Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. How is it fair or needs based that the Prime Minister is cutting $846 million from public schools in New South Wales over the next two years alone but is giving the elite King's School an extra $19 million over the next 10 years?

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The honourable member will no doubt have noted today in the press the strong support the former New South Wales education minister Adrian Piccoli gave to the government's school funding reform. Mr Piccoli, who had signed up to the Labor government's education deal because they offered a particularly good special deal to New South Wales, nonetheless recognised that we have a big opportunity here, a historical opportunity here—as Ken Boston has said, as Kathryn Greiner has said, as one educational leader after another has said—to grab this opportunity to deliver nationally consistent needs-based funding.

The nonsense about there being less money is just that. There is $18.6 billion of additional funding over 10 years. The Labor Party can talk about more money. They never funded it. It was fantasy money. It was a political hoax that the Labor Party played. They played it on the state governments and the school systems they entered into agreements with. They talked about David Gonski's needs-based funding, and now they have walked away from it. They talked about their care and concern for students, and now they have abandoned them. Every principle they said they were committed to about school funding—needs based, consistent, transparent—they have thrown aside.

The funding model we have presented is consistent, needs based and transparent across the nation. It is what David Gonski recommended and it is what we are delivering. Labor should drop the politics and focus on the children; forget about the education bureaucrats and the education union officials and focus on the children. We are committed to ensuring our children and our grandchildren get the funding they deserve that meets their needs and the quality teaching they need to get ahead and achieve their dreams.