Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

It is a very easy thing to take part of a story and turn something that is actually true in part into something that is untrue. That is just what we have heard from the previous speaker.

Let me talk about Gonski. Gonski was a long time in coming. It was years, actually, of negotiation between stakeholders all around the country in all the different school systems that finally came together and came to a common understanding about what our schools needed if we were going to position Australia and our children in the best possible way for the future. And it was not a four-year funding strategy; it was actually a strategy over six and beyond years. The funding increased year by year, and the major increases were in the fifth and sixth years, because you actually had to train teachers for it.

I know the government is not saying you cannot talk about the outliers—unless it is a tax cut. If it is tax cut for big business, you can talk 10 years quite happily, but apparently not when it comes to school funding—even though this plan was put in place and in the budget, and the opposition, on the day before the election, committed absolutely to funding it in full. So we can have two truths here. The government is funding the first four years, increasing year by year, and therefore they are funding more and more each year. That is true. But it is also true that they committed to funding years 5 and 6 yet they are not funding them. Both things are true. Yes, the funding is going up. It was supposed to—that is what Gonski did. Congratulations for supporting the first four years of Gonski, but no congratulations whatsoever for telling untruths to the Australian people that you were going to fund years 5 and 6 and now you are not. See, it is actually quite simple. You do not get to take part of a story and turn it into a giant untruth. You just do not get to do it and you do not get to carry on about out-years yet you are going to fund 10 years of a tax cut. With tax cuts outlying years are fine but with education they are not—how about some consistency or some truth from this government about something as important as education?

I want to talk about what my great schools are doing with the extra funding they have received through the needs-based incentives which this government is not committed to. I have a school in my electorate called Merrylands High School. It is a fantastic school in an incredibly disadvantaged area. They received some additional needs-based funding. With that funding and targeted literacy and numeracy programs and one-to-one support for students in the upper years, school attendance is up by 5.1 per cent and there has been a 14 per cent increase in the submission of class work but, more importantly, there are more people getting into university now. The number of students receiving university offers in the three years thanks to this program has increased dramatically—in fact, it has doubled. That is a remarkable effect from a relatively small investment through Gonski. That is the sort of program that this government does not support.

I have a wonderful little primary school in the south of my electorate called Holy Family Primary School. It is an incredibly diverse community. They have incredible numbers, with nearly half their students turning up in kindergarten—or preschool as it is called here; wrong state—unable to read at all. They have no reading capacity at all and some of them have incredibly low verbal skills. That is another school which is receiving special needs-based funding to work one-on-one with these children, to develop plans one-on-one, to make sure that these children are school ready and can do the best they can. It is incredibly important funding.

One of the speakers on the other side was ranting about high-gain schools and how you should only fund high-gain schools. Let me tell you: the schools that are high-gain schools are high-gain schools because they were funded. The high-gain schools in Western Sydney—Cabramatta High, Liverpool Public, Girraween Public, Burwood Girls High and Parramatta West Public in my electorate—are in some of the most ethnically diverse communities in the country. They have all received additional funding between $670,000 for the lowest and $2.2 million for the highest and they are all high-gain schools because of the additional funding. This nonsense that we heard over here that you only fund schools after they are high gain—excuse me? That is why I was laughing, Deputy Speaker—because that is one of the silliest things I have ever heard. These schools received extra funding, the kind of funding that you guys are going to cut even though you said you would not. Even though you stood up and said you would not, you are cutting it and you are going to do serious damage to my schools and my community by doing it.

See this speech in context