my home state of Queensland. Under the coalition government, from 2014 to 2017, total funding to government schools in Queensland has been $5.2 billion. That is an increase of 47.9 per cent over that period. In fact, Queensland has had the biggest funding increase to government schools in Australia. Funding is important. I think we on this side of the House can demonstrate very clearly that, under the coalition government, funding has increased year on year.

When I last spoke on an MPI on a very similar subject matter I gave a message to the parents here in Australia. My message was very simple—that their kids would get a much better quality education under a coalition government than they would ever get under a Labor government. It was true when I made that statement several weeks ago; it is true now. It will be true next week, next month and next year. In 10 years time, it will be true. I am very confident of what I am saying because we on this side of the House are very focused on achieving a quality outcome in education based on evidence, not knee-jerk responses, and taking on board many, many of the comments from stakeholders that we have heard from not just in the last six months but over a period of years.

We have released a report—the Quality schools, quality outcomes paper. It actually goes through very clearly the five key areas that we are focused on into the future. I will run through those very quickly and then I will come back and talk about them. These are the five key areas that we as a government are focused on.

The first area is boosting literacy, numeracy and STEM performance. The second area is teaching and school leadership.

Mr Conroy interjecting—

Mr Littleproud interjecting—

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