Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to say that, in discussing the support of the crossbenchers, I wish to make it very clear that the Greens did not support the taking out of the national curriculum from this legislation, and we do not support that. I do not like the idea of a blank cheque for four years under a flawed funding model. I made that very clear in my speech, and that is still my position. It is now obvious that this will go to the House of Representatives and then the real negotiation will begin. I want to make it very clear that the Greens do not intend to support a piece of legislation which does not have the accountability provisions, which does not have the curriculum provisions and which does not take into account those equity issues of non-government school funding in relation to government school funding.

You can have two separate bits of legislation. You can do one through the COAG process and one through non-government schools. No matter how you try and decouple them, they are not decoupled, because equity in education has to mean that there has to be some capacity for the Commonwealth to ensure that the states spend appropriately so that, whether Indigenous students are in a non-government or a government school, they are funded appropriately, and one is not a poor cousin to the other. It is the same for all students, in fact, in non-government and government schools. The Greens have a very strong position on this.

I think it was extremely sensible to say that this measure ought not to go beyond 2010, that it should include the national curriculum and that the government should bring forward the review of education funding so that we can go to the 2010 election with the whole community knowing where we stand. I look forward to the negotiations that are going to take place on the Schools Assistance Bill 2008, because it is certainly not over and there is no way that the non-government schools are going to get a blank cheque without the conditions that were made very clear to them, which they understood. It is not reasonable for that to be the case.