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

I thank the member for his question and I know that he has a keen interest in the Gonski review reforms. I understand from the Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth that both he and the member for Lyne attended a forum at Port Macquarie High School on 3 May, and that there was a very good discussion amongst local community members there about the Gonski recommendations.

To the member, can I say this about the way in which we are approaching the Gonski review: what David Gonski and his very eminent review team did was produce a comprehensive report about a new way of approaching school funding including a school resources standard, and loadings on top for things like educational disadvantage and for students with disabilities. They did produce a figure of $5 billion, that is true, but they themselves indicated in their report that that was working with older data, and they also indicated that there were some things that we needed to do for education which were very important reforms for which they did not have the tools to do any modelling.

To take one example of that, they indicated that there is no common assessment, or definition, of students with disabilities and so, if—as the Gonski review recommends—we were to put a loading on top for students with disabilities, we currently have no national platform or data sets which would enable us to do that. A lot of work is now happening through very collaborative working groups between the federal government, state and territory governments, the Catholic education system and the independent schools. It is only when we see the outcome of that work that we can start to make a set of decisions about how the government will resource school funding.

Of course, the government's objective is for the budget to be in surplus and we will hold to that, but we also believe people can judge us on our record about school education. We as a government have almost doubled the amount of money going into school education, because it was so shamefully neglected by the Howard government. Questions of educational disadvantage, for example, were not even considered or debated by the Howard government. We have acted to remedy that and, of course, we will take that set of Labor values into consideration in making the next decisions, following the work being done now on the Gonski review.

See this speech in context