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

You are quite right, Mr Speaker, and I am very sorry. The member for Warringah, when he used to be Prime Minister, cut $30 billion of school funding. Because this government is only cutting $22 billion, we are supposed to tug our forelocks, take our porridge bowls away and say, 'Thank you, I've actually got enough; I don't need any more.'

This is a cut, any way you look at it. The evidence that this is a cut is in the government's own briefing document, which they gave to every single journalist last week when they were trying to sell this dog of a policy, where it says the difference between Labor's policy and this policy is $22.3 billion. That is a $22.3 billion cut, any way you look at it. Those opposite try to say that this is somehow fairer. How can this be fairer when the vast majority of government schools will never reach their fair funding level? Under our proposal, the majority of schools will get there in 2019; Victoria in 2022. Under this new proposal, one in seven schools will be there at the end of the decade and the rest of them will never get there. Not in the foreseeable future do they get to that schooling resource standard—that fair level of funding described by the Gonski needs-based funding report.

And then there are the Catholic schools. If it is so fair, how have the government managed to unite government school advocates against the cut with Catholic school advocates against the cut? We went to a meeting last night. Hundreds of parents, hundreds of teachers—

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