Susan Lamb (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to oppose doublespeak and misleading political spin, to oppose saying one thing and doing another, to oppose cutting billions of dollars of funding and then claiming somehow to have invested billions more. When you are elected as a representative, the people of your electorate put their trust in you. So I actually find it quite abhorrent that this government so casually betrays trust with such misleading and Orwellian use of language. Should people be elated or scared if they hear that the government plans to invest in a particular sector? How are the people of Australia to know when a so-called government investment actually means real investment and isn't shorthand for more cuts? So long as this government is in power, there really is no way to know at all. They've thrived on lies and they've thrived on deceit, but the Australian people see through that. That's why the Liberals have been tanking in the Newspoll surveys.

Australians want accessible, affordable, high-quality health care. Australians want a fair go; they want to see active measures in place to reduce economic inequality, not huge cuts for millionaires and big business. Australians really want investment in a quality education system. They want what they were promised. They want true needs based funding—the original funding model that Labor created and costed. That's what the Liberals promised them, not this watered-down scheme that we have got. Let's face it: multibillion-dollar cuts is what they have been given. When Prime Minister Abbott promised the government would 'spend exactly the same over the forward estimates as the Labor Party for school funding' or when Christopher Pyne, the then education minister, pledged that the coalition was 'matching Labor's funding model dollar for dollar, so you can vote Liberal or Labor and you will get exactly the same amount of funding for your school', what they really meant was that the coalition would deliver $17 billion less in funding than Labor.

There is no way to spin this. They outright lied to the Australian people. They knew the Australian people wouldn't take this lightly, of course. That's why they invoked the Gonski brand that Labor had made so synonymous with true needs based funning. There is no more clear representation of this government's desperation, so blatantly attempting to deceive the public. Stop and think for a moment: why else would the coalition refer to their model as Gonski 2.0? It was a blatant attempt to align their lesser model with Labor's promise. The government is cutting billions from what was promised—$17 billion—from schools like Morayfield State School, Tullawong High School, Woodford State School and Burpengary Meadows State School. It is cutting $17 billion from schools like these, deserving schools full of deserving children. Some of these schools had already started to see the benefits from the original Gonski model. This is what's quite alarming—they'd already started to see this.

Minimbah State School, an independent public school, was utilising needs based funding to target the needs of students through targeted professional development in literacy and numeracy for every teacher and teacher aide. They saw the very best NAPLAN results ever. By employing a master teacher to improve classroom practices, they saw their mean scale score improve in all 10 areas. Through gifted and talented activities such as robotics, Minimbah has seen attendance rates rise to the highest level in five years—best NAPLAN, increased rates of attendance and an improvement in the mean scale score across 10 areas. That's what you get from a true Gonski model. The other good news story about Minimbah is that the Gonski plan, as promised, was always about helping the most vulnerable kids, and at Minimbah this translated to speech therapy as well as vision and hearing checks.

Every single student across this country deserves a fair go, including those in my electorate. But, let's be clear: this government would rather take $17 billion of this funding and use it to fund a cut for big business tax. We've grown to expect this behaviour by this government. We should never, ever accept it. Australia deserves a government with its priorities in order and a government that truly values education.

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