Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I must confess that the federal government here feels somewhat like a third wheel in this Labor Party attack on Nick Xenophon and South Australia. All the South Australian MPs are sitting up there, like free-range eggs, popped in there so that they can be on TV tonight. You are hoping that more than five people from Adelaide are actually listening. Well, for those who are listening, if you guys have some quarrel with Nick Xenophon, why don't we surrender some additional time for you to go on with five-minute bleats about how much you hate the Xenophon party. Clearly, today's debate is only about the South Australians consuming a little bit of oxygen in Canberra in the hope of helping their state colleagues.

For anyone whose notice it might have escaped, this complete preoccupation with cuts is just an ongoing Labor Party tactic dating back to the 'Mediscare' cuts campaign. Isn't it ironic? It hasn't escaped anyone's attention on this side that the once great Labor Party, the great social policy reformers of this nation, have been reduced to being whingers about cuts. It doesn't matter what it is in the area of social policy, they've completely abdicated the quality debate and all they can talk about is cuts. That actually does this nation a great disservice. This fetish with how many dollars of funding there are while completely ignoring how it's spent lets everyone down. It lets down their voters; it lets down policymakers; it lets down the nation—because we're not improving our schools one bit as long as we're quibbling over dollars.

Let's go right back to why we say cuts are a fairytale and Labor keep talking about cuts. It's because the word 'cuts' works very well for Labor voters, and they keep saying it because it keeps revving up the troops. The reality is, of course, that in education the $17 billion we spend every year will go to $31 billion in the next 10 years. That's a 77 per cent increase, but, of course, over in Labor land, we call that a 'negative 77 per cent cut' and everyone understands what we're talking about. That's an extra $25 billion this year, amounting to $250 billion in total being spent over those 10 years.

For those who are listening and bothered by this internecine battle between South Australian Labor and Nick Xenophon, I want to point out what is self-evident. That is that, when we agreed in 2013 to your funding proposals, we did so over the four-year forward estimates. No government can be bothered with what happens in years 5 and 6 because it's not in the Treasury papers. The reality is it's called 'funny money'. The reality is it's called 'the never-never'. Five and six years in advance, the great convenience was that Julia Gillard never had to worry about that money because she never had to find it in the first place. So Labor's denominator, Labor's starting point for cuts, is imaginary amounts of money which Treasury never had to find, and they never managed to find them because they desperately wanted Wayne Swan to minimise the deficit in the 2012-13 and 2013-14 years.

The education debate is about a globalising workforce. It's about a digitally enabled workforce and how we train them and teach them. It's about the impact of our interventions on progress and growth. It's about whole-of-school initiatives that can improve graduate performance. It's about how we define success. These are the things that this great parliament should be focusing on, not these ridiculous fairytales about cuts, which, I'll confess, are initially very attractive to Labor voters. But those mums and dads out there, when they learn those cuts are imaginary numbers and, in reality, the funding's going the other way, feel deceived by that party. They feel utterly deceived when they're told about it. To honestly improve educational performance in schools, we need a focus on quality that isn't happening here. What this government has, of course, is the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group, solid recommendations about setting high standards and strengthening measures for quality teacher outputs, reconstituting the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, overhauling the way we accredit initial teacher education programs and getting universities to really focus on evidence based pedagogical approaches.

While we have that party over there, where the only thing they know about education is when the next P&C meeting is, we will never have a debate about quality. While you're worried about the South Australian election, you'll never engage in this big picture. So listen, I urge you, to the Association of Independent Schools of New South Wales chief executive, who said it's time to stop the bickering. It's time for the Labor Party to stop egging on parts of Catholic education to complain about cuts when they know overall, when leaders within Catholic education know and independent schools know as well, as does the rest of Australia, that there are nothing but massive education funding increases for this nation. (Time expired)

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