Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Australian Education Amendment Bill 2014. If the government had kept its promise to honour the Gonski agreements, there would be no need to consider many parts of this bill. If the government had simply kept its promise to deliver the full disability loading in 2015, we would not need amendments relating to funding for independent special schools. If this government had a clear vision for schools policy, if it actually cared what happened in classrooms, Labor would not need to defend the Gonski reforms, stand up for students with disabilities and argue for transparency and accountability in school funding.

This bill will ensure that funding reaches Indigenous students in boarding schools and independent special schools, which is of utmost importance. The opposition supports clauses in the bill that allow funding to flow to Indigenous students at boarding schools and clauses that will prevent funding cuts to students with disabilities in some independent schools.

While not opposing the delay of the implementation of school improvement plans, the opposition has serious concerns about what this move might be a harbinger for: a watering down of accountability to the Commonwealth brought in as a part of the Gonski reforms, perhaps? These are reforms that the Minister for Education has botched; these are reforms that the minister has, as with other elements of his portfolio, clearly said one thing about before the election and said—in this case many, many—different things about after the election.

School improvement plans, at their very heart, are about making sure that the money invested in schools by the federal government actually reaches classrooms and actually improves students' results. They are ways of ensuring that bureaucracies, state government and independent schools actually spend money on students. On the one hand, the government claims that money alone will not improve our schools, but on the other it is trying to sneakily undo reforms backed by experts that will improve student results. School improvement plans are not onerous. They were designed to make sure that money reaches those students that need it the most and that the extra Gonski investment that Labor made in our schools actually makes a difference in classrooms. This is about accountability.

The independent Australian Council for Educational Research has developed the guide for the school improvement plans, and it has been signed off by the states—Liberal and Labor. We need an appropriate level of reporting to make sure that these reforms do what they are supposed to do: help every child in every school to improve their results. Schools already make improvement plans and track their progress. The vast majority of schools will have to do absolutely nothing more in order to satisfy the requirements.

If I can turn to Victorian school funding, the government has been caught out again with absolutely no idea when it comes to schools. A year after breaking its promise to honour the Gonski agreements, then having a different position on schools every day and then being shamed into humiliating double backflips, it is still chasing its tail. We have seen this, for instance, in Victoria, where the Napthine government refuses to be accountable for money it has received under the Gonski reforms; where it has refused to tell Victorian schools and their principals how the Gonski funding will flow to schools; where school communities have no guarantees that this funding will be delivered on the ground and not squirrelled away for election bribes; and where there continues to be doubt about how much money Victoria will receive, with the Napthine government saying that no final decisions have been reached, but with the Commonwealth and Minister Pyne claiming that funding is settled.

Education funding in Victoria is a mess, with a government who cut TAFE funding while youth unemployment went up; a government which abolished the Education Maintenance Allowance; a government which has no real commitment to schools or to the welfare of students; a government which, like those opposite, sees education policy as a proxy for some great cultural war, a war which is a waste of time, of interest only to crazed right-wing obsessives; and a Commonwealth minister who clearly cannot work out what his policy is. Hopefully, in less than two weeks time, Victoria will have a new government to fix up this morass, a government that will fight this government's plan to rip $30 billion from Victorian schools and their students.

Elements of this bill, and the ideology that drives it, foreshadow the federal government's deep desire to walk away from funding state schools, leaving state and territory systems to wither on the vine. The bill exposes the government's plan not to unite and improve all Australian schools but to pit parent against parent, school against school and state against state in a fight for a pool of Commonwealth funding. This will, in real terms, dwindle that funding.

The government has again locked in behind the concept of CPI indexation for schools funding from 2018. This is a real commitment to this government's $80 billion in cuts to schools and hospitals—cuts that will leave every school an average of $3.2 million worse off, which is the same as sacking one in seven teachers and which will mean $1,000 less support for every student every year. This is a very significant cut in real terms, with the education price index currently running at 5.1 per cent.

We know that behind closed doors the education minister has been telling schools that the CPI indexation rate announced in the budget will be renegotiated, but the government response to the recent Senate report Equity and excellence in Australian schools blows that out of the water. It is crystal clear about the fact that funding will be going down in real terms:

… school education funding from 2018 will increase based on student enrolment growth and the government-wide indexation rate of the Consumer Price Index.

I further quote:

The distribution of the funding envelope from 2018 will be subject to formal negotiations with all states and territories and non-government education providers …

This is a divide and conquer strategy that will mean our schools will never reach the student resource standard and will entrench and amplify inequality. It will be a handbrake on the economy. According to PISA 2012, there is up to three years difference in the results between the most advantaged and most disadvantaged students. This gap will never be closed if the government continues down the path of braking it promises on school funding and the Gonski reforms.

The government has cut all additional funding for the fifth and sixth years of the Gonski reforms; cut $80 billion from schools and hospitals over the next decade—the biggest ever cut; cut the $100 million a year more support for students with disabilities program and failed in its promise for more funding from 2015. It has let state governments off the hook by promising not to enforce their funding obligations under the Gonski agreements.