Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the urgency motion before us. It is hard to stand here listening to the rhetoric of those opposite as they outline the need to stick to promises of needs based funding models, of funding models with integrity, of ensuring that signatures are on the bottom line of any contracts—applying the Catherine King model, if you like, of contractual arrangements that was so commonplace in the past government's approach to their dealings with states and local governments: promises made, funding promised but not allocated, signatures not attained, and then we are in the mess that we were left with.

I am a great believer in the strength of education and, indeed, public education as a birthright for every single Australian. The coalition recognises the need to reform the education system. We have 10,000 schools and millions of students—over a million located outside of capital cities, I might say, and 660,000 of those are in state schools—so getting it right is important to those of us who are interested in the future. But there is one key factor in this debate that we do need to consider, and I would just like to quote Ken Boston, who was a member of the Gonski review panel. He said:

Public expenditure on education has never been higher. It has been wasted because it has not been distributed strategically according to need and has not been spent on the things that really matter.

I think we could go through a litany of funding proposals in education by the former government which show the unstrategic allocation of funds in terms of educational outcomes—maybe in political outcomes it was very strategic to allocate their school funding where they chose to. But the reality is that there is one bucket of money and we need to make sure it is spent in a way that has educational outcomes. I think we are committed to doing that.

One of the issues that the opposition fails to recognise time and time again—and the Greens completely reject the notion that we live in a federation—is that the states are responsible for education funding. It is not the Commonwealth's role to ensure that state governments, no matter which colour they are, remain unaccountable for how their state school systems are functioning. When we looked at the critique from the states when we were doing the Senate inquiry into the Australian Education Bill, there was a significant amount of concern from states around the lack of autonomy that they would experience under the model as it was proposed. That is something that, in government, we on this side understand. We understand that we live in a federation and that we need to work collaboratively with our state governments, no matter who they are, to ensure that every child in our nation receives an education which is their birthright.

I just want to attack one of the assumptions that have so often been made in this debate and that really gets to the heart of the matter, and that is that more money equals better education. That is simply not the case. The Senate Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Committee headed to China last year to look at a range of success measures that the Chinese education system has had internationally and to work out what was done. I can tell you: the student resource standard that they were getting per student in Chengdu, Shanghai or Beijing was a lot lower per student than our students get—