Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I take the opportunity this evening to address what no doubt will shape up to be a very important debate in this country in the run-up to the election, and that is the future of education and its role in improving the productivity and the long-term prosperity of the nation. I want to address the claim by the government that the budget announcements by the Treasurer prove that the government has its own education revolution underway. I will challenge that claim—I hope fairly significantly, because there is so much that could be said—in the few minutes available to me.

The centrepiece of the government’s claim on education is the $5 billion university endowment fund. No doubt that is a reasonable initiative, but it hardly addresses the issue of university places and access and equity for university students. This fund will provide capital amounts of money—although obviously not a great deal if it is only $300 million a year—and money for research facilities. That money is welcome, but it does not address the real challenge facing the great majority of students who find that it is the cost of living that really creates a problem for them in completing their university studies. Indeed, with Wollongong University in my electorate, I am constantly made aware by uni students of the struggle to balance their study and their work requirements and that they really have no other option but to work. Often many of them carry a full workload on top of trying to complete their studies. So, while this centrepiece item no doubt is welcome, it will hardly address the issues of making sure that many of our young people are able to access and complete university study.

The sad thing about the government’s proposals in the budget under education, where they are trying to claim that they have gazumped Labor, is that there was nothing about preschool education. Having a background in both education and juvenile justice, I am profoundly aware of the importance of the formative years for young people in both their social development and their educational development. Labor has committed itself to providing 15 hours of preschool education a week for all four-year-old children in order to provide them with the solid foundation they will need when they start school. There is absolutely nothing more important that you could do than to make sure, as much as you can, that every kid who starts school starts from a level playing field. The capacity to access the pre-reading and pre-numeracy type skills that you get in those programs is absolutely vital. There was nothing at all from the government in the budget about preschool education. It has completely missed the point that early intervention programs in all sorts of areas, particularly in education, can make a profound difference to the long-term learning of young people.

Then we come to the schools sector. We have a new commitment to an old pilot, which is the tutorial voucher scheme. We all remember what a great success that scheme was! Indeed, I remember young people in my area who had not passed the 2003 benchmark test being told that they had a voucher, yet many of them did not get that voucher until after they had sat the 2005 test. Rather than the government extending that program, I personally think it would be far better to use that money to provide literacy and numeracy support in schools, as Labor has proposed in its education revolution program; that would have been a better option. If the government is going to run this privatised version, it should at least ensure that the facilities and services are there to be provided to the young people who need them and it should not leave parents as disappointed as they were under the pilot.

Finally, there is the great initiative for technical education. As long as I have been here, the government has been telling us that Labor people are far too wrapped up in university education and that they do not understand how important vocational education is. What was the big loser in this budget? It was vocational education and training. The best the government could manage were three new ATCs, when it does not even have the current promised crop up and running. Those that are up and running are not even filling their quotas for students. The students that are in them, by and large, are missing out on employers; they cannot even get people to take them on for their work component. So let us throw some more money at something that is struggling to survive, as it is. This budget provides a very weak response to the needs for education to develop productivity for the future. (Time expired)