Dr MULINO (Fraser) (15:58): On no other issue that we'll discuss today is there as great a chasm between those on this side and the government. I'm proud today to stand in defence of this motion and to speak, with the shadow minister for education, on a vision that has been developed over many years, a vision that this country sorely needs. This motion highlights not just how important that vision is but how starkly it stands in contrast to the failure of this government, now in its seventh year—seven years of failing to deliver in one of the most important areas of policy in this country. I'm going to speak about the government's failure in relation to two particular areas of policy, two interdependent ways of looking at the same important area of government service delivery. One is education as a critical way of providing equality of opportunity for our young Australians, and the second is education as a way of investing in the future and providing economic development and, as the shadow minister outlined, as a way of driving productivity growth, which is currently at an appalling low rate. Let's first look at education as a way of dealing with equality of opportunity. I turn to my own electorate, an electorate sorely in need of greater investment in this area. Under the policies proposed at the last election, developed by the opposition and championed by the shadow minister for education, every government school in my electorate would have received additional equity funding. Indeed, four secondary colleges in my electorate would have received more than $2 million of funding over the life of the next term. None of that money will flow to them now. But every single government school would have received additional money that they would have needed and that would have been carefully calibrated to deal with the particular equity needs of that school. I've spoken to a number of principals in my electorate, both in the lead-up to the election and since. They've talked to me about what they would have done with that money, about how they're dealing with incredibly diverse students but, often, student bodies with a number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. There are many students with language issues, many students with disabilities and many students who are refugees. Those principals had plans, had visions, for how they could spend that money on specialists, on teachers to help with language, on teachers to help with students' needs when they have a disability, on teachers who could have helped a school cope with 45 nationalities in a student body of fewer than 200 students. That's what principals were dreaming of doing with additional equity funding they so need. But, now, none of that funding will go to them. What do those opposite say? When they defend their legacy—seven years—just about the entire defence of their legacy comes down to, 'We're spending more dollars than ever.' Their entire defence, almost, is that the nominal education budget is increasing—but, as all of the speakers on this side have so eloquently outlined, that's something that happens just through the process of population growth and inflation. That's really what they're relying on. They're relying on the nominal dollars increasing, and that's the end of the story. Well, no, that's not a vision, that's not providing real outcomes for people from disadvantaged backgrounds, that's not providing sophisticated holistic strategy in this space. It's not enough to say that we're spending more than ever before. That is not an education policy that this country needs. The second test I want to explain, that this government fails, is the economic test. You could look at this from a number of perspectives. One is early childhood. The member for Cunningham spoke at length about how, if you look at what we're doing versus what a lot of our economic competitors are doing, we are falling behind. The shadow minister also stressed that. Let's look at the VET sector. This is an area where the absolute numbers are falling, despite the fact that population growth is occurring, despite the fact that we are entering a period when people are going to be changing their careers more than ever, and despite the fact that we all know that, in a world where the future of work is one of the great challenges of this parliament, lifelong learning, lifelong reskilling, is something that we will have to embrace. I recently attended the opening of a really inspirational centre in St Albans, which will provide cybersecurity training to the cert IV level for students in my electorate. Do you know what that was off the back of? It was not from this government but free TAFE in Victoria, provided by the Victorian government. That's what would have been occurring, right across the country, with our party's policies but that's what is not occurring with this government in charge. Their policies fail the social policy and economic policy tests.