Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It was, and we both did fairly well. Nambour State High School seems to have been a little more successful than Macksville Public School in terms of the eventual outcomes for their students. As I read it, these two bills do not do much of anything that should have caused the length of debate that we have had. The Education Legislation Amendment Bill really only transfers appropriations from one area of legislation to another. It contains no reduction—in fact I believe there is a little additional spending that is attached to this. These nearly $780 million worth of measures are designed to improve the educational outcomes for Indigenous Australians. The education gaps that have been outlined in the parliament are inexcusable in modern Australian society. This is not the fault of the previous government alone but, I guess, the collective fault of all the governments that have preceded it, including some that, for a short period of that time, were Labor governments. We as a parliament and we as a government should be as one as we set out to remove those gaps. I note that there are some additional measures for Indigenous education included in the Schools Assistance Bill.

The Schools Assistance Bill simply provides exactly what we said we would provide for non-government schools. The same piece of legislation removes funding for state government schools which is still the subject of an agreement to be finalised later this year with the state governments. This is a funding regime for non-government schools. I want to quote a couple of sentences from the contribution of the member for Swan. He said:

... Commonwealth funding for non-government schools remains essentially unchanged

He also said:

... 67 per cent, or $6.4 billion, of Commonwealth funding for schools will be provided to non-government schools.

He went on to say—about something that we said we would do during the election campaign:

The government has also retained the socioeconomic status—SES—funding regime ...

So what is the problem? This government have put in place for the next four years what was in place for the previous four years. We are maintaining the existing SES funding and the indexation that goes with it. What has been happening here over the last couple of days as this legislation has been debated is a real concerted effort of dog-whistling. The opposition we see in the parliament these days is more interested in developing a narrative that says, ‘The government is doing this but we think that they are going to do this.’ The reality is that we are not.

In the parliament earlier today we had the member for Hinkler rise and make a personal explanation. He read to the parliament again some of his contribution to this debate. I would like to, for the third time, read a particular paragraph into the record simply because I think it deserves to be there and it tells the story. The member for Hinkler said:

It is also an encouragement to some of the more affluent schools to take on a cross-section of less affluent kids by way of scholarships or reduced fees or whatever it might be. That enriches the profile of their school and it gives other kids the opportunity—

and this is my emphasis—

to go to good quality schools.

That is what the member for Hinkler said: the SES system gives poor kids the opportunity to go to private schools which are good-quality schools. Whatever he might say about having support for the state school education system as well as the private school education system is wiped away in that one sentence. I believe very strongly that state schools provide an education product easily the equivalent of the majority of private schools. Some of the private schools of course are uber wealthy and they have the capacity to provide resources that are not available to the state schools. But for a member of this parliament to stand up in here and make the comment that only by going to a non-government school will a child from a less affluent family receive a good education I think is disgraceful.

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