Page 3780 - Week 12 - Thursday, 22 November 2007
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MRS BURKE: Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, I have put up with Mr Barr’s constant interjections. I am nearly finished.
Mr Barr: I have been reasonably restrained, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker.
Mr TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Gentleman): Order! Members, please cease interjecting.
MRS BURKE: I think it is going to be an absolute nightmare when a Rudd Labor government cannot even get their costings in and cannot get themselves organised. They throw things out to the community—100 policies. I am just amazed that we can sit here and think this is wonderful, particularly those in the Stanhope government. It is very sad; we bang on about Work Choices. The reality is that the federal government have not caused a scare campaign about that; it has been solely down to the unions.
MR BARR (Molonglo—Minister for Education and Training, Minister for Planning, Minister for Tourism, Sport and Recreation, Minister for Industrial Relations) (5.53): Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, if there is one thing that you can be assured of with the ACT Liberal opposition, it is that they have no shame whatsoever. The Liberal Party talks about the effects on this city of a massive slashing of the public sector. What about the record of the Howard government between 1996 and 1998? Those muppets opposite have the hide to come in here and accuse an incoming Labor government of having the potential to devastate this city. One only needs to go back to 1996 to look at the experience of the Howard Liberal government.
I will move on from that issue to the more important one—that is, the need for a federal government that is interested in investing in education, in increasing the quantum of the Australian federal government’s investment in education. We need an education revolution in this country; we need an investment in education and we need it to come from all levels of government. If we are going to build and sustain our economy into the future, we need to be investing in education and training now. We need a partnership between the federal government and the territory government to provide record levels of funding for education. That is why it is important that we see the election of a Rudd Labor government on Saturday.
Under the Howard government, Australia has fallen considerably behind most other OECD nations in terms of investment in education. On the early childhood front, the Australian government’s investment is at just 0.1 per cent of GDP, compared to an average of 0.5 per cent in OECD countries. We need significant further investment in early childhood education. The ACT government, through the range of initiatives that we have announced, will be investing in and establishing new early childhood schools. We have lifted the number of government-funded preschool hours in the ACT to 12 per week. With the addition of a $450 million investment from a Rudd Labor government in early childhood education, partnering with the ACT government, we will be able to further lift that to 15 hours per week.
The election of a Rudd Labor government will result in considerable investment in Australian schools. We will see investment in information technology. Again, it is an
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