Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

That was quite a gutful that we were given by Senator Carr. I want to talk mainly about education tonight, but I do want to make a couple of points about what Senator Carr had to say about universities. First of all, I think it is disgraceful that the Australian Labor Party has risen in this place for political purposes to talk down the achievements of Australian universities. I am a graduate of one of those universities. I assume Senator Carr is one, and many others in this place are. They are institutions which have done a superb job in producing outstanding graduates and outstanding research programs in the Australian context.

I am proud of what the Australian universities have done and I think that they are excelling in the fields in which they work. There is, of course, room to improve, but that is what the $5 billion Higher Education Endowment Fund in this budget is all about. It is about improving an already very good education system. I make one more point: Senator Carr told us how disgraceful it was that the coalition government moved to cut education funding in 1996, what a dastardly thing it was and how terrible Amanda Vanstone was to undertake that activity. He said that the Labor government had funded education more generously than have we.

Let us be very clear about this: Labor had not sustainably funded education to that level at all. It had spent money on education—as in all other areas of the budget—that the Australian community could not afford. It was on the basis of a debt of $100 billion and a deficit of $10 billion.