Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to contribute to this urgency debate. The motion that we have before us is to call on the government to ensure that it avoids the dire consequences for equity, improvement, achievement and opportunity in Australia of not keeping its promise to support the Better Schools program.

We have all witnessed today what was an extraordinary backflip by the Prime Minister and the Minister for Education. However, we know what this really was: this was a political stunt that has come about as a result of the extraordinary backlash in response to Minister Pyne's announcement last week. The anger and distress of education ministers last week after that conference was palpable, and it did not take very long for parent groups, educators and Australians generally to go to the issue—that is, that this minister has never, ever, ever been committed to the reforms that were proposed by the Gonski review, led by someone who had a genuine interest in improving our education system. It was supported by the hundreds of people who made submissions, trying to improve our education system by bringing it into the 21st century and focusing on the learning needs of our students rather than the funding and infrastructure needs of government and the commitments of government.

When we think about the issues in those terms, what more could Mr Pyne and Mr Abbott have done but to come out today before question time and scrambled the egg once again, do another backflip, saying: 'Yes, we've now agreed. We've signed up. It's all going to be fine'? The devil is always in the detail, isn't it? In the statement the Prime Minister said they had identified $1.2 billion in cuts, which will fund this agreement that they have now entered into with the states and territories that had not signed up, which will be reviewed sometime in the future

We heard in question time that there will be no strings attached, so what we did not hear was that there was going to be a commitment from our state and territory governments not to withdraw funding. We have seen that that has already happened, and so these three states and territories that have now signed up are going to have carte blanche to continue their own cuts in their state education budgets. That is hardly a support of the status quo.

We have no idea of the details. When is an agreement an agreement? Mr Pyne last Friday said that those states and territories that did not have a signed intergovernmental agreement did not have an agreement, but today we have an agreement in principle by those three authorities cobbled together and stitched up just in time for question time. So what is the actual content of that agreement? What are the in-principle facts? What is the no-disadvantage test that was alluded to in that statement? We are yet to see what that is all about.

I was quite taken with Senator Wright's contribution, because she really got to the nub of the issue of the problem that we have had with the SES funding model which Minister Pyne on Friday was quite wedded to—he has perhaps been a product of that system more generally and is most familiar with it—but it is not the view of his colleagues. Particularly, I want to congratulate the Minister for Education in New South Wales, Adrian Piccoli, who really got to the nub of the issue when he said: 'We've got to invest in our children's education. We've got to invest in our education system. We've got to invest in bringing on new teachers. We have a retirement age cohort of teachers. We're going to be left with a significant gap, and the Gonski reforms, which were systemic reforms, are the ones that are going to deliver the issue.' I think we all want a guarantee that, regardless of this dodgy deal that was announced before question time, there will be equity, access and affordability in our education system in the future.