Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Lalor is pleased to join my colleagues on this consideration in detail. I have a couple of questions for the minister. As someone who worked in the public education sector at the time of the Gonski review and the way it travelled around the country, I was part of that process. We all know in this room that that review determined that what we needed was a sector blind, needs based approach with a student resource standard set for primary school students at $9,271 and for secondary school students at $12,193. We all know that that is where we began this journey. We all know that the notion of it being sector blind was critical to move beyond what I would have termed the 'education wars' that had gone on under the Howard government for a decade.

I look at and study the data in the electorate of Lalor. Being in Victoria, with a state Labor government committed to transparency, I can actually access the 2017 projected budgets for every state school in the electorate and have done so. There are 30 mainstream public schools in the electorate of Lalor. In 2017, they will educate 27,000 students. What I found in looking at that data was that not one of those 30 schools has yet reached the student resource standard, neither in the primary sector nor in the secondary sector. Although on the ground you can see, because of this transparency, the variation in the needs based loading that is going into those schools, none of them have yet reached the base at which those loadings were supposed to add.

I have stood here and looked at the budget papers and I have heard the education minister say that education spending goes up and up. My question is quite simple. Without years 5 and 6 of Gonski, exactly when in these budget predictions will that SRS be met in every school for every child in this country as was originally promised?

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