Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

They may not close, but I think they are going to have a much more torrid time than they did under the previous government. Let me give one example. The establishment assistance grants were made available by the previous government to non-government schools. There was $500 per full-time student equivalent for the first year of the school’s operations and $250 per full-time equivalent in the second year. That was very important in getting non-government schools established and, quite often, it was helpful to the state system because it was in an area where perhaps you could not justify two state schools but where you could justify a state school and a private school. Under this bill, that provision has been thrown out. I would say to the member for Solomon: that gives you no worries?

One of the most contemptible aspects of the previous Labor government’s regime—I am talking about the Hawke and Keating governments—was its implementation of the so-called new schools policy. In effect, it was the exact opposite; it was a no new schools policy. It was a surreptitious measure of Susan Ryan’s to limit the number of non-government schools, and any objective observer would say that was the intent and that is what happened. One could be pardoned for believing that we are moving back that way. I ask the member for Solomon: why else would you contemplate reintroducing it if you did not have some secondary intent in doing so?

Of course, we have a number of conditions laid down for SES funding, too. I will not go into all of those, because they are quite extensive, but I will pick out a few. They say that you must agree to testing, benchmarking and assessment. I am not against those, but it is interesting that when we first proposed that in the first half of the Howard government’s regime it was bitterly opposed by the ALP and the teachers union, as was one of the other conditions: that school reports had to be fair in their assessment of students—that they could not use generalities, they had to use real assessment tools—and that the reports had to be understandable to parents. That was opposed, too. Now these things are coming in. On top of that, there is the further condition that they must accept the government’s curriculum. I will come back to that later, because I have some reservations on that.

In dealing with the SES, while nominally being adopted by the ALP at the last federal election, it is clear that they are in a mood to water it down. Several Labor MPs in speeches on the public record opposed the spirit of the SES, including the member for Prospect and the member for Eden-Monaro. They were quite unapologetic in their view. If we go back one further election, we had the spectre of Mark Latham and his infamous hit list of private schools—schools that were seen to be sufficiently well endowed to be punished for their success or for the generosity of their P&Cs or their old boys associations.

I remind the government that the capacity to fundraise is not limited to non-government schools. It is open to any government school association to do the same thing. Indeed, I have a number in my area that have been highly successful in raising funds for school facilities—in fact, two assembly halls. It is no mean feat for any school, private or public, to raise that sort of money. Why then would you punish the non-government school for the generosity of its school community, given that the same parents who have helped raise this money also pay fees over and above their voluntary contributions to the school?

The requirement in the bill that schools must report all forms of income is quite insidious. Quite apart from giving competing schools insight into what other schools are doing, it is an infringement of commercial-in-confidence. If the government knows that the school has a particularly highly motivated P&C which raises quite a deal of money for a school, or an old boys association that is providing sports equipment and the like, or a local committee running bingo for the benefit of the school, what business is that of the government? That is over and above work done by the community. I have personal experience of all three of those. Some of my kids went to a school in Bundaberg that raised money through bingo. The old boys of the boarding school I went to got together and raised money for a rowing shed and skulls and all that sort of paraphernalia so that they could get into the Head of the River and those sorts of sporting events. Having seen that firsthand, I would be horrified that schools would have to account for that sort of thing to the government.

Where does the government’s intrusion into the privacy of a school stop? If I were cynical I would say that having this sort of information on the public record would be used by Labor further down the track in modifying the SES funding. And what would the method be? First, flush it out; second, demonise it, which Latham did; third, win public sentiment through the politics of envy—‘What about these rich schools of Kings and this and that?’—and then, with Lathamesque aplomb, change it. Sadly, for his sake, he did not get the chance to do it.

Let me now deal with the philosophy of SES funding. The formula which is used is based on the socioeconomic status of the various census collection districts in Australia, and all the students are placed in the CCD areas. That means that a school that has these CCDs under its influence receives money according to the socioeconomics of the kids who come from those CCDs. Nothing could be fairer than that.

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