Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

The proper funding of our schools so that every child in every school in every part of Australia can truly achieve their potential is a matter of definite public importance today and every day. Today we saw the results of a study of the trends in international mathematics and science, which showed that Australian students' results have been flatlining for two decades. While we have been flatlining, students in countries around the world have been overtaking ours and achieving much better results in years 4 and 8 than our Australian students. In fact, Australia has fallen as by as much as 10 places in global rankings since the last survey just five years ago, with Kazakhstan and Slovenia now outperforming us.

I used to hate it when Kim Beazley used to say 'even Slovenia has better, faster internet than Australia'. Slovenia is a terrific country—it is where my parents are from—but the gross domestic product per capita of Slovenia is about US$21,000 a year. The gross domestic product per person in Kazakhstan is about US$10½ thousand per year. I have used US dollars for the sake of comparison. In Australia, that figure is about $56,000, so you can see why I say it is extraordinary that countries such as Slovenia and Kazakhstan are able to invest in a way that has seen their kids overtake Australian kids in maths and science.

Dr Sue Thomson from the Australian Council for Educational Research says this a wake-up call. She says:

We're the middle of the pack, our achievement is average … and if we continue to accept that we are doing a disservice to future generations …

From these results, we know that there are particular groups of kids who are really struggling. We know that kids in remote communities, Indigenous kids, kids from non-English-speaking backgrounds and kids from poorer households are really struggling. That is exactly the reason we introduced a Gonski needs-based funding system. We introduced it so that we could direct the greatest resources to the kids that needed the most help.

We also see from this work that kids who are gifted and talented are not achieving their full potential. If you look at a system like Singapore's, so many more of their high-achieving kids really achieve at the top band. In Australia, those figures are disappointing. That is why we said that the needs-based education funding system should not only help the poorest kids, the kids who are struggling; it should also mean that kids who are gifted and talented can get the help they need to make the most of their gifts.

It is also why we said we were not just going to put extra funding in; we were going to attach conditions to that extra funding. We attached conditions about improving teacher quality, improving teacher training, giving principals more say in their schools—a whole range of conditions. What is really disappointing from this government is not just that they have cut $30 billion from our schools—and that is pretty disappointing—but that they have also cut the transparency and accountability and school improvement measures.

We wanted to achieve more with this extra funding. Christopher Pyne, when he was the education minister, said, 'I'm not going to interfere with how schools run themselves.' We said at the last election that with our extra funding we wanted to get Australia back into the top five in the world for maths, reading and science. We were determined to improve school completion rates. We were determined to see better-trained teachers—and more of them—more students studying maths or science to year 12, more coding in schools and better support for students with a disability.

The schools I have visited in the early years of the flow-out of the needs-based funding are already seeing the results delivered in their schools. Merrylands school, in the shadow Treasurer's electorate, has doubled the proportion of its kids being offered places in university. I visited Minimbah school in Armidale in the Deputy Prime Minister's electorate, which has hired more Aboriginal teachers because they think it is really important for their Aboriginal kids to have the great role models that those teachers provide. We see those improvements everywhere we go.

What is really frustrating is the remarkable inconsistency of those opposite. In 2012 we saw plenty of Liberals prepared to stand up beside teachers and parents in their communities with pictures such as the one I have here that says 'I give a Gonski' and pretend that they supported needs-based funding in their schools.

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