Trevor Evans (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

My questions are focused around school funding. I see schools as very central to our local communities. The first thing I did when I was elected was to write to all of the schools around Brisbane. I wrote to the P&Cs and the P&Fs and then to the principals to introduce myself as the new member for Brisbane and to begin what I hope will be a long and meaningful relationship with them in their school communities.

As the minister for education would know because he visited Brisbane very recently and we held a morning tea and a round table with almost all of the local schools attending, Brisbane is home to many great schools in both the government and the non-government sectors. In Brisbane, we proudly have some of the best government and non-government schools in Australia. We also have one of the highest proportions of Catholic schools in the country.

I have enjoyed visiting many of the schools around Brisbane so far to talk about the benefits of the Turnbull government's school funding reforms. I have enjoyed talking to principals, school boards, parents and students alike. It has been quite enjoyable because I know—and almost everybody that I speak to agrees with this—that the aims of these reforms are right. The school funding announcements made by this government and funded in this budget are fair. They are creating a system that is equitable and that is needs based, as David Gonski originally intended, and that is why Gonski has endorsed these reforms. The fact that almost all schools around Brisbane should receive more funding under the reforms also helps the discussion to be more enjoyable and easier for me, of course.

The transparency of the reforms is a really important element. It is key. It demonstrates the fairness for all to see, so I have been strongly encouraging all parents in Brisbane to check out the government's online estimator and see for themselves how much better off their school should be and to look at how the funding of so many of our local schools could change. In fact, I have written to about 20,000 parents right across Brisbane, showing them not only how their school looks under the reform but how all of the other schools around Brisbane look by comparison. I would invite the minister to expand on this by telling us how the Commonwealth's allocation of funding will grow across Catholic schools in my home state of Queensland or, indeed, how it will grow for government schools or independent schools too.

There is a lot of information there. For example, Our Lady of the Assumption school in Enoggera will be allocated about $5,960 per student in Commonwealth funding in 2018, growing to over $8,000 per student in 2027—an increase of more than $2,300 per student from the 2017 funding levels. St Rita's College in Clayfield will be allocated an estimated $5,670 per student in Commonwealth funding in 2018, growing to more than $7,700 per student in 2027—an increase of over $2,250 per student from 2017 funding levels. Reflecting the diverse backgrounds and the challenges of its unique student cohort, St James College in Spring Hill will be allocated an estimated $11,740 per student in Commonwealth funding in 2018, growing to almost $16,000 per student in 2027—an increase of more than $4,500 per student on 2017 funding levels. That will add up to a total increase allocated to St James College of around $9.8 million in additional funding over the 10 years.

It is important to get into these details because then you realise what has been so wrong with the model up until now and how unfair Labor's approach has been in the past when it comes to school funding, with their secret deals and their different approaches for different schools, and different systems in different states, which was the complete opposite of the model that David Gonski originally recommended. The minister may wish to confirm, in fact, what was said in a recent letter from the executive director of Catholic Education to parents in the Brisbane Catholic archdiocese—that they—

Ms Butler interjecting—

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