Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I am a man of sympathy, and that performance was just embarrassing for Senator Carr. With his hyperbole, his series of complaints, his confected outrage, Senator Carr is attempting to hide the fact that he has no pull within his own party. I have sat in here and, whilst Senator Carr was industry minister, watched the Labor Party rip hundreds of millions of dollars out of Senator Carr's beloved car plants. We sat here during Senator Carr's months in the wilderness between leadership challenges and we saw hundreds of millions of dollars stripped out of higher education only months after it was promised to be the centre of this great new world order to allegedly fund Labor's so-called Better Schools Plan. Then, in the dying moments of the election campaign, after the last parliament had been dissolved, we saw Labor's true form being exposed by the sunlight of the election. Labor's true form saw $1.2 billion stripped out of education in this country, just as they did to higher education less than six months earlier. Let not their confected outrage hide the fact that the current Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten, the member for Maribyrnong, the then minister for education, was party to stripping $1.2 billion out of schools education in this country. He was party, as were senators on that side, to saying to students in Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland, 'You will not be funded on the basis of your need. You will not be funded as we think our more preferred jurisdictions are going to be funded.' The Leader of the Opposition was party to the greatest attempt at a swiftie in education this parliament has seen, and it was only due to the Charter of Budget Honesty that that attempt was exposed to the sunlight of the election campaign. We will not let the Labor Party run away from its past. It is a past of funding cuts to education, even in this calendar year, that have never been undertaken by this parliament before, and they happened on the Labor Party's watch. They happened when the Labor Party was in office with the support of their Green cousins in the other place. So let us not hear their confected outrage, because under the Labor Party there was no national funding model.

The first basis of a fair-funding model is the fact that it is national. The first basis of fairness should be that a student in Victoria or in the Northern Territory, having their needs taken into account, is not treated differently purely by the jurisdiction they live in or by the lines on a map that the centralists opposite so often claim to be concerned about. Yet, under the Labor Party, that is exactly what happened. They ripped $1.2 billion out and they treated students differently. That is not a record that they will be proud of and it is not a record that all the confected outrage and hyperbole is going to hide from the Australian people. What is the truth? The shadow Treasurer and member for McMahon belled the cat last week when he admitted that $1.2 billion had been taken out, a fact that the former Minister for Education did everything he could to avoid admitting publicly in his confected outrage on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. I was impressed by how helpful the member for McMahon was being to the Leader of the Opposition in that case, making sure that he outlined the facts of his short period of administration in that portfolio.

What we saw under the Labor Party and what we see today is a continuation of complete untrustworthiness in office. I noticed in moving to take note of answers today that Senator Carr asked: why did other states not sign up? There was a reason some states did not sign up. It was because they knew they could not trust this mob. If you were in the higher education sector in February, you had budgeted for future years and then come March or April Labor ripped the guts out of funding for higher education programs. If you keep doing the same thing over and over again and keep trusting the Labor Party opposite and they keep breaking their promises, more fool you. So the fact that jurisdictions did not sign up, the fact that jurisdictions knew that the Labor Party was not to be trusted is not to condemn them. It is a condemnation of the Labor Party.

What we know is that only two states and one territory had fully signed up to this program. The shadow Treasurer, the member for McMahon, outlined that as well. The Labor opposition seeks to divert attention from this fact because the other claimed signatories had not signed up to detailed funding agreements. I attended my first ministerial council meeting of Commonwealth, state and territory education ministers with the Minister for Education, Mr Pyne. I would say: do not believe everything you read in the press. What has happened today is that the coalition government has fulfilled and delivered on its promise of ensuring that the funding that was going to be made available for Australian schools, government and non-government, is being delivered to Australian families, students and to the people that administer the schools: the states, the territories and the nongovernment sector through various organisations.

Labor attempts to try and avoid discussion of the $1.2 billion they stripped out by referring to years 5 and 6 of these so-called agreements—they were never committed to by the former opposition. Let me explain why. Since 1974, when I was but the age of one, every funding agreement has been in a four-year cycle. They have always been quadrennial funding agreements, yet because the Labor Party was not willing or could not bring the Gonski package to any meaningful conclusion in years of negotiation—it could not get the states and territories and nongovernment sector to sign up to detailed funding plans—the Labor Party attempted to divert attention from this by promising huge sums of money in the out years.

Again, let us go back to the higher education sector, which has a similar portfolio, similar department—although it was hard to keep up under Labor's changes of minister and Prime Minister. The promises they made a year ago were ripped out of the system in under 12 months. So why on earth would anyone trust the Labor Party to make, for the first time ever, more than a four-year funding agreement? Let us put this in context. They were trying to negotiate funding agreements that were three elections away, if we assume a three-year election cycle. So it was going to be beyond the 2013 election, beyond the 2016 election and the last year was beyond the 2019 election. You cannot trust that mob for one election. Why on earth would you trust them for three?

The coalition always made clear we are going to stand with the historic arrangements for funding, which have been in four-year cycles, to give certainty to schools. The certainty the Prime Minister and the minister have delivered today is the certainty we promised before the election. Nothing those opposite say can be trusted in this space. While they were printing up stickers to distribute to and mislead voters in September, the pre-election economic and fiscal outlook belled the cat and outlined how they actually cut funding to education—money that we have put back today with this announcement. So the only party in this Senate that has cut funding to schools is the Labor Party. It is those opposite and their gall to bring this motion here today and have Senator Carr's confected outrage about our announcement to guarantee that our funding ensures that no school needs to be worse off. Labor will try and play word games in order to avoid accountability for their own poor performance.

Labor has also complained about some other aspects of our agenda. We do want to remove the command-and-control aspects of the Australian Education Act. We do not think that we in this place or bureaucrats in this city, or indeed the regional city centres of the Department of Education, have a place in telling people how to run schools. Labor is trying to hide behind that veil in order to avoid the fact that—we know and Australian families know—it does not like parental control; it does not like local autonomy. It does not trust communities and parents to run their own schools. Senator Carr earlier, when he complained about aspects of the SES formula, betrayed what the real agenda has always been for the Labor Party.

In 1964 the Menzies government started funding science labs. It started guaranteeing parents and families in Australia choice in education for their children. It is a core role of the Commonwealth parliament to guarantee that choice. It is something that those opposite have not been comfortable with. To hear complaints about how much the Catholic school system is getting takes me back to the days of Joan Kirner, takes me back to the days of Gough Whitlam—but that is Labor's agenda. It is about envy. It is about not liking choice. Today the Commonwealth government, Prime Minister Abbott and Minister Pyne, have guaranteed that the money that was promised to Australian students and families is going to be delivered, despite Labor's best attempts to take it off them.