Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Again, thank you for your protection, Mr Deputy Speaker. I think it is important that the Australian people see where we are stepping with this bill, because what we are seeing here is a very clever lawyer tactic. I give the Deputy Prime Minister credit; she is a very good performer in this House. I must say that in this House I have had the opportunity to see her acting as the Prime Minister for a couple of days in question time, and she certainly does a much better job than the incumbent. She is very good at building a case, and I think that in this case that is what she is doing: she is building the case and getting the information there so that, at a later stage when it is more convenient or there is a big enough case for her to drop that out there, that is what she will do. It gets to what the Labor view on public versus private is. The Labor Party do not like the private choice; they are not interested in the private school system. They want to make it as hard as they can for parents to send children to private schools. I think that that is what that clause is largely about.

The other section which concerns me greatly is the removal of the previous government’s position on new non-government schools establishment grants, which of course gets to the same point—that they are not keen on these private schools being built and developed. That gets back to the true colours of the Labor Party. I think nothing reflects it better than a couple of key quotes from the Deputy Prime Minister. On 4 September 2000, before her frontbench time and when she was trying to reinvent herself for government and so forth, she said in this House—I think you were here at the time, Member for Braddon:

The last objection to the SES model is more philosophical, that the model makes no allowance for the amassed resources of any particular school. As we are all aware, over the years many prestige schools have amassed wealth—wealth in terms of buildings and facilities, wealth in terms of the equipment available, wealth in terms of alumni funding raising, trust funds, endowment funds and the like.

So this is what this is all about.

I heard the member for Moreton in his previous remarks mention he went to a regional Catholic school, I think he said, or a regional private school. I did too. I went to St Joseph’s College in Mildura. I think we should protect that choice. My parents sacrificed a lot to be able to send me to a school—which you would never class in the King’s College type of costs of school.

Further, the Deputy Prime Minister went on:

... it must follow as a matter of logic that the economic capacity of a school is affected by both its income generation potential—from the current class of parents whose kids are enrolled in the school—and the assets of the school. The SES funding system makes some attempt to measure the income generation potential of the parents of the kids in the school but absolutely no attempt to measure the latter, the assets of the school. This is a gaping flaw ...

This was the flaw that the schools hit list attempted to address in 2004. It is where the Labor Party will go back to. This is the step along the way. This bill is part of the case building up to when they want to re-introduce the schools hit list. The Assistant Treasurer, on 1 December 2004, again on the Schools Assistance (Learning Together—Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Bill 2004, said:

The regime established by this government and continued under these bills for determining the funding arrangements for schools is the socioeconomic status index—the SES index. This is a fundamentally flawed index. It replaces the Education Resources Index, which was much more based on the needs of the school and the capacity of the school to reach educational standards.

That was the old system, based on attacking private schools. Colonel Mike Kelly, the new rising star on the Labor side who won the seat of Eden-Monaro last year—and I congratulate him on that—in the Australian in November last year referred to this ‘ridiculous postcode system’ for funding schools that is ‘totally crazy’. He went on to say:

So it’s a ridiculous approach to looking at the needs of schools and we’ll move away from that and get down eventually to a proper needs based approach ...

We have a case building on the other side—

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