Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Education. What is the Albanese Labor government doing to build a better and fairer school education system, and what alternative approaches to education would leave Australians worse off?

Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank my friend the magnificent member for Macnamara for his question. He knows, we all know, that when the Liberals were last in power they ripped the guts out of school funding. Thirty billion dollars was ripped out of schools. They were so proud of it that they set it all out in this document: the budget 2014 overview—not so much a smoking gun as a chainsaw.

We're still dealing with the consequences of that budget ripping $30 billion out of schools today, because over the last 10 years the number of students finishing high school has dropped from 83 per cent to 73 per cent. That's in public schools, where that funding was ripped out. Remember that this is happening at a time when it is more important than ever before to finish school. It's more important than when we were kids.

This is what we've got to turn around. That's what the agreements that we have now struck with Western Australia, with South Australia, with Victoria, with Tasmania, with the Northern Territory and with the ACT are all about, and we want to do the same with New South Wales and with Queensland. Together this is the biggest new investment in public education by an Australian government ever, and it's not a blank check. This is tied to real and practical reform—things like evidence based teaching; phonics checks and numeracy checks in year 1 to identify children who need additional help, and then making sure that they get that help through more individualised support like catch-up tutoring.

A lot of parents spend a lot of money on tutoring. The difference here is that this is free, and it will save mums and dads a lot of money and provide their kids with the support they need to catch up, to keep up and to finish school—to help our children get the best possible start in life. It's what every mum and dad wants for their kids and what every child deserves. This is all about priorities—free tutoring for our kids under Labor, or free lunches for bosses under the Liberals—because if the Liberals win the next election all of this funding for free tutoring will be gone. They'll rip the money out just like they did last time. The Leader of the Opposition, old Tony Abbott 2.0 over there, says he'll cut, but he doesn't have the guts to say where he'll cut. You don't have to be Einstein to work it out. It'll be just like what they did last time. As the Treasurer said, it'll be Medicare, pensions, housing, veterans and this—cutting funding from our schools and cutting funding from our kids' futures. How cooked is that?