Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Education, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations and Minister for Social Inclusion. Will the Deputy Prime Minister inform the House about the release of new education data?

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Calwell for her question. I know her deep concern for educational equity in her electorate. In the past few days, while they have been wandering around talking to each other about themselves, members of the Liberal Party have missed some very important educational data that was released by the OECD. The OECD released the report Education at a glance. This is a periodic report from the OECD about the status of a nation’s education system.

The OECD Education at a glance report is a snapshot of expenditure on this nation’s education system, its strengths and its weaknesses in 2005—that is, it is very clearly a report card on the Howard government’s years as they relate to education. When we look at that report card, there is plenty to be disturbed about. What it tells us is that public spending on education was at 4.3 per cent of GDP, well below the OECD average of five per cent. We ranked 19th when compared with our competitor countries in the OECD. We were behind Canada, behind the US, behind the UK and behind many other European countries. Deeply disturbingly, despite all the worldwide research that shows investment in the early years is the most productive investment one can make in education—research which is so familiar to the Parliamentary Secretary for Early Childhood Education and Child Care, the member for Bennelong——when we look at this OECD report on spending in the early years, we see that we came near the bottom of the class. We were 24th out of 26 countries. This is an unbelievable indictment of the record of the Howard government. These are the nations with which we must compete. These are the nations with which our economic prosperity is tied up. If we cannot compete then, over the long term, obviously this nation will go backwards. The Howard years put at risk the education system of this country. In the modern world of education policy, standing still is going backwards. Under the Howard government we did much worse than stand still: we had 12 years of neglect and underinvestment in education.

This government was elected to bring in an education revolution, and we are doing that. We are doing that across the board—from early childhood education, to schools, to vocational education and training and university. Amongst a comprehensive suite of policies, this government is investing $11 billion in our Education Investment Fund so we have a long-term source of funding to renew the capital of our higher education system: both our university and our vocational education and training systems. But you cannot have $11 billion in the Education Investment Fund if someone engages in a smash-and-grab raid on the surplus. The newly elected Leader of the Opposition, in spending $20 billion in 20 minutes at a press conference today, has indicated to the Australian people that he is going to lead the Liberal Party on that smash-and-grab raid. What that smash-and-grab raid means is we cannot make investments in educational infrastructure for the long term in this country. The Liberal Party neglected education when they were sitting on the treasury bench. Now they are trying to damage education from opposition. This is economic vandalism, which ultimately means education vandalism in this country.