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

This is a valuable opportunity to ask a couple of questions about education in regional Australia. I want to touch on health and medical research, as it pertains to education. I also want to talk about the budget allocated for early education, school education and university education and the impact of COVID on school attendance in regional Australia. Then, finally, I want to look at the permanent residency arrangements that exist for those that choose to study and work in regional Australia. They're all key questions that I think this government is finally attuned to.

First of all, in the area of early education, I'm really grateful the minister mentioned the significant changes that we're seeing as a result of surveys for out-of-pocket costs for those in early education. While many of us have our views formed by some of the more outlying costs of attending early education in the inner city, the reality is it's a very different picture in regional Australia, where in many cases there's a real occupancy challenge to remain viable. It was an interesting point the minister made that 71 per cent of Australians are paying less than $5 an hour for early education and about a quarter of that cohort are paying less than $2 an hour. That is an extraordinarily affordable investment for a large proportion of Australia to be able to attend the highest-quality early education that we do enjoy.

No-one on this side forgets that early education fees went up by 58 per cent under the previous government, at a time when we justified that based on improvements in quality in the Early Years Learning Framework. That's really important. We paid more, but we got more. So it's a bit cheap to be getting a lesson from the other side about affordability of early education when we effectively gave them somewhat of a leave pass to more than increase, by more than 50 per cent, early education fees on the pretext of quality. So, we have a quality sector and we never want to lose sight of that.

If we talk about affordability, we need to understand the variable impacts within that sector from urban out to regional. I speak as an outer metro MP where many of my childcare centres struggle with satisfactory occupancy to remain viable, and through COVID that's been an additional challenge that's been met by a range of measures, including JobKeeper.

In school funding the coalition's record is extremely strong. The minister touched on that as well. My question pertains specifically to regional school education and in particular the Choice and Affordability Fund where the coalition set aside, particularly for the Catholic and independent sector, additional funding to do what can't be done. And the reason that they are not eligible for the Choice and Affordability Fund is that, rather than increasing funding over the next decade by five per cent per annum for state education, we're doing it at 6.8 per cent. That difference is way more than the Choice and Affordability Fund, Member for Moreton. What we have is for the Catholic and independent sector in a tailored way to be able to alter their service provision models to allow for what is a new way of measuring parental socioeducational benefit, and that's obviously in the wings as well. That move to be able to say that some day in the future, not 2100 but in 2029, this nation, a decade from now, can say: the same student with the same need in the same sector will be given the same amount of government support. That is such a fundamentally fair proposition that's constantly been avoided. We've prevaricated on this topic until this government came along and took that hard conversation.

We want to make sure that those regional school systems in particular—the minister will be interested in Catholic, Lutheran, Uniting and Anglican schools that are working in the regions to provide an alternative to public education which is utterly legitimate, welcomed and recognised by the Australian population—are ready for that transition to 2029. That funding of $314 billion over the next decade may well be $22 billion this year in 2020 but rising to $24 and $26 million. These increases across the OECD when we look at it, Minister, are some of the greatest education funding increases that we are seeing across the OECD. It's very important.

I want to attach to the minister's areas of interest in regional Australia the fact that we know from welfare reform that just eight hours a week for the standard configured family at the current minimum wage in Australia is sufficient to be above the poverty line. That's the fewest number of hours you need to work of any OECD nation by a long shot, and it tells us that if the education can be tuned in regional Australia to connect to work we only need to obtain, remarkably, not 18, eight hours a week to take an average family above the poverty line. It's an extraordinary figure and it means that our system is unique in comparisons between the OECD. Across research, school education and early education—and I didn't get to university funding—these are areas we're most concerned about and particularly with a COVID overlay on those questions.

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