Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Lindgren, a former high school teacher, for her question and her passionate interest in this portfolio area. I am very pleased to address the question about the new Quality Schools, Quality Outcomes plan, which the Turnbull government released yesterday. As Senator Brandis has already informed the chamber, this plan will take school funding from a current record level of around $16 billion in 2016 and grow that level of school funding each and every year into the future to a level of an estimated $20.1 billion in 2020—strong growth but affordable growth, growth that we are comfortable as a government and confident as a government that we can pay for without, unlike those opposite, increasing the level of taxation on all Australians.

Importantly, it is growing levels of school funding which we are committed to distributing according to need to ensure that those in low socioeconomic areas, those students with disability, those Indigenous students and those students who may be in rural or remote areas receive additional support out of the funding that is available, not just the funding available from the Commonwealth but, importantly, the funding available from states and territories as well.

But we know full well, as I have told this Senate before, that funding is important, but what you do with funding matters even more.