Ms Julie Bishop (Curtin, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Women's Issues) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Jagajaga has fallen into her own trap of identifying the two providers, Queensland and Victoria, as the states where the parents were not informed by the state governments in a timely manner. In trying to limit the Australian government’s capacity to make the most appropriate arrangements to deliver much needed assistance to students, it seems that the member for Jagajaga, as this amendment illustrates, does not understand the processes and structures of the Schools Assistance (Learning Together—Achievement Through Choice And Opportunity) Act 2004. Labor’s proposed amendment either tries to deliver what is already possible under the act or is a nonsense.

The arrangements that are currently in the act outline the processes for entering into arrangements with non-government schools and non-school organisations to deliver much needed educational services and support to Australian schools and students. The arrangements are robust. They include the need for these organisations to enter into agreements with the Australian government that outline financial and educational accountability requirements. The amendment is fundamentally flawed as it refers to authorised payments to non-government bodies while the entire schools assistance act, including section 120, is structured around payments to the states for non-government bodies. Even so, the provision would not add anything to the current position under the schools assistance act because, as identified in sections 7(1)(a) and 7(1)(b) of the act, payments to relevant authorities are already possible.

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