Andrew Giles (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think the member for Griffith is more optimistic than I am. I think we perhaps might have done better with the assistant minister responding to questions. But it is the attention to detail which you have just demonstrated, Minister, that perhaps explains why your colleagues have been so receptive of your package of reforms in the energy space. In any event, perhaps, representing Minister Birmingham, you can account for yourself rather better in this chamber than you have been in your party room.

Before we get to questions—and I will be dealing with questions in respect of the schools portfolio—it is worth reflecting on what the coalition has done to schools.

A government member: Where's your minister?

The shadow minister, soon to be minister, is away sick, actually. The rhetoric of this government has gone through many, many evolutions, but the reality remains the same. We remember on this side of the House that the coalition were on a unity ticket when it came to needs based school funding, before the infamous 2014 budget. Since then, what have we seen? We have seen two fundamental failures: a failure of process where the now minister, Senator Birmingham, has failed to engage with state and territory colleagues and with the schooling sector before delivering a package which is a substantive retreat from needs based funding; and an abandonment of a national responsibility of our national government for schooling standards in Australia.

What the Prime Minister and the minister are currently proposing is the opposite of needs based funding, however the assistant minister may dress it up. There are students in every suburb in every state throughout Australia whose needs will never be met by this government's inadequate plan, which does not provide a pathway to the schooling resource standard, which was the core of the Gonski recommendations. Every school in my electorate of Scullin will be worse off.

Let us be very clear: only the Australian Labor Party is committed to investing in our students everywhere based on their needs. Under the Prime Minister's plans, Australia's schools, principals and teachers will be $22 billion worse off, as the Prime Minister's own briefing note has made clear and as, perhaps, the minister at the table might be brave enough to admit in this consideration in detail. This is money that would make a huge difference to school communities and the educational experience of so many students. Under Labor, students would get every chance to fulfil their full potential, no matter their parents' background or bank balance or where they live.

I do not expect satisfactory answers from the minister, because the government are much more interested in avoiding their responsibilities to schools than in actually supporting students, but I will take the minister to recommendation 1 of the review, which said:

The Australian Government and the states and territories, in consultation with the non-government sector, should develop and implement a schooling resource standard …

How is your plan, Minister, with no requirement for states and territories to ever contribute their share of the SRS for public schools, meeting this recommendation? Further, what consultation did the government commit to, particularly with states and territories, with the private school sector and with the Catholic sector, while developing this framework, which has no logic underpinning it or evidence base supporting it? Where, Minister, in the review of funding did the panel recommend that 80 per cent of the SRS be paid by the Commonwealth to non-government schools, and where does it recommend—and this is perhaps the crux for many of us on this side—that 20 per cent only should be paid for government schools? What analysis was undertaken to determine this was the right figure?

Does the government believe that all states and territories have the same capacity to adequately fund their school systems? Last week, Minister, I was in the Northern Territory visiting schools in Darwin. If the government genuinely believed in needs based funding, it would not be producing a model, regardless of commitments to transition funds, that will leave every one of the 151 government schools in the Northern Territory worse off. Why does the Northern Territory—with 40 per cent Indigenous students, nearly 66 per cent low-SES students and the worst schooling outcomes in the country—get an increase of only 1.3 per cent a year?

This government has no plan to deliver needs based school funding. What it is presenting the parliament and the Australian people is walking away from needs based funding and, more fundamentally than that, walking away from an Australian government having an interest in educational outcomes for every Australian child. In so doing, they are undermining, for all of us, our future wellbeing.

Debate interrupted.

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