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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Human Services (Senator Kim Carr) to a question without notice asked by Senator Milne today relating to schools funding.

I was really alarmed today when the Prime Minister delayed the government's response to the Gonski review. The government has had this review for six months. There was a broad expectation in the whole education community across Australia that the government's response to the Gonski review would be out this week and yet we have had an unexplained delay. Not only is it an unexplained delay; we have the Prime Minister making another significant shift. Whereas before the government had said that no school will lose a dollar as a result of the Gonski review, the shift today was that every school will receive an increase in government funding. That is quite a different claim from saying no school will lose a dollar under the government's funding model.

The issue here is that there has been an inequitable funding model for schools for the last decades. Under the Howard government the most inequitable system was brought in whereby a formula was to be applied according to socioeconomic status but was distorted immediately by saying that those schools that were receiving more money than they were entitled to under a socioeconomic formula would be entitled to keep the additional money. That inequity has gone on to the point where we now have so many schools, particularly public schools, around Australia adversely affected. The majority of students are still educated in public schools and they are the schools where the children with the greatest disadvantage tend to be going. The Gonski review came out with a model that aimed to address that disadvantage by allocating a standard amount per student with loadings for students with a disability and those from low-income, Indigenous and non-English-speaking backgrounds, and the view was that it would cost at least $5 billion all up and the Commonwealth would put in $3 billion.

I was really alarmed when I heard the Prime Minister say today, 'I have never looked at a big independent school in an established suburb and thought that this is not fair.' I would put to her: has she ever looked at a big public school in an established suburb and thought that that is not fair, because she should have thought that as she walked around the country and travelled around the country. I will tell you what: compare two schools, two enrolments, some in very highly established and wealthy suburbs and other large public schools in lower socio-economic suburbs, and it is not fair.

The issue here is that we need an unequivocal guarantee that this legislation will come before the parliament and have enough time to get through before Christmas. We cannot sustain any more delays. We need to fix this inequitable funding model once and for all, and we need that certainty because schools need to plan for 2014. There cannot be any more delays. There has been delay, delay, delay since the 2007 election. It cannot go on. We want that legislation in here before Christmas.

Secondly, we want to know from the government—and the minister evaded the question again today—where is the Commonwealth getting the money from to be able to finance the Gonski implementation? We must find that money. The Greens are prepared to put our shoulder to the wheel and work with the government to raise that money and to find ways to find the billions of dollars that are necessary. The one option that I put to the minister today—and it is one we have already put concerning the mining super profits tax—the government did not want to do. We have put on the table getting rid of fossil fuel subsidies—$7.2 billion a year we waste on fossil fuel subsidies. We could get rid of those. Equally, the government currently spends $3.4 billion on a coal railway for the Hunter Valley, which is singularly for coal trucks—nobody else uses that proposed railway—to facilitate the opening of a whole lot of new coalmines to make greenhouse gases more extensive than they are already. Let us get on with it. We want the legislation before Christmas. We want it to be an equitable funding model that genuinely addresses the disadvantage of public education in Australia and, thirdly, we want a proposition from the government as to how it is going to be funded so that we do get it funded and there is not some excuse that it is tied to a whole range of other things. Whatever you want in performance standards in schools, they need to be funded. You cannot lift performance across the whole range of things you need for students without money. We need that funding and the Greens are prepared to deliver. But I am worried about the delays.

Question agreed to.