John Madigan (Victoria, Democratic Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak to Senator Moore's motion. I believe we need to spend more on education, and on health—doctors, allied health et cetera. I really do wonder if we are just going to have another razor gang, in some ways. I acknowledge that you cannot spend what have not got, but you do need to invest for the future. There is a lot of concern out there, and there has been money badly spent, but all governments spend money wisely and unwisely, and we have to acknowledge that no side gets everything right.

In my travels around Victoria I have visited secondary schools, primary schools and kindergartens, and a few come to mind. In Donald I visited the Donald Primary School and saw that the walls are riddled with white ants, and they cannot open the windows in the school. The teachers have to come in and paint the classrooms during the school holidays to hide the borers in the walls. I can recall visiting Kyabram Secondary College, where the borers are so bad that you actually fall through the floor and the sheet-metal class teachers have to cut sheets of steel to screw over the holes in the floor. Then there is North Geelong Secondary College where it is obvious that there are major problems with the maintenance of the buildings—and all credit to the new principal for the improvements that he has made to the school, but there are still huge gaps in the budget. Close to home, near my workshop in Daylesford, at the Daylesford Secondary College you can see enormous problems there with the gap in the budget. Then I spent some time at Easter up in western Victoria in a town where a friend of mine's daughter is a nurse, and she said: 'If you get sick here, don't bother going to the local hospital; drive the 2¾ hours back to Ballarat because you're not going to get any assistance here because there's no money for doctors and enough staff and facilities to treat people. So drive back to Ballarat.'

So I think that there has been money not appropriately spent, but I do fear that we are falling behind the rest of the world when I see some of the projects that are happening overseas in education and public health. Possibly we are falling behind, and I fear we may fall even further behind. I do not want to see a situation where we have a lot of consultants brought in with, possibly, preconceived outcomes, as has happened in the past. There is never any query on the cost of consultants and what they bring.

I also do not want to see any further selling of public assets. Medibank Private has already copped it—shall we say, the former government took a dividend from the members of Medibank Private.

So I see there has been fault on both sides of the equation and by successive governments of all persuasions. Ultimately, whatever decisions we make here affect people. And we are elected by Australians; we are not elected by corporations; we are not elected by ideologies, whatever they may be—we are elected by people, to do what is in our country's interests and to build our country up for all Australians, no matter who they are or where they live.

So I would urge the government to think very seriously about how this commission of audit is going to carry out its work. I urge them to remember that, ultimately, it is about people, and that, no matter what government it has been, they have all made mistakes. But these mistakes affect people.

For our young people to take advantage of the jobs of the future and what opportunities may present themselves, they need to have good health, and they need good education so that more of them can be engaged in the workforce and be better equipped to take advantage of those opportunities when they present themselves.