Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

The Schools Assistance (Learning Together—Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Amendment Bill 2006 being considered by the House today proposes to amend the Schools Assistance (Learning Together–Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Act 2004, which provides the bulk of Commonwealth funding to schools. The Commonwealth currently provides funding, including capital funding, for government and non-government schools for the 2005-08 quadrennium through this act.

You would have to say that the glib and overtly political title of the principal act glosses over the extraordinary inequities that this act perpetuates and the policy failures that this amendment bill attempts to correct. There was no mention in the second reading speech by the Minister for Education, Science and Training of the unfairness of the funding increases that the act enshrines for at least another four years, from 2005. There was nothing about the unfair distribution of funding within the non-government school sector itself.

According to the explanatory memorandum, the specific provisions in this amendment bill have the following objectives: to move uncommitted capital infrastructure funding for government schools from 2005 to 2006 and to bring forward 2008 funding to 2006; to move unspent funding under the Tutorial Voucher Initiative from 2004 to 2006; to allow funding to be carried over or brought forward to another year for all ‘non per capita’ programs—that is, capital grants, targeted programs and national projects; to provide maximum general recurrent grants for a small number of non-government schools that cater for students with emotional, social or behavioural difficulties; and to make a minor technical correction to one of the defined terms in the act.

This is the bill that we had to have—a bill that tries to tidy up an extraordinary policy mess left behind by the now departed minister. The new minister’s second reading speech was her first major statement on schools, and it is telling that this statement is about the effects of political opportunism and administrative incompetence on the part of the previous minister. We are going to have to wait a little bit longer it seems before we hear about the current minister’s educational philosophy and her vision for Australia’s schools. Maybe that will come some day soon.

Labor will support this bill, only because the needs of students and schools cannot continue to be neglected. But we do have to put on record the consequences of this government’s incompetence, and particularly the incompetence of the previous minister. This incompetence is there for all to see, and the potential for bungling was very clear at the time of the announcement of the programs for capital funding and for literacy vouchers. I want to go through both of these programs in detail.

The government’s major 2004 election commitment for schools was its Investing in Our Schools program, where $1 billion over four years was provided for capital projects in schools, with $700 million of that to go to government schools and $300 million to go to non-government schools. This commitment was a very direct and very hurried response to Labor’s election policy for schools. There is no question that the panicked way in which this policy response was developed at the last minute has followed through into what can only be described as slapdash implementation and chronic delays in getting the money to the schools and the students who need it. For government schools, what we had from the previous minister was a decision to bypass state authorities by calling for applications directly from schools and local parents and citizens associations. The previous minister announced that Australia’s 6,900-plus public schools would be eligible for ‘up to’ $150,000 each under this process.

The government has been overwhelmed by its own decision to go down this path and has failed to deliver this money to schools. Most schools are still waiting for the money. I am sure many members in this House are getting representations from their schools, because they are sick and tired of seeing the funding dates for this money getting pushed back further and further. The previous minister for education first of all promised that the grants would be announced in May 2005. That is when the grants were supposed to be announced. It is now March 2006. The new school year started weeks ago. Many schools have promoted their facilities to parents on the basis of projects they expected to have completed in time for this school year. Now many parents are questioning schools about whatever happened to those promised shadecloths, computers or whatever other initiative it might be.

The government’s incompetence has caused all sorts of other collateral damage. I know of a contractor in Victoria who has almost $10 million out in quotes for school contracts. He provided those quotes more than a year ago, when schools were writing applications. Now he is in a financial dilemma because building costs have gone up in the past year—once again, due to this government’s skills crisis—and he does not know whether he is going to be able to honour the year-old quotes. He knows and the schools and parents know that all of this intolerable situation has been brought about by the bungling of this government. I do not even need to go into the larger round 2 grants process. Schools were first told that round 2 successful grants would be announced last October, then it was pushed to December, then we were told February and now it is supposed to be April. It is extraordinarily irresponsible of this government to be continuing to delay the funding of these important projects when we have schools who need the money desperately.

Although the program was clearly targeted in the election to all government schools and all parent associations, what we have had from the minister is the extraordinarily flimsy excuse that the department was surprised at the volume of applications. But it was targeted at all schools! The department, apparently, has been completely unable to administer the program in a timely way despite significant increases in staffing for the program. This bill is the direct and inevitable result of this government’s incompetence. All government schools were promised additional funding for capital projects in the election, so why on earth was it any surprise to the previous minister or the current minister that most schools and most parents and citizens organisations were keen to apply? Of course they were keen to apply. Of course they wanted some of the money for their students and their schools. There cannot be any excuse for not preparing to handle applications from so many of the nation’s schools.

As Minister Nelson sowed, now Minister Bishop reaps. Today she is saddled with the task of trying to clean up the mess left behind by Dr Nelson. The incompetence of the Investing in Our Schools program implementation, unfortunately for the new minister, is only the first example of the landmines that Dr Nelson has left behind for his successor. Someone somewhere has to be responsible for this mess. What is clear is that the Howard government have bungled their management of this program by trying to set themselves up as a small-scale capital developer for Australia’s government schools. They knew how many government schools there were before they made this announcement. They paint themselves as trying to rescue school communities, but what they have had to do is create their own administrative monster and, as a result, even with 50 extra staff, they have been completely incapable of getting this money into schools in a timely fashion. They have set up a complete duplicate administration for getting capital funding for schools, and it has become very clear in the last few days that this has been done for blatantly political reasons.

We now see the inevitable result of this ad hoc administration. It is a salutary lesson for this new minister. If she is to learn anything from the schoolboy mistakes of her predecessor, it is that it is much better to work in cooperation with the states than to try to set up a whole duplicate administration and then bungle it and be incapable of delivering to our schools and to our students. Of course we want to see the involvement of parent organisations in the decisions about the allocation of capital funds. Parents have a very important role to play. But their involvement needs to be done in a strategic way and it certainly should be done in cooperation with the states, not with the Commonwealth setting up its own administration and then being totally incapable of delivering the money.

We have been concerned about this incompetence. We continue to be concerned about it, but we also know that the approvals so far show that political pork-barrelling continues to be the primary motivation in the decisions behind the Investing in Our Schools program. Once again the minister says, ‘Of course coalition seats got more money—we have more seats.’ Minister, let me take you through a few figures that demonstrate that this initiative is all about pork-barrelling. The average funding per Labor electorate is $547,877. The average funding per Liberal electorate is $703,262.

I will go through all the rough numbers to give you an idea. The Liberal electorates get 128 per cent of the funding going to Labor electorates. The Nationals are certainly right in there. The average funding per The Nationals electorate is 246 per cent of the funding going to Labor electorates. This shows that it is all about pork-barrelling. It has certainly nothing to do with need. In terms of total funding to an electorate, 19 of the top 20 electorates are coalition held. The first Labor held electorate appears at No. 20 and that is Bendigo. In terms of the average grant given to a school, nine of the top 10 electorates are coalition held. Reid is the only Labor-held top 10 seat. How on earth can the Howard government justify such huge discrepancies? How could a credible, accountable and transparent assessment process possibly arrive at such a flawed distribution of funding? How could it be arrived at? How could it be fair?

Let me particularly highlight the funding that has gone to the seat of Dr Nelson, the former Minister for Education, Science and Training. Does the former minister, Dr Nelson, really expect parents to believe that each school, in suburbs like St Ives and Wahroonga, in his North Shore Sydney seat of Bradfield deserve an average 38 per cent more funding than schools in the seat of Fowler, in battling suburbs such as Bonnyrigg and Cabramatta? Who would think that Dr Nelson’s electorate is more needy than the electorate of Fowler? Nobody would believe that. It is all about pork-barrelling and the Liberals and The Nationals looking after their own electorates. The combined effects of incompetence and political pork-barrelling have completely discredited this program. This should have been about targeting the needs of schools and students, with the involvement of parents, not about political pork-barrelling.

In the light of this demonstrated incompetence by the Howard government, and particularly the previous minister, and the pork-barrelling of this program, Labor supports only the increased flexibility in the bill for the minister to move funds around within the funding quadrennium so that schools eventually get the money. It is complete administrative incompetence by the previous minister. Of course, this program should not be used for political purposes. We can see the stage-managed activities that the coalition politicians will use in media releases in the lead-up to the next election, but of course we will continue to point out the political misuse of the program.

The next part of this bill is about the tutorial vouchers program—another extraordinary demonstration of this government’s incompetence. We have unspent money now having to be moved from both 2004 and 2005 to the current year because in this program, once again, we had from the previous minister another example of ideology over good sense. The government insisted on tendering for brokers to provide tutors for children who needed literacy support, including some brokers with doubtful qualifications and operations. In 2004 the government introduced the payment of tutorial vouchers of up to $700 to parents of children who had failed to meet national benchmarks of reading literacy in national testing of year 3 standards in 2003. These are children who did not meet the literacy standard in 2003. Of course, there is no dispute between Labor and the government about whether young children who, by year 3, have not reached minimum standards of reading literacy need support. Of course they need timely and intensive support. We know that, if these children do not receive that support and receive it quickly, they will most likely continue to struggle with their learning over all the years of schooling. Of course, literacy deferred is literacy denied.

But if the government were serious about its concerns for improving literacy standards, it would have directed its increased funding to the source—students and schools, where the children are every day. But, once again, we have had ideology, particularly on the part of the former minister, overcome good sense. Once again, the Commonwealth has tried to implement this scheme without any prior discussion with the states. So, instead of working with schools and the systems, the Howard government took over the idea of giving this money to private brokers who had no real experience in this kind of work.

Now that the program has failed to deliver for most eligible students, the government is trying to blame the states. We know how good this government is at trying to find someone else to blame. It blames the states, even though it refuses to work with them in the first place. Some of the brokers are, very sensibly, school authorities, but others are private providers and enterprises. I want to take the parliament through the results of this program. Answers to Senate estimates questions revealed a nationwide take-up of only 36 per cent by mid-November last year. That is what I would call a flop of a program.

Let us have a look at a state by state analysis of the figures for this program, which shows a much poorer performance on the part of commercial brokers, particularly when compared to the performance of school authorities. For example, in those states where we had the state education departments—that is, New South Wales, South Australia and Tasmania—doing this program, we had significantly improved take-up rates of eligible students, going up to 69 per cent. But the notable failure of this program is the performance of a private company, Progressive Learning, which has failed spectacularly to deliver tutorial programs to eligible students in Queensland and Victoria.

These figures from the Department of Education, Science and Training show that just 656 of the 5,717 eligible Victorian students got this voucher. What a failure! Only 12 per cent of eligible students received the voucher. The vast majority of students assessed at their year 3 benchmark testing as requiring extra literacy assistance have now already sat the year 5 literacy benchmark without receiving any tutoring at all. Progressive Learning also charged a $250 administration fee, so the few students in Victoria who actually received any tutoring got only $450 of the value of their $700 voucher.

The government also issued contracts to companies to deliver the tutorial voucher program in the full knowledge that the companies could not talk to the parents because they were not legally able to obtain their contact details. Of course, I am sure we will hear the minister say that in her view it is the states’ fault. The previous minister knew that this was the legal situation and decided to go down his ideological track rather than doing it sensibly in cooperation with the states. The program has been an administrative disaster—more about this government’s ideological obsession with bypassing state school authorities than what it really should be about, which is helping students who desperately need support. We know the government like to use the term ‘voucher’. No doubt it made them feel good using that sort of term. It is a bit like hitting student unions—they are more concerned with how it sounds and how it looks than what it actually does.

If turning a blind eye to the practical effects of populist initiatives is a key competency for a minister for education and training in the Howard government, then the former minister is right up there. He certainly gets top marks for populism and a very big F for delivery because he has been incapable of ensuring that children who need help with their reading have the assistance this government said it would deliver.

Labor will support the carrying over of unspent moneys, not because we think anything about the extraordinary incompetence of this government but because there are children in need of literacy assistance and support. But we also need to protect the integrity and value of this funding, so I foreshadow that during the consideration in detail stage of the bill I will move a substantive amendment to strengthen the conditions of funding to make sure that only qualified and accredited educators deliver this money. With this amendment we want to ensure that persons and organisations who deliver these programs other than already approved school authorities, because obviously they are registered to deliver these programs, meet national standards of quality—that is, professional teaching standards of tutors—and probity, such as financial and administrative records of whatever private companies might be involved.

Labor supports the flexibility in the management of program funds between years. The current act does provide for some funding changes by regulation—for example, in cost supplementation for general recurrent and capital grants. The extension of regulation-making powers will introduce greater flexibility, allowing the government to expedite the reallocation of funds between program years because of changing or unexpected circumstances in the delivery of school programs. Regulations are, of course, subject to the standard disallowance procedures by either house. Nonetheless it is arguable that removing the requirement for legislative amendment may result in a lesser degree of parliamentary scrutiny for any changes to school programs funding covered by item 21.

We have raised similar concerns about provisions in the Student Assistance Legislation Amendment Bill 2005 and the Employment and Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Welfare to Work and Other Measures) Act 2005. Both contain provisions that replace requirements for legislative amendment with the power to amend by regulations and guidelines. That said, we do not want schools and students to suffer from administrative incompetence, and there are good reasons for carrying over funds in some circumstances. We understand there can be delays in capital projects, for example. But none of that gives a blank cheque for this flexibility to be abused by any minister for political purposes. We have seen already in the allocation of this schools capital funding that the previous minister has handed out huge grants to himself and his mates in the Liberal and National parties. I hope that the new minister does not continue down that path.

I want to speak briefly about the provisions in this bill aimed at providing maximum general recurrent grants for a small number of non-government schools that cater for students with emotional, social or behavioural difficulties. We certainly support access by these schools to maximum general recurrent grants, as is already the case for special schools. These are high-needs schools dealing with high-needs students and they fully deserve increased support. We are only talking here about a small number of non-government community and church based schools that cater for students who have left mainstream schools because of their difficulties. The schools provide intensive support for these young people, some of whom are homeless and all of whom are in substantial need. These schools attract general recurrent grants under the government’s policy of funding schools according to their socioeconomic status characteristics. A strict application of the SES criteria, however, would deny these schools the maximum grants they need for the highly intensive support they provide to their students.

The bill before the House provides for a separate classification of ‘special assistance schools’ to enable the schools to receive the maximum level of general recurrent grant as received by non-government special schools for students with various disabilities. Labor supports this amendment, although I would point out to the minister that there are a number of schools in the government sector that need similar special consideration.

These amendments are sensible. Once again, they will depend on cooperation with state authorities that recognise or register non-government schools for federal and state funding. Interestingly the amendment bill points out that the blanket approach of the government’s funding scheme, based on the socioeconomic status of school communities, is flawed. Such a crude and simplistic approach does not take into account the specific needs of students or the resources actually available to them; it simply applies the SES of the parents’ locations without considering the particularly intensive education and support the schools provide. This principle of funding being based on an assessment of actual need and actual resources available is one that should apply to all schools.

There is another part to this bill that corrects a technical flaw, where references in the act about accountability refer to section 20 rather than section 30 agreements. Labor agrees that the change to subsection 36(4) in the act has to be made. We note the assurances in the explanatory memorandum that this technical change will not affect the rights of or obligations on any person.

I have set out in detail our concerns regarding the administrative incompetence and political misuse of the two significant funding programs dealt with in this bill. Both Investing in Our Schools and the tutorial vouchers initiative highlight the mess that has been left to the new minister by her predecessor, a mess this bill only begins to deal with. For these reasons, I will move the second reading amendment circulated in my name, and I urge the House to support this amendment. In doing so, I note that it should not be necessary to have to move such a second reading amendment to call on the government to make sure all programs are administered in ways that deliver maximum educational benefits for students. As my remarks indicate, that is not how this government has allocated this money. This money is going to those electorates that have Liberal and National Party members. It is not being distributed to the students or schools that need it most. It should not be necessary to move this amendment; unfortunately it is. On this occasion we need to explicitly highlight the administrative incompetence and the political pork-barrelling that has gone on with these programs. Therefore I move:

That all words after “That” be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:“whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House:

(1)     condemns the Government for:

             (a)    failing to deliver urgently-needed capital funds and literacy support in time for schools and students to achieve the benefits of those funds;

             (b)    failing to protect the integrity and probity of its program for tutorial literacy vouchers, especially in the appointment of brokers for the delivery of tutorial assistance in some states;

             (c)    approving capital funding under its ‘Investing in our schools’ program in an unfair and unequal way between schools and regions, and

             (d)    failing adequately to take into account the relative educational and financial needs of schools in the allocation of capital funding under the ‘Investing in our schools’ program; and

(2)     calls on the Government to:

             (a)    ensure that all programs are administered in ways that deliver maximum educational benefits for students;

             (b)    take steps to assure the educational integrity and probity of its tutorial assistance for students with literacy needs;

             (c)    direct some of the unspent funds for tutorial assistance for students with literacy needs for use by schools to develop appropriate programs for their students, in consultation with parents; and for the professional development of teachers to improve their literacy teaching skills; and

             (d)    support improved accountability provisions for funding under the capital grants and tutorial assistance programs”.

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