Marise Payne (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

The government has made it very clear—and I think this might be the third or fourth time that we are saying this for Senator Carr, but nevertheless we are very generous people so we will keep doing that—that we will honour the funding deals reached with the states over the four-year period as promised. We are also working with Victoria and Tasmania to finalise their bilateral agreements so that the funding can flow.

What the Australian government will do to Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory is the same amount of Commonwealth funding that was committed by Labor even though a National Education Reform Agreement was not signed. We have already made arrangements so that $230 million of funding will flow to them for 2014, and this will give the government ample opportunity to formalise new heads of agreement with these three jurisdictions. They will not be conditional on signing up to a deal which reduces their authority over schools or creates unnecessary red tape.

What we have is a proper national funding model—a funding support model. What Labor did was to make a complete mess of school funding negotiations. Now that we have agreement across the board for our funding plan we can deliver national school funding reforms. We will also remove the red tape as demand and control features that characterise Labor's model, and we will treat the states and territories like adult governments who operate and own their government schools. But most importantly, there is only one party in this chamber that has taken money away from schools—that is $1.2 billion—and that is Labor.