Page 1133 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 29 May 2007
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One initiative is welcome, although I do not believe it goes far enough, and Dr Foskey was correct in picking this up. It is the university endowment fund. It is an interesting way of budgeting. I think that Ross Gittins in the Sydney Morning Herald referred to it as “jam jar economics”: the Treasurer puts a little bit of money aside, puts a label on it and then says, “Look, this is fantastic”—
Mr Seselja: Can you get through a whole Ross Gittins article? It is so boring. You did well not to fall asleep.
MR BARR: Mr Seselja, you would do well to take the time to read a bit more of what Mr Gittins has to say. He is one of the more objective economic observers, and he is someone who does not have a particular party political barrow to push. He has made the observation that in this type of economic policy we hive off—hypothecate—particular amounts of money, put them in our jam jars, give them a label and say, “This addresses all of the issues.” The great concern is that, having established the university endowment fund, the federal government will wash its hands of any further funding for the higher education sector. That is going to have a dramatic impact on productivity in this country.
I move to the next point. Perhaps the next disappointing aspect is the continuing decline in productivity on the federal government’s watch. They have failed to act on the critical link between long-term prosperity, productivity growth and investment in education. Human capital investment is at the heart of economic reform—the economic reform that is necessary to position Australia into the future as a competitive, innovative, knowledge-based economy.
Following the launch of the education revolution from the opposition leader, we are starting to see some catch-up politics. The federal Treasurer wants his lap of honour on education before he ebbs out of office. It has taken 11 long years—11 long years before we saw anything in substantial investment in education. The proportion of GDP was two per cent when they came to office but has fallen to 1.6 per cent even with this investment.
One of the more disturbing trends over the period has been the decrease in support for public education. Whilst I argue that we should have more investment in education overall and that that investment should be shared between public and private schools, we are seeing a massive shift in the proportionality of the funding. Public schools educate 70 per cent of Australians and 60 per cent of Canberrans. It has always been the case that this jurisdiction has had a higher proportion of people in non-government schools.
There has been a massive increase in funding for non-government schools. I understand that from this budget, across the nation, non-government schools are set to receive a $1.7 billion increase in funding over the next five years. That is welcome; that additional funding for education is welcome. The unfortunate part is that public schools will receive only $300 million a year extra in funding. There is a 30 per cent increase to non-government schools—a welcome investment—compared to only a 10 per cent increase for public schools. Ten per cent is better than nothing, but it is
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