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

Sometime. It is the vibe—who knows. What will be in that national agreement? We do not know. What we do know is that years of reform have been wasted because, first of all, the Liberal's first education minister, the member for Sturt, said reform was 'just red tape'. He said that states and territories can do what they like; reform is just red tape. This education minister wants to take reforms out of the legislation through the bill that is before this parliament. We are also told, incidentally, that sometime next year bilateral agreements will be sought with the states. I thought they were against state by state, territory by territory arrangements. Is that not what they have been railing against?

This bill also reflects the reduced expectations in our education system as a result of the $22 billion of cuts. This bill has cut the targets that we set. It no longer aims for Australia to be one of the top five highest-performing countries in reading, maths and science by 2025. It no longer aims for our schooling system to be considered high-quality and highly equitable by international standards by 2025, nor to halve the gap between the outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and other students by 2020. After all their talk about the need to reverse Australia's declining education performance, this government will not back itself to achieve better.

This bill is unfair. It abandons a needs-based, sector-blind funding model. Labor created a needs-based, sector-blind funding model because we wanted to end the divisive system-versus-system fight for funding, because it is not the system that matters—it is the child. We created needs based funding because we want to make sure that all schools have the resources they need to deliver a great education for every child. We created needs based funding because we believe that children from disadvantaged families and communities should have the best chance at succeeding in life.

But instead of properly funding all our schools, this government is giving big business a $65 billion tax cut. It is giving millionaires a tax cut. What sort of society would we be if we were to take funding away from a proper education for our schoolchildren and give that money to multinational companies and millionaires as a tax cut? This is not just robbing individual children who miss out; it is robbing our nation of the full value of the gifts and talents of every Australian child.

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