Meet The Press

E&OE................................

Journalist: Good morning to you, thank you very much for joining us this morning, Mr Pyne.

Hon Christopher Pyne MP:  Good morning Cat.

Journalist: First question to you, Tony Abbott’s response yesterday was somewhat muted to the Government’s announcement today.  Are you in a way sitting pretty in that the Government is doing all the hard dirty work for you?

Pyne:  Well I don’t know what you mean by the hard dirty work.  I mean the Government has announced $11 billion worth of cuts and redirections to fund a $14.5 billion education package.  That’s $600 million of new money each year.  Now the Gonski report said that $6.5 billion would be needed each year.  So in fact they have delivered one tenth.  So they have done all these exertions since November 2011 and they have delivered a “Conski” not a Gonski. Now the public will be shocked as the South Australian public were today when they woke up to the headline in the Sunday Mail which said ‘SA schools duded’.  The truth is that the Government is robbing Peter to pay Paul.  They are robbing future aspirations of university students to fund school students today.  And it is essentially not a, an investment in the future it is a re-election plan, not an education plan.

Journalist: Christopher, good morning.  I noticed that the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, had been very equivocal about the position on the Higher Education cuts.  Are you telling us that you will support those cuts or you will, you’ll do something about them that you will repeal them?

Pyne:  Well Simon, we can’t save the Government – save the country from opposition.  That is not our job.  The government is announcing cuts, they announced $3.9 billion of cuts in MYEFO, $600 million at the last budget, $2.8 billion yesterday.  They’ve announced billions of dollars of redirections for the so-called New School Funding model…

Journalist: Sorry – it is a simple question. Do you support them or do you not?  If they propose to go ahead with them, will you go ahead with them?

Pyne:  We will not be saving the sector from Opposition. If a sector wants a new government that manages its budget successfully, gets the government back into surplus, pays back the government debt, like the Howard government, can then invest in education, then they need to change the government.  We can’t just block every cut the Government announces to save the various sectors that are burnt on the funeral pire of Julia Gillard’s political ambition to win an election in 150 days, but if we change the government we will be able to get a government of adults in the room who live within their means and start growing the economy again.

Journalist: So it sounds like you’re happy to let those cuts to go through.  So you’ve got cuts on the table, what spending are you actually coming up with in education?  You said that you like the idea of Gonski, you don’t want to spend as much as the government on Gonski, how much are you prepared to say, when are you going to tell us?

Pyne:  Well we have to really wait until Friday’s COAG meeting because all of this could well unravel.  The State governments are yet to be told their quantum of funds per state that they are expected to come up with.  Now it is a scandal that the government has had the Gonski report since November 2011, and in April less than a week before COAG the States are still yet to be told that their share of the funding is as part of a $14.5 billion spending package.  The Government is trying to bully the States into accepting it on a blind date.  Now we don’t know if the Catholic schools or the Independent schools will support this new funding money because it’s all bit of smoke and mirrors.  Put it this way, will the Government deliver university cuts, 100% we know they will.  Will they deliver on Gonski benefits? 0% because we know what they do is announce programs and they cancel them before they even started.   That’s what happened with MYEFO and that’s what happened today with their announcements to Higher Education cuts.

Journalist: You’ve said that the $6.5 billion is what was required under Gonski, which the Government support, you are now saying what is being delivered under this package is $600 million a year.  How do you justify that number?

Pyne:  Well Simon in the announcements that we are reading today, we are finding today that they have cut $2.8 billion from Higher Education, $3.9 billion last year in MYEFO, $600 million in the laptop in schools program, $1.3 billion for the rewards for greater teachers, $1.2 billion for teacher quality programs, $550 million for the literacy and numeracy programs, $540 million for other national partnerships for low SES students for example.  In total, they have announced cuts or they have announced redirections of national partnerships totally $11 billion over the next six years.  So this is a smoke and mirror trick, it is another example of the Prime Minster announcing a re-election plan , not an education plan because she wants to get through the next 150 days to get re-elected and I don’t think the public will buy it.

Journalist: Christopher Pyne, Shadow Education Minister, I’m afraid we are out of time - we will have to leave it there. Thank you for your time this morning.

Pyne:  Thank you.

ENDS