Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

Can I thank my friend the terrific member for Tangney for his question. We want Australians to earn more and keep more of what they earn. That means pay rises and tax cuts. For a brand-new teacher in New South Wales at the moment, they're now on $85,000 a year—the highest paid teachers in the country. From 1 July, they'll get a tax cut of more than $1,800.

That's good news, because our teachers do an important job—the most important job in the country—and that job has got a lot tougher in the last 10 years. In the last 10 years we've seen teacher shortages go up, and over the last 10 years we've also seen the number of kids finishing high school go down, not everywhere but in our public schools. We've seen a drop from 83 per cent down to 76 per cent. It's no surprise that this has all happened after the Liberal Party ripped the guts out of Gonski funding.

We've got a big anniversary coming up, because in seven weeks time it will be 10 years since the Liberal Party ripped more than $20 billion out of public schools in this country. Remember that cigar-chomping budget? Guess who was on the ERC at the time? Old smiley over there, the opposition leader. The health minister talked about—

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