Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am really pleased to rise after the member for Bowman, because it means he has to stop talking. Before he leaves the chamber, I'd just like to say this: I'll match your doctor and I'll raise you with a school principal. Listening to the member for Bowman talk about education across the last five years has been an education, let me tell you! It demonstrates that you can be the smartest person in the school, and you can go on to be a doctor, but it doesn't mean you've got any common sense.

What we have on this side is common sense. What this side did when we were last in government was a review of national education. Do you know why we did it? Because we were slipping down the scales in the OECD rankings in terms of our student performance. What did we do? We sent a banker out with a team of people. I saw David Gonski speak about what he found. I'm going to paraphrase him, because I can't directly quote—it was a live show. But he said he expected to see bureaucratic waste, and what he found was a lean machine in education across this country. What he found was that there was no waste. Every cent put into schools was going into classrooms and into education, which left him with the question: why aren't we performing like we should? He thought he'd find waste and he found none.

What he did find was inequality, and what the OECD had already reported on was that those countries with the highest inequities in their school systems were sinking, and those countries with the most equitable systems, with the least difference between schools and, in schools, between classrooms, were reaching the stars. So the review went to find the answer for Australia, and what did they find? They found the schooling resource standard. They found a dollar figure that they could undo disadvantage with, to ensure that, for every child in every school, regardless of sector, regardless of postcode, regardless of parent, we could find a solution, if we could get this secret model going.

That's what we went to the 2013 election with, and those opposite knew the power of the argument with the Australian people. They knew that the Australian people understand how important a quality education is for every child in this country—not just for their own children but for every child in this country. They know the economic power of a purposeful, well-funded education system and what it means for this country. They understand what it means for our economy. They understand what it means for our society. So the coalition went to that election saying, 'Not a dollar difference'. They got government, and then they trashed Gonski. They appointed the member for Sturt, with the quick repartee, as Minister for Education. I don't want to point out the obvious, but the current Minister for Education has to be the exact opposite of the member for Sturt. The member for Sturt, with his quick repartee, took on education and absolutely smashed the Gonski model. He put his sector glasses on—he put his goggles on—and he determined that they would tear up this system that was so well planned. What we then saw was Minister Birmingham, who continued on that road. As the member for Sydney pointed out today, they lost complete track of the reforms and the things this money would target to get us better quality schools and better quality teachers—teachers working together in schools with proper resourcing to improve their own practice and to improve every classroom in this country.

It is a sad day today. The new education minister and the new Prime Minister—we're three for three, remember; three Prime Ministers and three education ministers. It's like a game over there: if you back the right horse, you get the education portfolio! It's a sad state of affairs that no-one has followed this from start to finish. The announcement today does not fix the problem for this government. What it does is entrench inequality. They didn't put a bandaid on today; they ripped a bandaid off. The terrible sore that is education policy for this government is going to get worse. I promise, as a former school principal: it's going to get worse.

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