Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Of course, all of us in this place acknowledge the member for Longman and her incredibly brave speech. It's impossible to speak after her without acknowledging that.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I'm sure that you would remember, as many on this side do, when the Prime Minister and the education minister proudly unveiled their new schools funding calculator after they'd made changes to the schools funding arrangements. It didn't last very long. It got taken down quick smart, because what that schools funding calculator allowed schools to do is look up how much worse off they would be under the government's changed funding arrangements. It was down for five months. It's finally been replaced by something that doesn't really allow us to compare apples with apples. This whole exercise has been about covering up for the fact that those opposite are cutting billions of dollars from our schools.

Just this week, we've released information from the Parliamentary Budget Office and the National Catholic Education Commission that shows just how much worse off schools will be over the next two years. In fact, over the next two years alone—this year, calendar year 2018; and calendar year 2019—Australian schools will be $2.19 billion worse off than they would be under Labor's funding arrangements. The extraordinary thing about this is that the cuts don't hit every sector equally, do they? In fact, the cuts hurt the poorest kids in the poorest schools the most. If you look at the cut to public schools of $1.88 billion over the next two years, that is 86 per cent of the total value of the cuts. Guess what? Public school kids are 66 per cent of the kids, so the largest share of the cuts by far, a disproportionately large share of the cuts, hits public schools. Public schools get 86 per cent of the cuts, Catholic schools get 12 per cent of the cuts and independent schools get just two per cent of the cuts. How does that work?

In South Australia, this has been a really incredible hit to the schools budget—$210 million cut from South Australian schools over the next two years alone. Government schools losing—

Mr Tudge interjecting—

It's in the budget papers, you moron.

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