Brendan Nelson (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

I join the member for Riverina in strongly supporting this legislation, the Schools Assistance (Learning Together—Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Amendment Bill 2007. I also thank her for her acknowledgement of the current Minister for Education, Science and Training and of me, having formerly been in that capacity. I do very much recall the day that the idea came to me. I was driving past a school in my electorate, Roseville Public School, and, as is often the case, there was a very large sign out the front of the school—‘Trivia Night on Friday night for the P&C’—and adjacent to it was a fundraising thermometer. For some time we in the federal government had been very angry about the way in which state governments had been neglecting and underfunding their own state schools—which is why of course they are called ‘state schools’. In fact, in the 2005-06 budget for the state of New South Wales, the New South Wales government actually cut its education capital works funding by $20 million and froze its maintenance budget. That compounded a long period of underfunding of its government schools.

It seemed to me that when parents were not absolutely flat out trying to look after their families, feed their children and meet their mortgages they were frequently required, through government school P&Cs, to be fundraising for a variety of very necessary and worthy things. The proposal which was developed, which has obviously been supported by and now implemented by the government, was that we would provide additional funding, not funding taken from any other Commonwealth government education program, to schools directly to parent bodies so that a school’s parent body would determine itself which projects were a priority for them while the principal of the school would need to sign off the proposal. In other words, we were bypassing the clipboard mentality of the states’ centralised education bureaucracies and going directly to parents.

The Investing in Our Schools Program has revealed a number of things. It has revealed not only that parents know exactly what is important to support the education of their children but also the exorbitant fees that are being charged at the state government level for the management of projects and building. One of the key things which need to be examined very closely is the extent to which the Australian taxpayer, at a state and federal level—for the money that goes into capital works for state schools—is being gouged for excessive fees. Parents have found that they are able to get projects funded much more efficiently and have the work completed much more on schedule and for a much more appropriate price than by going through centralised education bureaucracies. On that note, I strongly support the legislation and I look forward very much to hearing from the member for Bass.

See this speech in context