Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens are proud supporters of public education and we believe that governments at all levels must prioritise the needs of government schools. This is a principle that is held dear by the Greens, because it springs from one of our four founding principles: pursuing social and economic justice. It is sad that this basic principle—this appeal to the Australian sense of a fair go—has been so forgotten in the current education debate. It appears to have been usurped by the argument for individual entitlement and choice. This view is the one that the government embraces and, from its recent announcements, to a large extent the opposition does too.

The individual entitlement position is this: schooling is about parental choice and opportunity. Hence the bill that we are dealing with, which outlines that. This is how the government argument goes: schooling is about choice and it is the government’s responsibility to facilitate parental choice, and to do so fairly government funding should be distributed on a per child basis as their individual entitlement, irrespective of educational outcome. That is the key point to understand about the individual entitlement or choice argument. It says nothing about education outcomes. It is not about making Australia smarter. It is not about the education interests of the whole community. The government is not interested in arguments about future wellbeing; it is only about the individual interests of those rich enough to exercise choice in schooling.

The principle that the Greens believe in is that schooling is about education outcomes. It is the responsibility of government to ensure that all Australian children get the very best education that they possibly can in this country. By any measure, the most effective way of achieving this is by providing the very best public education system we possibly can. Private education cannot do the same job. By definition, private schools are about exclusion and they do not want to educate all Australians. If we are true to this principle of education outcomes, we must ensure that all Australian children get access to the best quality public education that our community can afford—no exceptions and no excuses.

The Schools Assistance (Learning Together—Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Amendment Bill 2007 is the latest in a string of schools bills from this government which fly in the face of this principle. It is all about the exceptions and excuses that riddle the special interest driven federal school funding policies we see in this country. This bill deals with a number of school funding programs: the Investing in Our Schools program, the capital grants program and the Literacy, Numeracy and Special Learning Needs Program. To the extent that these programs deliver much-needed cash to public schools, the Greens are not going to oppose them. We do, however, register our objection to the continuing unfair and, frankly, irresponsible diversion of federal education dollars into the private sector, a diversion which continues in this bill.

This bill delivers an additional $181 million for the second round of applications under the Investing in Our Schools program. This $181 million is divided into $127 million for public schools and another $54 million for private schools, thereby reflecting the 70-30 split intended in the original announcement that promises $1 billion for the Investing in Our Schools program, with $700 million for public schools and $300 million to private schools. The Greens are not fans of the Investing in Our Schools program. We are critical of its design and we are critical of its implementation. In terms of design and implementation, which this bill is concerned with, the scheme is demonstrably unfair.

Going back to the principle of education outcomes, one would have thought that the best way to get value for taxpayers’ money would be to assess what capital works schools needed, which ones had the most acute need and which projects would bring the most benefit and then fund them accordingly. This scheme does not do that. The government has decided, before seeing any applications or making any investigations into the needs of schools, that 30 per cent of all funds will be spent in the private school sector—reflecting the 30 per cent of enrolments that are in that sector—and that 70 per cent will be spent in the public school sector. It has made this choice to put 30 per cent of the funding into the private school sector despite knowing better than anyone else that the private schooling sector has enjoyed more capital investment than the public school sector over at least the past couple of decades and so it already possesses many more and better quality capital assets than the public school sector, thanks to this funding and other funding that they receive.

The design of the Investing in Our Schools program is predetermined to, at the very least, maintain current inequities between private and public schools. The government has predetermined to spend taxpayer dollars on added extras in private schools that could have been spent on basic essentials in public schools. This decision boils down to the minister deciding to subsidise a rifle range at a private school rather than a toilet block at a public school.

Let us think about that for a minute. How can it be rational, how can it be sensible, to spend scarce education dollars on subsidising rifle ranges in the wealthiest of private schools while some Australian children do not have access to proper toilet facilities? That is the irrational outcome of the individual entitlement philosophy that has captured the current schools funding debate.

But the inequities do not end there. The Investing in Our Schools program also includes caps on the amounts that schools can request. Originally, public schools could apply for up to $150,000, so they were planning to apply for projects up to that amount. But now the government has reneged on that promise and brought down the cap to $100,000, thereby upsetting the plans of scores of public schools that had plans up to the previous cap. The explanation for this is that it will allow more schools to get funding. Why has there been no equivalent process for private schools? Indeed, why is $200 million of the $300 million set aside for private schools uncapped? Some private schools have been awarded grants under this program in excess of $1 million. That is 10 times the proposed cap for public schools. There is no defensible explanation for these inequities. They are simply the product of the powerful special interests within the private school sector that have so captured federal education funding in this area.

But the Greens have a more fundamental objection to the Investing in Our Schools program—that is, that the program should be unnecessary. The fact that we have such a program at all is an admission that we as a community have allowed the capital infrastructure of our schools to deteriorate to alarming levels. What should happen is that a rational, needs based funding model should distribute ample capital funds to schools managed by departments of education with input from individual schools. And the capital assets of those schools should be well maintained and upgraded when necessary. Instead, we get this politically motivated program that is about giving desperate public school communities a few crumbs in the lead-up to elections whilst allowing grateful private schools to get yet more public subsidies to maintain their exclusive facilities.

This bill also continues funding to the capital grants program that delivers top-up capital funding to private schools to make up the perceived losses to target capital works programs that were scrapped by the Howard government in 1996. To the extent that it can be shown that this funding is justified on a needs basis we would support it. For example, if it were targeted to assist remote Indigenous education in the private sector, we could support it. But it is not. It appears that the $10 million just goes to the general pot of money to further subsidise private schools’ capital grants. The Greens cannot support this kind of sloppy funding policy and will move to amend this bill to redirect those funds to the public sector, where they are desperately needed. We know this because a lot of research has been done into the state of our public schools. This is a feature of public sector services—they are open to scrutiny. We know what we are paying for and what is needed. It is not so in the private sector.

Of course, both the government and the opposition tell us that to be concerned about the inequities between public and private schools is a debate that, to quote the shadow minister, is ‘very much behind us’. This is a declaration of surrender, a surrender of rational policy making to the bullying of special interests. There clearly is a tension in government funding between public and private. To suggest there is not is simply to deny reality. There is a concern about fairness, because one school system is allowed to pick and choose its students and charge fees whilst the other is not. There is a justified debate about how to resolve these problems, and the Greens will continuing to play a leading role in this debate.

The Labor Party, however, are hoping to avoid the intractable problem of public school/private school funding inequities by introducing a pilot policy that they are calling Local Schools Working Together whilst also announcing that no private school, no matter how wealthy, will have any government funding cut under Labor. These policies will fail to resolve the tensions I have talked about. First of all, the decision not to cut funding to even the very wealthiest of private schools is a decision to prioritise subsidising luxury add-ons for private schools instead of spending this money on essential basics for public schools. You cannot escape this logic. Under the Labor Party’s policy, the only way to provide genuine needs based funding is if your boost to public school funding is so great that it makes all public schools as well resourced as the King’s School in Parramatta or Geelong Grammar. But I do not think that is the kind of funding for public schools that the Labor Party is talking about in this proposal.

Even if you did give that level of boost to public schools—and the Greens would think that was fantastic—the formula that is set up, which the government supports and the opposition has not indicated that it does not support, ensures that you continue to give money to the very wealthiest of the private schools ahead of spending it on public education. You have to get to a system where the King’s School is considered the most needy in order for it to get funding in a needs based funding model. Until you get to that point you cannot describe the model of funding you are putting forward as a needs based funding model. If you are going to give more money to the the King’s School under a needs based funding model then you need to prove to us that the King’s School needs that money more than a small local public school in the west of Sydney. I think you would be pushing it to do that.

The Local Schools Working Together program may make a good headline, but it is very limited in scope and will simply not have much of an impact on the overwhelming majority of Australian students. The policy suggests that we can make resources go further if schools share them. To facilitate this economy of scale, the Labor Party say they will subsidise capital works which will be shared between public and private schools. But this policy raises more questions. Why prioritise resources sharing between public and private schools? Why not target the $62.5 million earmarked in this announcement for public schools at building new facilities in public schools? That is surely just as feasible. Why cannot the Labor Party increase funding to public schools without feeling compelled to include private schools in the scheme?

Funding is supposed to be needs based—and we all know which schools need funding; it happens to be public schools, which have had their funding taken away by state and federal governments to feed the wealthiest of private schools in this country—but it cannot be needs based if you do not fund the needy schools and, instead, continue to fund and say that you will increase the funding of private schools, as the Leader of the Opposition, Kevin Rudd, has done in the last few days.

The Greens are also concerned that, because the scheme is particularly aimed at new schools, it will further increase the establishment of small, new private schools. I have spoken about this previously. The abolition of the new schools policy in 1996, which previously limited the establishment of private schools and which set up somewhat of a planned system, has been one of the most damaging policies to the integrity of the public school system that we have seen in recent times. The new Labor policy could in fact exacerbate this problem. The Greens believe that the expansion of the private schools system in this way is a problem for Australia, which I have addressed many times previously. Because of the impact that it has on enrolments of local public schools where you provide a funding model which says: ‘We will give you this funding if you set up a new, local private school that does not need to meet the same regulations in terms of quality in educational standards,’ we see these new schools pop up taking students away and out of our public system. But they do not have the same requirements to provide the same quality of education. Overall, this damages the quality of education which is available in schools in Australia, most particularly in public schools but right across the board.

This bill is a symptom of the concept of applying individual entitlement arguments to national education policies—and it is one that, sadly, has won the support of both the opposition and the government—rather than ensuring we have a quality public education system. What is needed in the education funding debate is the courage to stand up and be proud of public schools in this country, to invest in them and to say, ‘That’s the priority; it’s the responsibility of government to ensure that children in this country can access the best quality education that the government can afford to put in place.’ That is the government’s job. It is like government 101: ‘We provide services, we provide the best quality education that we can.’ In the public system, it is the government’s job to provide that quality of education. That is what we need to see, but it is not what we see. Every year, every funding round, every election, we see both the major parties reneging on that core responsibility to provide and fund public schools in this country.

We see successive governments, at state and federal level, take away funding from our public schools in this country and instead put it into already wealthy private schools. That is what we see every time. How can people in here stand up and say, ‘We are the government, we want to be the government, we are going to look after people’s services.’ You cannot do that unless you invest in those public services that all Australian children can access, regardless of their capacity to pay, their religion, their gender or any other bias. That is the great value of our public education system, and governments of all persuasions should stand up and be proud of quality public education systems that they invest in.

You cannot do that with the existing funding models. You cannot do that with the system of funding we have which says, ‘Every time we increase any funding to public schools, we’ll also increase it to private schools.’ You cannot have needs based funding when you are increasing the funding of schools such as the King’s School in Parramatta. You cannot have a needs based funding model where you say, ‘The King’s School in Parramatta really needs that money, so we’ll take it away from the Mount Druitt Public School. We’ll take that money out of the package of government funding for public schools’—public schools are government responsibility—‘and we’ll divert it to the King’s School in Parramatta.’ You cannot do that and call it needs based funding. It is not needs based funding. When you bring Mount Druitt Public School’s funding up to the level of funding for the King’s School at Parramatta then let us have the debate, but that is not what you do. (Time expired)