Sue Lines (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support Senator Moore's urgency motion relating to the Better Schools program. I want to start by putting some facts into the Hansard and making some opening statements. If you have listened to the government today and over the last week, as I have, you will know there have been an incredible number of backflips. There really have. This government is completely out of control, and Minister Pyne, the Minister for Education, has shown himself to be completely unfit for the job before him. He has no idea what he is doing.

It is as if Gonski has gone and has been forgotten. According to the government, it is as if Gonski never, ever existed, because now the government is saying it has to go out and develop a fair and equitable model, when that is what Gonski did. Let us just remind ourselves for a few minutes of what Gonski actually did. Gonski undertook the most comprehensive review of education that our country has seen over the last 40 years, and the review was based on ensuring real equity of opportunity for all our children. That was at the core of the review. It received overwhelming support from principals, teachers and parents. If you listened to the government today, you would think that somehow Labor is on its own in this debate. Labor is not on its own. It has the support, overwhelmingly, of Australian parents, of Australian teachers, of Australian principals. It has support in the Catholic and the independent sectors and it has support in the public schools sector. So let us not kid ourselves that the Labor opposition is some kind of ogre. We are on the side of right here and we are with the majority of Australians in supporting a fair and equitable public and private school system in this country, one that we currently do not have.

Gonski found that we were investing far too little in our schools—I am sorry, Government; money does matter—that too many students are missing out and that the current system is not efficient. I think we agree on that. It is certainly not fair and it is not effective. Why isn't it effective? Gonski confirmed for us that there are growing gaps in student achievement, that Australia's overall performance has fallen in the last 10 years, that postcodes—yes, lines on maps do matter—are defining economic outcomes and that students in disadvantaged areas are up to three years behind students who live in wealthy areas. One in seven 15-year-old students does not have basic reading skills. Yet we hear from Minister Pyne that somehow, between now and the next school year, they have to go out and, in secret, over a couple of months, develop a new funding system—when we have got a comprehensive, well-supported review. It is called Gonski and it has certainly not gone. It has not gone from Labor senators and members of parliament, it has not gone from school principals and it has not gone from teachers and parents. It still has overwhelming support.

Under Labor's reforms following the Gonski expert panel's review, we agreed that we needed $14.65 billion in our schools over six years, with a Commonwealth contribution of $9.4 billion. Let us be clear about what Labor's model would do. We have heard a lot today about Western Australia—and I would like to correct the ACT senator; it is a shame he is not in the chamber—but as a Western Australian senator I can tell you what is going on in Western Australia. Labor's model would put an end to education budget cuts by requiring states to grow their funding alongside that of the Commonwealth, not allowing—as we have seen in Western Australia—disgraceful cuts to education but actually requiring and demanding that states grow their budgets. That is the reason Colin Barnett did not want to sign up to Gonski: nudge, nudge, wink, wink; he took a bet; he thought maybe his mates Mr Abbott and Mr Pyne would get into government and meanwhile he could slash and burn the education budget in Western Australia, which he has done, and then, regardless of any inaction of his he would get the money anyway. That is exactly what is happening. The Abbott and Pyne government is intending to reward bad behaviour. You are rewarding a Western Australia Premier who has ripped significant funds out of schools.

Before we got to where we are now, there was so much public pressure on the coalition—not just from Labor but from parents, school principals and teachers across the nation—that Mr Pyne and Mr Abbott were at pains to assure the voting public that we had a unity ticket. I bet Tony Abbott now rues the day that those words came out of his mouth, but that is what he said at a press conference on 4 August:

… an absolute unity ticket when it comes to school funding.

On 2 August—he was getting a bit desperate by then—he had said:

There is no difference between Kevin Rudd and myself when it comes to school funding.

Christopher Pyne said on 29 August:

You will get exactly the same amount of funding for your school whether you vote Liberal or Labor.

What a dishonest statement that was. Unfortunately Australian voters, who want to trust their politicians, took Mr Pyne on faith. Mr Abbott at a press conference on 2 August guaranteed that no school would be worse off. But there must have been some small print there somewhere because Colin Barnett, the Premier of Western Australia, is on the public record as saying, 'Actually in WA some schools will be worse off.' So perhaps the caveat around that was that in terms of federal government funding Mr Abbott meant no school would be worse off, because we have got Mr Abbott being directly contradicted by the Premier in Western Australia, who said that some schools will be worse off.

So where do we get to? We have now seen three different models over the last week, as Senator Carr pointed out to us. Despite the Gonski panel finding that the old school funding model, the Howard model, was broken, that it was inefficient and an unfair model, that money was flowing to schools that were well resourced but not to students with high needs, just last week Minister Pyne announced—I did not need to read this quote or to have it researched because I heard it myself—that the government would scrap the Gonski model from 2015 and replace it with a new system that was similar to the one we have got now. Mr Pyne just last week did not see too much wrong with that model. I think someone had a word in his ear since then, but last week I heard him say that there is nothing much wrong with the current model. Mr Pyne went on to say that Labor's model, supported overwhelmingly by parents, by public and private schools, by the Catholic system, by principals, was somehow unworkable. So just last week Mr Pyne was liking this model but when Julie Bishop was education minister that model was criticised.

Perhaps the biggest criticism of this government comes from one of their own. I was at a meeting earlier this year with Adrian Piccoli where he proudly said to an audience of parents and students and others interested in public education, 'I've got three words to say: I got Gonski.' That is what he said in the Town Hall in Sydney in about March of this year. I heard him too decry this government as acting immorally. So carp at us all you like, but the critics of the government on what it is doing to the school system are not just Labor, it is the community, it is your own people, it is the education minister in New South Wales, Adrian Piccoli, who was proud to sign up to Gonski, who knew it would deliver well. He is your biggest critic.