Luke Hartsuyker (Cowper, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is addressed to the Minister for Education, Science and Training. Would the minister update the House on the Howard government’s support for school infrastructure? Is the minister aware of alternative policies?

Ms Julie Bishop (Curtin, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Women's Issues) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Cowper for his question and note his great interest in schools policy in his electorate. The parents of Australian schoolchildren expect not only choice in schooling, as the Prime Minister indicated, but also higher standards in terms of teaching, learning and the physical environment—the infrastructure in our schools. The Howard government agrees that there should be higher standards in our schools. That is why at the 2004 election we committed to investing $1 billion in schools across Australia so that schools could apply directly to the federal government for infrastructure projects.

The Howard government is now exceeding that election commitment. On top of the $1 billion to invest in our schools we have added an additional $181 million, targeted to the more needy schools. We have exceeded our election commitment under the Investing in Our Schools program. What this program has highlighted is the chronic neglect of state government schools by state governments. Basic infrastructure needs such as shade cloth, toilet blocks and air conditioning are being funded by the federal government because the state governments have failed to fund their schools properly.

I am asked about alternative policies. Yesterday we witnessed the spectacle of the Leader of the Opposition running away as fast as he could from the Mark Latham hit list policy. That had been Labor policy for as long as I can remember. The Labor Party is committed to taking funding away from some Catholic and independent schools. While the Leader of the Opposition said he was running away from that policy, not once did he guarantee to fund non-government schools at the same rate of increase as they receive under the Howard government.

In other words, when the Leader of the Opposition says, ‘No school will be worse off,’ that is code for ‘School funding will be frozen.’ That is Labor Party code. So on the one hand the Leader of the Opposition is running away from Mark Latham’s hit list policy while on the other hand he skulks out later in the day with a new policy. He says it is a brand-new policy—$62 million for schools to share resources. Some might be gullible enough to believe that it was a new policy, but if we go back to the old hit list policy, we find it on page 12—$62 million to share educational resources. This is Mark Latham’s failed 2004 policy.

What Labor is doing is finding old and failed policies, trotting them out with a brand-new cover and rebadging them as new policy. The Australian public are awake to this. Recycling old and failed policies is not policy development. Cutting and pasting Mark Latham’s old policies is not providing the kind of policy development leadership that we would expect even from the Labor Party. This is doing nothing to raise standards in our schools.