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

I thank the member for Wakefield for his question. The Howard government is committed to ensuring that parents have a right to choose the school that best meets the educational outcomes for their child. The Australian government is committed to a strong public sector and a strong private sector. That is why the Australian government has ensured that there has been record funding for all schools across Australia since 1996. In fact, there has been a 160 per cent increase in funding for all schools, and that includes a 120 per cent funding increase for government schools, even though enrolments in government schools have increased by only one per cent over that time.

I was asked about alternative policies. According to a transcript on 702 ABC, the Labor Party are saying publicly that they are committed to the current indexation arrangements, that Labor will not take money off schools and that Labor have abandoned the Beazley-Macklin-Latham hit list. That is what they say. We know that the unions are committed to the hit list, because their misleading advertising campaign shows that they are hell-bent on taking money away from Catholic and independent schools. But guess what? So is Labor. Labor are committed to the hit list. It is done in a very underhand way. Labor’s 2007 national policy platform says that the Labor Party in government will fund non-government schools based on need. The words are specifically that they will take into account ‘income from private resources when assessing financial need’. This is Latham’s resources model. This is, word for word, Mark Latham policy. The resources model was the basis for the hit list—so the hit list lives on. As the independent schools sector of New South Wales said only last week on radio, the resources model in the Labor Party’s national policy platform is a direct attack—

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