Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Rudd government’s Nation Building and Jobs Plan will deliver the biggest investment in schools Australia has ever seen. Building the Education Revolution is about ensuring schools have modern facilities to ready students for the modern world. This includes multipurpose halls to meet the diverse needs of students and obviously to serve community needs as well, which is our great initiative; modern libraries worthy of the digital age rather than the Dark Ages; science labs and language learning centres to help students get the edge they need; and new modern classrooms. It is also about ensuring that schools have the resources to complete minor capital works and maintenance.

In all, the Rudd government’s Nation Building and Jobs Plan is pumping $14.7 billion into our schools —public and private. I remind those opposite that our funding is designed for all schools irrespective of the sign over the gate. It will be delivered in just two years and it will go a long way to make up for 12 years of neglect by the Howard government, especially of public schools. I say that as a former organiser in the Independent Education Union, which spent a lot of time in private schools.

One of the state school principals in my electorate told me that they have spent their weekends painting classrooms at their school because they simply do not have the budget for a fresh coat of paint. It is sad when you think of a principal having to spend time painting classrooms. This funding will ensure schools like this one can now carry out the urgent maintenance that is required and deliver the kinds of facilities they had resigned to the never-never under the coalition. It also means principals, teachers and parents can focus on their core business, which is about educating our students.

I simply cannot describe how thrilled schools in my electorate are to be receiving this funding. I will leave that to a local principal who described it this way:

This is exactly the kind of investment our primary schools have been crying out for, for years!

This is not just in my electorate. It is in every single school, all 9,540 of them—in every community, in every town, in every electorate across the country be it Labor or Liberal or even National. This would not be the case if the opposition had their way. As a former schoolteacher, I simply cannot understand why anyone would stand in the way of better resources and better facilities for our school kids. But not only does the opposition not care about education, in the face of a worsening global financial crisis the coalition is not prepared to make the tough decisions required to protect jobs, support small business and stimulate growth in the Australian economy.

We should have known. In government, the coalition ripped off public schools to the tune of $2.9 billion every year—do not get me started on universities—and refused to acknowledge the wider benefits of education, such as jobs growth and better productivity. Of course, public or private matters little. What really matters is the quality of education provided through schools, their physical assets and infrastructure, and the training of their teachers and other staff. I know this being the product of both systems, having attended a Catholic primary school and a state high school, and also having taught in both private and public systems as well.

These are the issues at the core of the Rudd government’s education revolution. As I said, we do not care about the sign that is on the top of the school gate; all we care about is quality education for the future. That is also why we are investing in computers and IT. It is why we are delivering record funding of $14.7 billion for schools across the board. It is why we introduced the education tax refund to reward all taxpayers who have school-age children. I hope they are collecting their dockets at the moment. It is why we are rewarding our best teachers and it is why we are improving accountability and community reporting in our schools so that we all understand what is going on in our schools.

We, on this side of the House, well understand the value of teaching. I see the member for Braddon, who is a former teacher, is present, and there are a lot of former teachers on this side of the House. I will continue to meet with schools in my electorate over the coming exciting months as we work together in Building the Education Revolution. I ask those on the other side of the House to also put aside some of the baggage and issues that they have with respect to education and to embrace the education revolution. Do not be hypocritical in engaging with schools as we saw from the member for Dickson the other day in the House.