Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the urgency motion before us. Firstly, can I say how extraordinarily astounded I am that we are even debating such a motion. I am absolutely astounded that we are even having this discussion having listened to the debate that we have had in the house today, the debate that has been around over the last week in relation to this matter. During question time today I probably heard the Minister representing the Minister for Education, Senator Payne, and the Minister representing the Prime Minister, Senator Abetz, say on many, many occasions that the funding was not going to be cut for any schools in any state or territory of Australia. So can I repeat the words of the Prime Minister a minute ago when he said, 'We are committed to a fairer funding model which will ensure no school will be worse off because of anything that the Commonwealth does.' I am not quite sure what we are actually debating here today if we are ensuring that every school, every state and every territory will not be worse off by the actions of the Commonwealth. I may be wrong here, but it seems to me that we are debating the semantics of the details of nomenclature instead of actually debating the issues of education.

What I think would be a really terrific outcome here would be if we took this time now and started to address the real issue that is before us, and that is the delivery of good education in Australia. I really believe there is a tremendously good outcome for education when we do have a country that, despite all the problems we have seen in our education system over the years, has a reasonably good education system, but nobody is even remotely suggesting that we cannot do a better job of it. What we have seen today announced I think is one of the most important steps towards that better education system, and that is that we have a national agreement. Let us not hide behind the fact that we came into this parliament with an agreement in relation to education that excluded three significant jurisdictions. Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory had not signed up to the national funding model, so it really does make a bit of a farce of calling something a national funding agreement when you have got three significant jurisdictions which have not agreed to it. Firstly, we have to acknowledge that we now have, albeit only in principle, agreement from the other three jurisdictions so that we actually have a national funding agreement.

That leads on to the obvious issue that has been of great debate over recent days, and that is the funding. We noticed in the chamber today that there was some suggestion that we had not increased the amount of money that is being applied to this model. But we have to realise that prior to the election $1.2 billion had been allocated to the jurisdictions that were excluded from the agreement that had been achieved by the previous government and that $1.2 billion had been taken out of the budget. By reinstating that $1.2 billion, by getting the three jurisdictions to commit to this national agreement, I think we have to acknowledge that there has been a significant and substantial progression and benefit to the development of a national education program for better schools in our country. I think the substantial change with this new national agreement is not just the equity but, more importantly, that while the financial arrangements are going to remain largely the same, albeit with the addition of these extra jurisdictions, the control is proposed to be removed.

I am a great believer that we have a system of federation in this country, and we have to recognise the fact that we actually elect our state governments to do a job. I think we have to stop taking away from state governments and thinking that we here in Canberra know best about everything—we don't. If you have a look at the model that was previously proposed, it was basically setting up a command and control style operation in relation to education. It was going to give the federal education minister the ability to direct the states and territories as to how they fund or operate their schools. That is just completely and utterly against everything that we believe in, in the sense of people out there on the ground. The teachers in the schools, the principals in the schools, the parents of the children are all in far better positions to understand the nuances and the details of the things that are most important to their particular schools, their particular communities. For us to think that we know better sitting here in Canberra is an arrogance that we can well do without.

Labor's model was going to create a new bureaucracy that was going to collect even more data from schools, from states and from territories, so we would have ended up with a situation where we spent more of our time collecting data than we would actually worrying about what the children need and the teaching of our children. It also required that federal school inspectors could enter schools and examine all the schools' records and monitor improvements against federal criteria. Where did Big Brother come into this whole exercise? He seems to have been alive and well.

In closing, what we are seeing here, with the changes that are being proposed by the coalition, is nothing more than a recognition that education is a very, very important issue. It is something that we place a huge amount of importance on; however, we do not believe that the people who sit here in Canberra are in a better position to dictate what happens. We believe it is appropriate that the state jurisdictions have the ability to deal at a grassroots level with the issues that affect individual schools and individual states. The idea of just adding money is certainly not the answer. I believe that the previous government failed to get a national agreement, and we have achieved that in less than three months. We have kept our promise to maintain school funding to this program. In fact, if you put back in the $1.2 billion that was slashed from the budget prior to the election, you could actually say that we have increased the amount of funding that is available for these programs for the states that had not signed up. We continue to recognise the important role that the states and individual schools should play in the management of their schools.

Question agreed to.