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

I wish to indicate I will not be supporting the amendment. I think it is fairly clear now that the coalition has said that it is supporting the bill with the national curriculum in it, and so it should be. The Greens have made it very clear from the start that this is an integral part of this legislation as far as we are concerned. A national curriculum is a national curriculum. Once you start going down the track of saying that you also recognise a broadly alternative curriculum, you do not have a national curriculum; you have a curriculum and any other curriculum that anyone thinks is broadly equivalent. So we will not be supporting the amendment. It is a mechanism for gutting the notion of a national curriculum, and we will not live with it. We will not support legislation with such an amendment in it because it destroys the whole notion of a national curriculum.

On a second matter, I think it is unfortunate that neither the government nor the opposition were prepared to support a Greens amendment to limit this funding to two years and to tie it to a bringing forward of the review of non-government school funding so that the community could have considered that before the election. I think that is important. Also, I note it was a mechanism to try to get equity with public schools. That is an issue which we really need to see addressed, and I think it has been a shame and actually wrong to decouple public school funding and non-government school funding. Now there is not a mechanism to actually link the two and see if there is parity—and there clearly is not.

I also want to put on the record how disappointed I am that this parliament was prepared to make a payment of $2.7 billion as a result of an overpayment, to almost half of the non-government schools in Australia, that is over and beyond what the SES formula said. I think that it would have been entirely appropriate to make the same payment to the public schools of Australia and for the parliament to decide to recognise that an overpayment for the non-government sector but not for public schools is wrong. I think that, with decoupling the two and having it in such a way that in the next two years the states are likely to cut their budgets to education—because of the economic downturn, the lack of GST receipts, the lack of corporate profits, taxation and so on—what we are going to see is a widening gap between the funding for public education and the funding for private education in this country. That is why it would have been very sensible to limit this funding for two years to see what that gap actually ends up as in two years and what we can do to fix it—because four years hence we would be going to see a significant widening of the gap in terms of equity and justice—so that all students, whether they go to a government or a non-government school, have equal opportunity in education. That is what we ought to be doing, and no more so than with Indigenous education.

I have made it very clear that I think it is a dysfunction of the federal system that we have a situation where 80 per cent of Indigenous students go to public schools and will be funded less than the students in private education. But I want to make it clear that getting a national curriculum as part of this bill is critical to the Greens support for it and we feel very strongly about our opposition to the proposed amendment.