Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to move a motion that this House censures the Prime Minister for breaking his promise to parents and children across Australia that no school would be worse off under his government.

Leave not granted.

I move:

That so much of standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the Leader of the Opposition from moving the following motion forthwith:

That this House censures the Prime Minister for breaking his promise to parents and children across Australia that no school would be worse off under his government.

Those opposite dislike being told that they have broken promises. But I can tell you something: Australians dislike being told that promises that they were told by the coalition on education before the election—

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would remind the Leader of the Opposition that this is a suspension motion, and what he has to establish is suspension, and speak to the suspension.

Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Madam Speaker, I remain in constant gratitude for your counsel. Standing orders must be suspended—

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am grateful that you are grateful, and perhaps you would like to demonstrate that you are grateful.

Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will endeavour to do my best. Standing orders must be suspended, because Australians dislike being told that promises about the educational opportunities for their children in the schools of Australia are then broken after an election. What a circus this last few weeks in education history in Australia has been. We know, and every fair-minded observer knows, that for the last three years those opposite, when they were in opposition, did not want to have a bar of reforming education. We know that those opposite were not interested in changing to needs-based funding. We know that there was the mindless opposition of those opposite—I think they said that Gonski was a 'conski'. In fact, they said that—not last year, not the year before—on 1 August and on the morning of 2 August this year. But someone—probably the notorious Mark Textor—must have told them: 'Do you know what?—on education, Labor is more credible than the conservatives. It is Labor who has worked with parents. It is Labor who has worked with educational experts to try and get a better deal.' But those opposite are so blinded in their hatred of Labor, and they were so blinded in their hatred of former Prime Minister Gillard, that they were determined to say, 'There's no way that we would ever have the needs-based reforms which Labor introduced'.

But, demonstrating the cynical administration that they are, and their desperate desire to get into power, no doubt their planners and their pollsters said in early August, 'Education is one issue where Labor is leading over the conservatives.' Those opposite are quiet, and do you know why they are quiet? They are quiet because they know the truth when they hear it. They know that no-one trusts them on education. Christopher Pyne, member for Sturt, well-known education reformer—not!—on Thursday calls it 'conski' and then on the Friday, in what can only be described as a road-to-Damascus miracle says, 'Actually, we support these changes in education.' I remember very clearly what they were saying and when they were saying it, because I was in negotiations with the conservative government in Victoria on these education reforms. This is why we must suspend standing orders—because this government has different policies before an election to those they have when they get elected.

Then they tried desperately to tell their Victorian colleagues, in a flurry of phone calls: 'Please don't do a deal with Labor. You can trust us.' They came up with that beautifully precise, conservative form of language—the 'no-strings-attached deal'. I have never seen a deal such as this, where they put up a truckload of money and no strings attached, so they could persuade the Liberals in Victoria not to sign a Labor deal. But there is a peril with the no-strings-attached approach, which the Prime Minister has endorsed again today. They have been against this for years and, on the basis that they believe a leopard can change its spots, they said just before the election: 'Well, we've changed our spots. I know we are the conservatives. I know we've bagged needs-based education.' In fact, most of the electorate knows that the member for Sturt does not like government schools; his dream is to turn every government school into a private school! And then what happened—and this is why we should suspend standing orders, Madam Speaker—after the election was that we started to see that well-known government tactic of the backslide. They never go down a slide forwards this crew; they always go down backwards. What a circus!

They have tried to take down from their website their speeches of before the election: 'Let's not talk about what we know.' We have had these golden lines from those opposite, including the Prime Minister, 'We want to end the uncertainty.' What a statement of optimism over experience—'uncertainty'! These people opposite were boasting today, 'We've changed our view from yesterday.' Education in this country has become a circus of funding. Those opposite have been in damage control ever since—the moose is loose—the member for Sturt has been conclusively confusing everyone. I love what the Prime Minister said when he was the opposition leader. He said, 'No school is worse off.' What a mischievous, deceptive comment that is in light of today's comments. And they are boasting; the mob opposite have never been shy about shouting their ignorance to the world, and what they are saying today is: 'How clever are we? We are going to give money to the Queensland government, to the Northern Territory government, and to the Western Australian government—no strings attached!'

They say that a fool and his money are soon parted—those opposite are evidence. Did these clever education reformers even stop to ask those notorious cutters and slashers, the conservative Newman government? Did those opposite ever say: 'Here comes the Commonwealth truck, the Armaguard truck driven by Tony Abbott and his truck jockey, the member for Sturt. We have got the cash, Campbell Newman, quick, get it out the back and get it into the schools! Oh, and by the way, Mr Newman, you can borrow the empty cash truck we're taking. You can bring it around to the back door of the school because you can take the money out of your schools.' These educational vandals, these educational dilettantes, these people too lazy to do their policy in opposition—then turn up at the exam and copy our exam answers. They have made no guarantees to stop Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia from cutting their budgets.

I think you have a colleague seeking the call over there, Madam Speaker—if you don't want to recognise her, I won't.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am happy to give you a rest. The member for Ryan.

Jane Prentice (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise on a point of order: I just felt that the speaker was straying from the purpose of his address.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Leader of the Opposition.

Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The standing orders must be suspended because in education in this country we have seen those opposite say, 'You can have Labor or Liberal; you will get the same deal'. That is not true. Those opposite are now boasting—and it is a different position to the position they had yesterday and the position they had on Friday—to Australia: 'We will hand Commonwealth money to the states, but we will not require that they do not cut their funding.' The difference between Labor's model on education is that we would seek to give two dollars for every one dollar that the states—

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Leader of the Opposition will resume his seat. I call the Chief Government Whip—he has sat down again. The Leader of the Opposition has the call.

Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is not the government that was promised to Australians at the election. Those opposite said, 'There will be no surprises and no excuses.' What a joke! Every day under Christopher Pyne is surprise day in education. Every day in 'Abbott-land' and 'Prime-Minister-land' is excuse day. Before the election they said, 'In education, we will make sure that no school is worse off.' I have the quote for the member for New England. They said:

We will honour the agreements … We will match the offers that Labor has made.

They also said that 'no school would be worse off'. They cannot keep that promise with the deals they are talking about doing with the states. The Northern Territory has been closing schools; Queensland has been closing schools.

We see needs-based funding as being fundamental to the improvement of Australian education. We in Labor understand that what is important is giving kids the best start in life. We believe in needs-based funding. We believe there should be a loading based on children's disabilities and learning difficulties. We believe there should be funding based on whether or not kids live regionally. We believe there should be funding based on the postcodes and the lower socio-economic status of the areas in which parents are sending their kids. We believe fundamentally in giving children needs-based funding. We are a party and an opposition that will back public schools. We are a party and an opposition that will never give up on state education, unlike those opposite. (Time expired)

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Madam Speaker, I move:

That all words after 'that' first occurring be omitted and the following words substituted. That this House condemns the Leader of the Opposition for cutting funding to schools in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory by $1.2 billion in the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook and for failing to achieve a national fair and needs-based school funding model when Minister for Education.

I move that as an amendment to the suspension of standing orders.

Madam Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition has turned up today with last week's questions pack. It is as if he has turned up to the set of Mad Max to play a small role in it but insists that it is really Alice in Wonderland, and everybody has to run around with a clock saying, 'I'm running behind time.' The Leader of the Opposition reminds me he is one of the worst leaders of the opposition that I have experienced in my 21 years in parliament. He has turned up for question time; he has last week's questions pack. He has decided that the way to solve this problem—because the opposition is being killed in the social media verse that I am not part of—is to shout and bellow at the dispatch box at members of the government and the press gallery, almost to insist that the press gallery accepts that he has had a great day in spite of the fact that at half past one today his house of cards came falling down around him. Unfortunately for the Leader of the Opposition, he is shattered that we are putting $1.2 billion into school funding that he ripped out of the school funding model before the election in the pre-election fiscal outlook, rather than standing up to congratulate the government for putting more money into the Northern Territory, Queensland or Western Australia so that there are no second-class students under this government. He did not stand up to praise the government—to seek indulgence to praise the Prime Minister—for putting money in that the Leader of the Opposition took out. Instead, they are going to insist that that has simply has not happened. They are going to say that the questions pack stands, 'We do not have time to change it.' As I said in question time, Madam Speaker, Ataturk said that when the battle changes, a good general changes his tactics. Sadly, on that side of the House, with Mr Albanese away in Italy, they are short of their good generals. And didn't it show today, Madam Speaker? The reason the Leader of the Opposition should be censured, and the reason the amendment should be carried for the suspension of standing orders, is that when he was the Minister for Education he left an absolute wreckage when he departed the scene after the election. He had cut $1.2 billion out of the school—

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On a point of order, Madam Speaker. I will try to be brief. The Leader of the House said that his amendment was to the suspension.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Correct.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We now have a written copy. He has said that all words after 'that' and he has added 'first occurring'. That means his amendment ceases to make this a suspension of standing orders and we have an amendment, which, if valid, means we cannot continue with the debate. He meant to say 'second occurring'. If he wants to change his amendment, we will give him leave to do so. But this amendment is actually impossible to be carried.

Opposition members interjecting—

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Any proposition is open to amendment, and that is exactly what I have done. I have moved an amendment to the Leader of the Opposition's proposition. That is why it is in order. Sadly, they will do anything other than debate the facts about today's education debate. A $1.2 billion cut, and the Leader of the Opposition left a model that was not a national model. Queensland was not in it; the Northern Territory was not in it; Western Australia was not in it. He was prepared to take $1.2 billion—

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rule on the point of order that there is no point of order.

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When we came to government, what did we find? We found that the Leader of the Opposition had left us $1.2 billion short in PEFO on school funding. We found that he had never signed Victoria and Tasmania to contracts for the new school funding model. He had claimed that the National Catholic Education Commission had made an agreement with the government, but they had done no such thing—nothing was signed. We found that three states could properly be regarded as signatory states, and two states and one territory were entirely left out of the school funding model. So, it was not national. We found that he tried to introduce a heavily-regulated model dripping with red tape—with new institutes, new government spending, new bureaucracies—that infantilised the states and territories and treated them not as adult governments, but as children.

We said before the election that we would keep the same funding level as Labor. We have not only done that, madam Speaker, we have gone even further. We have bettered that commitment by putting $1.2 billion more into school funding than Labor would have if they had been re-elected. That is why they are so embarrassed. They are embarrassed that it is the coalition that is delivering more money for students so that we can get on with the real debate in education about quality and standards. That is what parents care about. They care about teacher quality; they care about engaging with their children in a genuine way about their studies; they care about local decision making and principal autonomy that is working so well in places like Western Australia. They want a robust curriculum that does produce students that can read and write, and that does rely on orthodox teaching methods that actually do not see us slipping down the rankings all the time internationally, even against other English-speaking countries.

We also said that we would take away the command-and-control features inherent in the act, and that is exactly what we will do. We will remove regulation; we will remove red tape. It will be a better model. We said we would deliver a national scheme, and, much to the embarrassment of the opposition, I have delivered a national scheme that the Leader of the Opposition was never capable of delivering. We now have a national scheme that applies to every student equally in Australia, because we did not want any second-class citizens in the way that the Leader of the Opposition was prepared to leave it.

The Leader of the Opposition in his address talked about 'no strings attached', as though the previous Labor government had a handle on controlling state spending. We all know that the states and territories make their own decisions about spending, about their own budgets, as they should, because they are sovereign governments. What the Leader of the Opposition did not tell us was that last month in the South Australian state parliament's Budget and Finance Committee of the education department—which I assume is similar to our estimates—it was confirmed that Premier Jay Weatherill has demanded $230 million of cuts to the department of education between now and 2017, and $180 million of them are yet to be identified. So on the one hand we have Labor trying to claim the mantle of putting more funds into schools, and on the other hand we find out that they have cut funding by $1.2 billion nationally. In South Australia, the only mainland state Labor government left, last month it was revealed that they were cutting $230 million from the South Australian education budget. Shame on them.

On top of that, as the Prime Minister said in question time, not only has the Leader of the Opposition failed to change his tactics in question time but he has also forgotten—a bit like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderlandthat it was his government that cut the computers in schools program in the last budget. It was his government that cut spending and funding to trades traineeships and apprenticeships in MYEFO last year, in the PEFO and in the budget last year. It was his government that took a scythe to higher education before the election, cutting $2.8 billion from universities, ostensibly to pay for schools, when we knew they were also cutting $1.2 billion from schools. And it took this government to recognise that the cap on self-education expenses was such a bad policy that we would remove that cap and scrap that measure.

The Leader of the Opposition should be censured. He should be censured for ripping $1.2 billion out of schools before the election and he should be censured because he did not leave a national model; in fact, he was prepared to short-change the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The need to suspend standing orders to deal with the matter before the chair is more urgent than ever. Since the time this motion was first moved in this chamber, the following words have been said by Senator Abetz in the other place: 'You might actually find some schools are worse off courtesy of various state government decisions.' They are the words that those in this chamber wanted to avoid, but everybody who has a relationship with a school, everybody who cares about a child's education around Australia, knows exactly what is going on with the weasel words that were used by the Prime Minister immediately before question time today.

The guarantees that were given—and this is why it is so urgent—time and time again prior to the election were guarantees that no school would be worse off. They were guarantees that did not say, 'not worse off because of us, but we'll let the states do what they want'. At the exact same time that you have state governments in places like the Northern Territory and Queensland firing teachers and closing down schools, the games that will be played as a result of the announcements made today by the Prime Minister are not lost on anyone—not anyone at all—and it is urgent that we bring this issue on. For a government that promised to be a government of no surprises and no excuses, we have seen the exact opposite.

It takes a very special Liberal Prime Minister to have a bad interview on Andrew Bolt's program—not many people can achieve that. Yesterday we heard from the Prime Minister, 'I think Christopher said schools would get the same amount of money—'schools', plural—will get the same amount of money.' Let us have a look at that little word game and see that it is indeed urgent for us to bring this debate on now within the parliament, because it was not the Leader of the House, the Minister for Education, who was using Leader of the Opposition letterhead before the election. When that statement was made we had the words: 'We want to end the uncertainty by guaranteeing that no school will be worse off over the forward estimates period.' So maybe he can say to Andrew Bolt, 'Well, that's what Christopher meant,' but everybody knows what the Prime Minister meant. Everybody knows the guarantee that the Prime Minister was giving and everybody knows now that the Prime Minister did not mean a word of it when he said that to the Australian people.

We then had, from the Leader of the House, the Minister for Education, on his own letterhead, in a media release: 'Every single school'—that is an unusual way to describe a plural, I have to say—'in Australia will receive exactly the same Commonwealth funding over the next four years whether there is a Liberal or Labor government after September 7.'

We then go back to letterhead that came out from the Prime Minister when he was Leader of the Opposition, when he did a joint media conference with Barry O'Farrell—hasn't that relationship gone well!—and the Leader of the House, where the Leader of the House, now Minister for Education, said, 'You can vote Liberal or Labor and you will get exactly the same amount of funding for your school.' There is no line there saying, 'Oh, but if the states make the cut it won't be our fault.' There is no line there saying, 'Oh, but we are going to give them permission to do exactly what they want.' As published in TheSydney Morning Herald, the then shadow minister for education and now Minister for Education said:

… no school will be worse off, whether it is a Liberal or Labor government in the next term.

This issue needs to be brought on urgently not only because of the dishonesty we have seen from those who now occupy the treasury bench in the commitments they made and promises they have now broken but also because there is no issue that drives both productivity and equity harder than decent, fair investment in the schools of the nation.

The Better Schools plan, a proud legacy of the former Labor government which at the election the coalition wanted to sidle up to so closely, actually guaranteed for the first time that we would end the debate between independent, Catholic and government systems—a debate that those opposite would love to drag us straight back to. The Australian public know the dishonesty that they are hearing from those opposite, and there should be a free vote and a free debate on that here on the floor of the parliament.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The original question was that the motion be agreed to, to which the honourable member for Sturt has moved an amendment. So the immediate question is that the amendment be agreed to.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question now is that the motion, as amended, be agreed to.

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I ask that further questions be placed on the Notice Paper.