Jerome Laxale (Bennelong, 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? Are there any risks to this?

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

I thank my friend, the best member for Bennelong we've ever had. Yesterday the Prime Minister signed an agreement with Premier Crisafulli to fully fund all public schools in Queensland. This is the last piece in the puzzle. This agreement means that now every public school in the country will be fully funded. No government has ever done this before. This is the biggest new investment in public education by an Australian government ever. It's worth an additional $16.5 billion over the next decade. It's not a blank cheque. This is tied to the biggest reforms to school education in decades—real and practical reforms designed to help children who fall behind when they're little to catch up and keep up and to help more young people finish high school.

And it's bigger than that, because, as we all know, a good education can change lives but a good education system can change countries. It's changed ours. Under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating the number of children finishing high school jumped from 40 per cent to almost 80 per cent. That was nation changing. It created jobs and businesses that otherwise wouldn't have existed.

When the Liberals were last in government, they ripped the guts out of public school funding—$30 billion worth—and we're still reaping the consequences of that today because since then the number of kids in public schools finishing high school has dropped from 83 per cent down to 73 per cent. This is what we have to turn around. It's what these agreements fundamentally are all about.

This is real microeconomic reform. If we're going to build Australia's future, if we're going to build the country of our imagination, then we need people to build it. This is about helping more young people finish high school and then go on to TAFE or to university to build the skills that they need for the jobs that exist today and will exist tomorrow. That's what this is about.

This is what Labor governments do, and it's what Liberal governments always try to undo. Labor builds, and the Liberals cut. It's what they did last time; it's what they'll do again. The Leader of the Opposition said as much himself the other day when he said, 'You should look at what politicians do as much, or probably more, than what they say.' Well, there it is. There's all the evidence you need that he'll cut and you'll lose—that he'll cut funding from our public schools and it's parents who will pay, it's children that will pay and it's every Australian that will have to pay—all for $600 billion worth of nuclear reactors.