John Forrest (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to be on my feet speaking on these education and school bills and particularly to follow the member for Port Adelaide. His predecessor, because of his former education experience, always spoke very strongly on education bills. I found myself agreeing with the current member for Port Adelaide, mostly because most of his remarks were addressed to the Education Legislation Amendment Bill 2008, which is not particularly controversial. I found myself thinking back to 1996 and then to 1998, when I chaired the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Community Affairs, and to my shock when, after I arrived at this place, one of the first inquiries that we did was in relation to Aboriginal health. I remember just how significant Aboriginal education was even way back then. I do not share the pessimism expressed by the member for Port Adelaide about the Howard years. We did an enormous amount in bringing that issue to the fore.

So I find myself not in disagreement on the Education Legislation Amendment Bill. Most of my anxiety is in relation to the cognate bill, the Schools Assistance Bill 2008. I noted that the member for Port Adelaide made reference to paranoias and ideological positions that are often taken. I was amused to read the editorial of the Age on Thursday last week. The editor introduced his editorial with this comment:

There are few matters that evoke as much passion or ideological division as the education of our children.

I do not have an ideological position in respect of the Schools Assistance Bill, but I do wish to express the anxieties that have been expressed to me by the schools in my constituency. There are 127 schools in the division of Mallee, and I am proud of every single one of them and the educational outcomes they achieve. Some of them are extremely remote and some of the primary schools have fewer than a dozen children, but the parents wish for that form of access for their children in isolated locations and they fight vigorously to keep their schools open. Of those 127 schools, 29 are non-government schools—primary schools and secondary colleges—scattered right across the north-west of Victoria. They have expressed some concern about what this bill gives the minister jurisdiction to do. I would like to put those anxieties on the formal record just to ensure that those fears are not realised—not my fears, but the anxieties that have been expressed to me.

It is interesting that, of those 127 schools, three are new independent schools that have been established since 1998. One of those is an Islamic primary school in Mildura. The other two are Christian primary schools. Parents had expressed a desire to have their children educated in that environment, where the value emphasis could be formally part of the school curriculum. Those new schools, in particular—having tried to get established through the previous period, when the Australian Labor Party were in government with the New Schools policy, which was effectively a ‘no schools’ policy—waited patiently for many years for the Howard-Fisher government to make it possible for those parents to have their aspirations realised and have schools operating to a curriculum that they felt best suited their children. They expressed anxiety at some of the provisions this bill introduces.

The Schools Assistance Bill is primarily an instrument for non-government primary and secondary education in Australia for the 2009-12 period and for appropriating $28 billion for that purpose. Passage of this bill before the end of 2008 is necessary to provide continued Commonwealth funding for non-government schools into January 2009. However, while the bill apparently preserves the total funding available to non-government schools, consistent with the government’s election commitment which they made in 2007, the bill introduces a number of changes to school funding agreements. This is where the concern that has been expressed to me from the non-government sector is generated.

This concern gets added to when they hear comments from senior government ministers, like the Deputy Prime Minister and other Labor members, in relation to their perceived opposition to a socioeconomic funding model, the SES model, which serves their purposes well. They are not huge capitally funded schools; they are small schools with 50 to 60 children. They express anxiety when they see in this legislation the power that a minister might have to interfere with a parental choice they make about the schooling of their children.

There are four main areas where this non-government sector can be potentially negatively impacted. Firstly, there are the changes to the grounds upon which the minister can elect to refuse or delay a payment. Section 15 of the bill makes it easier for the minister to be able to do that—I will go into that concern shortly. The second area is the new requirement for school funding agreements to comply with the national curriculum by 2012—and the anxiety and concern about changes has been expressed by many speakers already in this debate. It has been an interesting exercise, listening to the contributions from members—which drew me to that reference by the editor of the Age about the diverse ideological positions that people can have. The third point of concern is the alteration of the reporting requirements for schools, particularly new requirements in relation to financial viability. And the fourth point is the removal of the previous government’s new non-government schools establishment grant, which has benefited those schools that have recently been established. Let us go through these one by one.

It might be reasonable, as other speakers have said, that the minister could react to a qualified auditor’s report and either threaten to withhold funding or withdraw it completely. I would like to make the point that auditors—a bit like civil engineers—are very, very conservative people and they can qualify an audit report for all sorts of different reasons. It can be in regard to a school’s plans and strategy to invest capital so that it can improve its value, to make way for a new building they plan to construct in two years time. An auditor can express a qualified audit report warning of the dangers of that.

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