Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much. I was asked about a building at a particular school, and I am answering about that building at that school. On the comparison that the member has drawn with St Lucy’s, let me just explain to the member that, of course, the amount of funding that this government has allocated to students with disabilities has in fact gone up. We allocate that to school systems. We allocate it in particular to the Catholic school system. The Catholic school system, as it did when the Liberal Party was in government, makes determinations about allocations for the school within its system. Consequently, there is more money available to the system overall and it has made its determinations, including the determination for St Lucy’s School. If the member wants to take that up with the Catholic Education Office then he should, but he should not be drawing an inappropriate, inaccurate comparison in this House in the attempt to confuse or mislead people, because that is completely wrong.

Can I say to the member opposite: this is a government that has almost doubled allocations of funding to schools over a four-year period. We are doing that to drive a fundamental reform agenda, including transparency, which you were too incompetent in government to do; including a national curriculum, which the Liberal and National parties were too incompetent to do; including directing more money to disadvantaged schools, which is something the Liberals and Nationals in government could not have cared less about; including money for teacher quality reforms, such as Teach for Australia which provides more money for the best teachers in the country to go to the classrooms that need them the most—a reform you would never have dreamed of and could not have delivered even if you tried. There is the Digital Education Revolution, the Building the Education Revolution, trade training centres in schools—

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