Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak on the Australian Education Amendment Bill. We can do nothing in this place that is more important than making sure our children get a quality education. No matter where they come from or how much their parents earn, every Australian child should be able to access the school that they deserve and need. That way we give our schoolchildren the best possible start in life. But, it is an investment in our future. We are never going to beat our competitors in South-East Asia and Asia or Africa or indeed South America or other places on the basis of driving down wages; we are going to beat them with the creativity, ingenuity, skills, talents and abilities of our people, which we will foster in education, from preschool through primary school, high school and tertiary education. This is why the Labor Party has consistently fought for Australia to have the best education system in the world. It is why we introduced the original Gonski reforms, to give every student, no matter what their circumstances, access to an excellent school experience; it is why we enacted the Schooling Resource Standard, to establish clearly and definitively the level of funding required for schools to deliver a first-rate education; and it is why we will today fight against this government's disgraceful attempt to drag school funding levels down through its sham of an education policy.

The government's education policy is nothing more than a sham—it is a con. Their own documents that they produced when they announced Gonski 2.0 show a $22 billion cut to school funding in this country. They have no credibility, and it is why the various sectors—Catholic, state sectors, state education unions and indeed conservative governments at the state level around the country—are up in arms, as well as Labor governments. This is a budget that hands millionaires and multinational companies huge tax breaks. It is shameful that the government cannot find the necessary money to match Labor's commitment to Gonski needs based funding. I was a candidate, as member for Blair, at the time, and who could forget those banners, those corflutes, on election day in September 2013? Liberal candidates—certainly the candidate who ran against me in 2013, and then fronted up in 2016 again—were saying that the Liberals would match Labor's education funding dollar for dollar, only to break that promise in the first budget in 2014, slashing, according to the budget papers, $30 billion in education funding. They have no credibility.

Debate interrupted.

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