Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Capricornia obviously does not remember the hydroelectric scheme, but I remember it very well, if we talk about what Labor has done! But I rise to speak to this private member's motion on Commonwealth funding for Queensland.

This motion does not reflect the impact that the Abbott government and its rotten budget will have on Queensland and Queenslanders. As my predecessor said before the last election, 'For Queensland, the Newman government's cuts to public services are just the entree; Tony Abbott will be the main course.'

The Abbott government has failed Queensland. The Abbott-Hockey budget cuts $80 billion from health and education. Before the election the now Prime Minister promised there would be no cuts to education. The Liberals and Nationals claimed they were on a 'unity ticket' with Labor, when it came to the reforms known as Gonski. Those reforms arose from the comprehensive review that David Gonski led of Australia's broken school funding arrangements.

We know that the Liberals and Nationals would have said anything to get elected. For example, they said there would be no cuts to health, no cuts to education, no changes to the pension and no cuts to the ABC or the SBS. Each one of those promises has been broken since the election—every single one of them has been broken and, unfortunately, they were obviously far from the gospel truth from the now Prime Minister. Now, Queensland students and their families, including those in my electorate of Griffith, are paying the price.

The southsiders I speak to are well aware that the Liberal-National government is not making good on its pre-election commitments. Despite claiming that unity ticket with Labor when it came to the Gonski reforms, the Prime Minister has refused to fund the essential fifth and sixth years of those reforms. And Treasury has now confirmed that under the Abbott-Hockey first budget Australian schools will be stripped of $30 billion over the next decade. This is the biggest ever cut to our schools. This is equivalent to sacking one in seven teachers, and will leave the average school $3.2 million worse off with every student receiving $1,000 less support per year.

So, despite the rhetoric in the motion put forward by the member for Ryan, the budget papers themselves state:

In this Budget the Government is adopting sensible indexation arrangements for schools from 2018, and hospitals from 2017-18—

and removing funding guarantees for public hospitals:

These measures will achieve cumulative savings of over $80 billion by 2024-25

That is $80 billion in cuts on the government's own budget papers.

Cutting indexation just to CPI—which the budget papers assume to be 2.5 per cent—at the same time as the ABS Education Price Index is 5.1 per cent, means a significant and compounding cut in real terms. This compares to what was intended under the Gonski reforms, where the intended average federal expenditure increase was 9.2 per cent. So, Deputy Speaker, you can see that this is walking away from the reforms in respect of which they supposedly had a unity ticket. Last year the now education minister described the prospect of three per cent indexation for schools as 'frightening', yet this year he is prepared to introduce a system that will go beyond that.

In Queensland the cuts that are being made amount to $6.7 billion. The 58 schools in my electorate on the south side of Brisbane—that is 58 schools in the electorate of Griffith—will lose $236 million. This means that students in Griffith will miss out on literacy and numeracy programs, extension classes, extra teachers subject choices, music, drama and art programs and sport. The Abbott government has also changed the federal school funding rules, taking a no-strings-attached approach. This means letting states and territories off the hook, allowing them to divert money to other projects, to cut school budgets and abandon reforms to improve student results.

I know that those opposite, on the government side, continue to argue that, really, education is about quality and not just about dollars. But that is just a cynical distraction from the government's destructive agenda to cut funding to schools. Every teacher, principal and parent will tell you that resources actually matter at schools and in the classroom. The research backs that up, and so do Liberal premiers. When I visit my local schools and hear about the benefits they are getting from the new libraries and other facilities they got under Kevin Rudd's Building the Education Revolution policy, it is clear that schools thrive with the right resources. No local school I have been to has said to me, 'Gee, I wish we didn't have that new library.' They love the additional resources because they help to deliver quality education for the students.

So the Gonski reforms are not just about money at all. The purpose of the reforms is to improve the way that money is spent. The reforms are aimed at getting resources to those schools and to those students who need them most, while making sure no that school is worse off. We have an achievement gap of up to three years, and we need to fix it.

Debate adjourned.

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