Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

Let's deal with the facts of life—lies, damn lies; statistics; Senator Doug Cameron and the Australian Labor Party. What we have here, of course, is that they fail to recognise school funding is at a record level and will grow every year into the future by around $1 billion extra—

Opposition senators: Not one dollar less!

$1 billion extra year on year. University funding is at a record level, and last night in the budget we announced $1.9 billion for research infrastructure that will of course drive and spur more innovation.

Senator Cameron comes in here and wants to run his class war rhetoric, talking about tax cuts for Australian businesses. We make no apologies for the fact that we want to keep spurring investment by Australian businesses, because investment created more than 400,000 jobs in Australia last year. Do you know who gets those jobs? Australian students, when they leave university, when they leave vocational education, when they leave school—more jobs for Australian students from their quality education.