Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

Once again, what we're seeing from the Labor Party is a lot of talk, a lot of reviews and a lot of hot air. When it comes to actually doing anything—nothing! Absolutely nothing.

The one thing about this motion that stands out more than anything else is this: what about educational outcomes? What about making sure that, when it comes to kids who are at school, the focus is going to be on ensuring that they can read, write and add up at the end of their schooling? There is nothing about this. What we need to be doing is focusing on ensuring that everything we're doing is student centred. It's about getting better outcomes for students. It's not just about governments talking about 'we're doing this' or 'we're doing that'. There is nothing here in this motion which says, 'What we want to do is improve the educational outcomes of our students.'

Look at what the government is doing in the childcare sector. It's all talk. Come to my community. Go to the member for Grey's community. Go to Tasmania. People can't get access to child care.

Where's the solution? Where's the talk about trying to do that? It's nowhere in this motion. Where are the outcomes when it comes to improving the pipeline of teachers for our schools? We need more teachers. We need better qualified teachers. We need teachers who can go out into the regions and out into remote Australia, and can deliver the types of outcomes that we want for our students. There's nothing there. Then we get to higher education. We've just seen this higher education review announced. There are no extra dollars—not a cent. But, even more importantly, where's the focus on getting better outcomes in the sectors that we need to grow our economy going forward?

What are the growth areas in employment going forward for this nation? Health care, science and technology, education and construction—these four industries are projected to provide 62 per cent of total employment growth over the next five years. What did the coalition do to try to help and support these sectors going forward? We cut the price that any student who goes into these areas has to pay for their degree. That means discounted fees for teaching, for nursing, for clinical psychology, for English and languages, for agriculture, for maths, for science, for health, for architecture, for environmental science, for IT and for engineering. What we did was cut the cost of the student's degree in any of those areas because they are the growth areas. They're the areas that we want to encourage students to go into because that's where the jobs of the future are going to be. I say to those opposite: I look forward to you contemplating increasing the cost of those degrees in those areas again because you will be howled down. We had the courage to say, 'These are the areas that we want students to go into, and we're going to cut the price of their degrees.'

What I say to the government is: you should be very transparent about the cost of degrees, you should be very transparent about where the future needs of our economy are and you should be ensuring that you're publicising the fact that, if you're a young student and you're leaving school at the moment, these are the areas we are encouraging you to go into because these are the areas where future employment growth will be. Instead, what are we hearing from those opposite? We hear crickets. They don't want to own up to the fact that what we did when we were in government was say to anyone who wants to go in those areas, 'We will cut the cost of your degree.' That is good, sensible policymaking. It's going to be very interesting to see what happens because the minister said, 'I don't like the Job-ready Graduates project.' Well, you come in and increase degrees in those areas then.

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