Peter Khalil (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Last night, every member of the government, including the member for Chisholm, voted six times to push through a $22 billion cut to schools. Prime Minister, how is it fair that over the next two years $600,000 will be cut from the Aurora School for deaf and deafblind children in Chisholm while Geelong Grammar gets a funding increase? How is that fair, Prime Minister?

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question. What he knows full well is that the school funding model that we have presented, and which was passed through the House last night, is an achievement which we are very proud. What it does is set up now the prospect of, for the first time, David Gonski's vision of transparent, consistent, needs-based school funding being delivered.

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They call out 'needs-based'. Well, it is needs-based because it is based on the Schooling Resource Standard, which is adjusted for non-government schools on the basis of the school community's ability to pay, using the socio-economic standard which has been used by governments for many years, both Labor and Liberal governments. That has been as consistent as recommended by David Gonski and as utilised by the Labor Party itself. The difference between our model and what Labor had is that they had 27 secret deals. The same student in the same school, were that school in one system or another, or one state or another, could get dramatically different funding. No consistency, no transparency, no equity, not needs based, only based on the political emergency of the Gillard government, desperately wanting to collect a few signatures for their 27 secret deals.