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

Well, you’d know about it! It does so as I described in the third point that I made, on the alterations to the reporting requirements for schools, particularly new requirements relating to information about financial viability and funding sources. The previous government received this information. I pay tribute to the Parliamentary Library for the Bills Digest they released on this, which says:

Previously, the financial information that was collected was treated as commercial-in-confidence and, therefore, individual school financial information was not released. However, the Bill—

this bill—

contains another new provision which empowers the Minister to ask for reports about individual school information in a way determined by the Minister. Potentially, under this provision, the Minister could make these reports publicly available.

We all see the game being played here by the Deputy Prime Minister, which is, of course, to get the information from King’s College—which is the Labor Party’s favourite attack point on this issue—and release it publicly as part of an argument to say, ‘You’ve got to reduce the funding for these schools; you can see King’s College have this massive benefactor,’ when we know that what they are really trying to do is to undermine the choice in the Australian school system. They are trying to undermine the private school system, which has always been the Labor Party view.

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