Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As we speak, thousands of South Australian teachers and parents are rallying across South Australia protesting against the South Australian Labor government’s budget cuts to public schools. These cuts will take $84 million from public schools over the next four years. The government announced the cuts last year and they have now told schools that that will be raised by a one per cent WorkCover levy on their staff budgets. This money will have to come out of the schools’ discretionary budgets. These budgets are used to highlight programs which the school community and principal decide are priorities, such as literacy and numeracy programs, and reading recovery programs. The amount of money that will be taken out of their budgets ranges from $3,000 for a small preschool to $60,000 for a school with 400 students and up to as much as $100,000 for a large high school.

To get an idea of what a Rudd Labor government would look like, we only need to point to the performance of the state Labor governments. Five years ago Michael Rann was elected on a platform to make health and education the priorities. In their most recent budget, the Rann government are clawing back money from government schools and preschools. Why? Three reasons: they have mismanaged their budget, they have mismanaged WorkCover and they are having to increase debt. A Rudd government would be—

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