Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Smarter than the education minister. What does a $22 billion cut to education mean? It is equivalent to a cut of $2.4 million for every school in Australia. We have had a bit of misinformation flowing from those opposite, so I want to give a little bit of history. We have 27 systems, because we have government schools, Catholic schools and independent schools. About 2.5 million kids go to government schools, about 800,000 to Catholic schools and about 550,000 to go independent schools—the Christians, the grammars and so on.

Let us have a look at how they have changed over the last five years. In government schools there has been an increase of 142,749 kids over the last five years. That is a 6.1 per cent increase. What does that mean? That means, if you had 20 kids per class, about 7,137 teachers. I know it is not as simple as that, it is primary and secondary, when we come to calculating money. The reason I say this upfront is these growths of 6.1 per cent in government schools, 4.1 per cent in Catholic schools and 7.1 per cent in independent schools over the last five years indicate that there will always be increases in funding for education. This is a smoke and mirrors operation saying, 'The Prime Minister says we are increasing funding in education.' Guess what? Those 7,137 teachers in the government schools all have to be paid and it obviously costs money to build classrooms to put the kids in, and there are all the other associated costs.

We need to look at the details and look at a bit of history. We are a federation. The Constitution provides that basically the schools, including the non-government schools, are overseen by the states and the money is distributed according to some decisions made by Canberra. If we go back to 1964, we brought in capital funding for schools for the first time, then recurrent funding for school students, and the Australian Schools Commission was set up. Then we look at what John Howard did in 2001 where he brought in the socioeconomic status system. Remember that 48 per cent of the schools covered by that model were 'funding maintained', meaning they sat outside the SES model because they were going to be worse off. The Catholics did not actually join the SES model until 2005, because they have a different mechanism, which basically means the richer parents distribute money to the poorer schools in the Catholic system.

We need to look at the 27 different systems, because educating in Queensland is different to Victoria; educating in country New South Wales is different to inner-city Sydney. We need to understand that. There are different costs associated with primary and secondary students; therefore, we need to be careful about how we distribute our education funds. Gonski, the banker, made it clear that there is a good economic return, a much better economic return on education than giving money to big business. Strip away the morality of the bleeding heart leftie, and you actually get a better economic return by investing in kids; it makes sense to do so. Gonski understood that as did his expert panel.

Where we can do this, we should be investing in schools as much as we can but we have sadly got a government that is giving with one hand and taking away with the other and is going to leave schools worse off. We know that we have to get the best possible return on that investment so that the smartest kids get a chance in life. We cannot let those that are hampered by things like being from the bush or being Indigenous or having English as a second language—all those other things that come into play—be a disadvantage.

We on this side fundamentally get needs based education funding. Those opposite are dressing up a five-year-old wether and calling it a lamb. It is not going to fly at all. We need to keep fighting to make sure that every child in every school has the opportunity to reach their educational potential. We know that when the Prime Minister talks about fairness, he is really just reading from his talking points; he does not fundamentally get needs based education funding because he never understood those schools in his lifetime.

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