Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

I will resist the temptation to waste the committee's time by responding to all of Senator Collins's verballing and unsubstantiated claims and otherwise. But I will very quickly deal with a couple of her questions. I am not quite sure Senator Lambie did specifically ask this, but I am more than happy to say that the four-year budget entitlement or cost for the National Schools Resourcing Board is $7.2 million, providing funding to ensure that the board has sufficient resources to commission data, modelling and expert work as it sees fit. While Senator Lambie is not here, we will make sure that her office is alerted to those figures, should she wish to know them.

Senator Collins also asked, in relation to the measures we were discussing with Senator Back last night, for a state-by-state breakdown of the funding provision to provide equivalence of the maintenance of system weighted averaging for systems next year: for New South Wales it is $10.5 million for the Catholic system and $0.5 million for independent school systems; for Victoria it is $9.2 million for the Catholic system and $2.4 million for independent systems; for Queensland it is $7.5 million for the Catholic system and $0.9 million for independent systems; for South Australia it is $2.5 million for the Catholic system and $1.5 million for independent systems; for Western Australia it is $2.5 million for the Catholic system; for Tasmania it is $0.8 million for the Catholic system; for the ACT it is $5 million for the Catholic system and $3 million for the independent systems; and for the Northern Territory it is $0.2 million for the Catholic system—totalling the estimate of $46.5 million that I indicated last night to the committee. Of course, as I indicated last night, it is an estimate and is subject to enrolment numbers and such other normal factors.

In terms of the other modelling that the senator has asked for: I am not aware that there is modelling of the precise nature that she wants. What the department has produced, and which has been provided at Senate estimates and elsewhere, is modelling that demonstrates all of the integrated changes, whether they be changes to the capacity-to-contribute arrangements, changes to indexation, the shifting of systems in schools to receiving, over time, a common share of the schooling resource standard, the needs based funding arrangement—all of those are integrated changes. They all of course impact upon one another in different ways. That is what provides us with the different funding that has already been tabled in relation to funding for different systems.