Kate Ellis (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

It is not at all. You are making up figures which do not stack up. I certainly hope we are recorded in Hansard so we can see that, yet again, those opposite are making it up. It was not long before he undid his pledge for six per cent increases and reverted to his old position of defending the broken Howard SES funding model. In February 2013, the now Minister for Education said:

... the current funding model does work. It's not a broken model.

Then he flip-flopped again, pretending to be so concerned about the declining school funding model, that he declared the prospect of three per cent indexation to be 'frightening'—a comment that came back to bite him very hard when he announced the biggest ever cut to schools in this year's budget and pegged funding from 2018 at CPI, which their own budget papers predict will be just 2.5 per cent. The same person who argued that the prospect of three per cent indexation was frightening has now introduced into this parliament budget papers which show school indexation at just 2.5 per cent from 2018. Several months later, in what had become a very bad version of policy hokey pokey, he said:

I can give you this guarantee: if the coalition's elected, we will keep the funding model for two years, we will keep the current indexation rate which over the last 10 years has averaged six per cent.

That is where things stayed until the lead-up to the election. We know from those opposite that Gonski was a 'conski' and the coalition had the impossible policy of indexing school funding at six per cent and returning—

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