Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

'A++'—I like that. I rise to add my remarks to what can only be described as an enormous fraud. This is not a policy. It is not an investment plan. It is not a fair bill. But it is marketing spin of the first order. It is the government trying to con people to think that this is in fact a funding boost, that it is fair to students and that it is a good outcome for Australia, when it is actually a $22.3 billion cut as compared to the existing arrangements. We all saw the extraordinary moment in question time where the Prime Minister refused to endorse the words that his government put out when announcing this policy.

In my electorate of Bruce alone it representatives a $17.2 million reduction in funding over 2018 and 2019 to government schools, which is an enormous amount of money, some hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some cases millions, per school. You have to acknowledge the chutzpah—or that great Australian phrase, 'more front than Myers'—of trying to claim this as a funding boost when you are actually cutting. It was a good gag for the first couple of days. It did get some good early headlines. I felt sorry actually for the member for Sturt, the former minister who likes to style himself as a great 'fixer'. He was going to fix the universities and he was going to fix school funding. Then he saw his successor, Minister Birmingham, come up with this great 'fix' that got such good headlines. But then of course, as is always the case, when you see past the spin—when the opposition here starts doing our job and looking at the detail and comparing the numbers; when the principals; the schools sectors; the Liberal state governments even; the Premier of New South Wales, supposedly a friend of the government—when all of the rest of us have a look at the actual reality behind the spin, of course the government's case falls to bits and the scam is exposed.

What this bill really does is remove extra funding that was agreed with the states and territories for 2018 and 2019, funding that would have brought all under-resourced schools to a fair funding level. And it especially hurts public schools, which receive less than 50 per cent of funding under the government's proposal compared with 80 per cent extra funding under Labor's proposals.

In my state of Victoria, when you chunk this up—just over two years—and this is a $630 million cut, a reduction. I know we keep being told it is not a cut. But these were signed agreements. You read the agreement, and it says this was the money. This was the money we were going to get with the agreement. But, under this bill, under this government's arrangements, we do not get that money. That sounds like a cut. It is a cut. So my 36 schools get $17.2 million less. And this absolutely matters a lot. I could, if I run out of things to say, which is highly unlikely on this topic, stand here and read out into the Hansard all of the schools and the figures, but you can find them on the website. I had a lovely catch up yesterday and this morning with Glendal Primary School from Glen Waverley—they were visiting the parliament—a fantastic primary school that had been investing in numeracy, literacy and robotics. They had a team go to America for the international robotics championships. They are losing $400,000 over the next two years that were signed up.

But if I had to pick one school whose situation is manifestly unfair and draw the House's attention to it, it would be Dandenong High School. For anyone who does not know Melbourne, Dandenong High School sits within the second-highest disadvantaged municipality of all 79 councils in Victoria. It is a fantastic school, and under the Gonski agreements that had been signed with Victoria, Dandenong High School would have received an extra $1.6 to $1.8 million over the next two years. They now will not receive that if this bill goes through and those agreements are ripped up.

Let's stop and think about that. The Dandenong community is an incredibly multicultural place. It is a settling place for asylum seekers and refugees. There is entrenched intergenerational disadvantage in many pockets of the school's catchment. Despite this, and mainly because of state Labor government investment over 10 to 12 years, it is doing fantastic things. It is blessed with a wonderful principal, Susan Ogden, who is providing great leadership to the school and doing great things with equity funding—numeracy, literacy and leadership programs.

I met with Dandenong High School leaders when they were up here a few weeks ago. For anyone who watches The Voice on TV, here is a plug. The leading contestant, Hoseah Partsch, is a disadvantaged Dandenong High School student who visited our parliament only a month ago. We are all behind him. His story was written up in The Daily Telegraph. He entered the competition hoping to win the money to buy his family a house because at one stage he and his family were living with six people in a one-bedroom apartment. This is the kind of student that Dandenong High School is so proud to represent. So it beggars belief that, of every single high school in Victoria from year 7 to 12, Dandenong High will lose more money under this bill when this agreement is ripped up than any other school. It makes no sense, for anyone who knows Victoria, that you would take the most money off one of the most disadvantaged schools. How is this fair?

I have said before that my electorate of Bruce, with 53 per cent of people born overseas, is Australia's future; and I firmly believe that this school is Australia's future, yet the government is cutting funding. Every member will say education is important—and I believe we all believe that. But I can say without hesitation that for people in my electorate there is no more important issue than education. I told the House in my first speech that I had doorknocked over 14,000 homes over 13 months. My favourite question that I asked was 'What was most important to people?' and the standout answer was education—whether it was young people at uni or TAFE, parents with schoolchildren, or grandparents worried about the whole spectrum. The reason for this is the high value that migrants, above anyone else, place on education. When people come here they sacrifice everything for a better life for their kids; they have that laser-like focus, knowing that education is a pathway to a better life for their children because it brings opportunity. We know that through the waves of Australian migration. We had the post-World War II Greeks and Italians, people who worked four jobs and just wanted to get their kids to get to uni. And then we had Asian migration—more recently, from the subcontinent—and people from every part of the world.

The starkest demonstration of that occurred in Glen Waverley in my electorate when I was doorknocking. I doorknocked two houses that were next door to each other. I discovered that one of them was inside the school zone for Glen Waverley Secondary College and the other was outside it. The price difference for the house inside the school zone was $230,000. That is because people in my community are so determined to pursue what they see as the best education for the kids.

Of course, people understand that this is not just key to their kids' opportunity, it is key to Australia's future. Education is the critical enabler of our future prosperity. They are 100 per cent correct. This is not a lefty, radical, pinko plot kind of view either. The OECD's Economic Outlook in 2016 said 'education and public investment are the two areas of public expenditure that are estimated to be associated with higher long-term productivity'. And you cannot have an innovation economy, which we hear so much about, without investing properly in education. The OECD said 'better and more education is associated with higher growth and productivity, and also greater income equality.'

I am an unlucky soul on chamber duty; this week, yet again, and week after week, the member for Hughes was speaking. Anyway, I sat through it; it was entertaining, if nothing else. And we got lectured about choices, budgets. Labor is absolutely clear on the need to choose education. I will quote from an article which I actually filed away when I read it last year because I thought it summed up so much of why it is important to invest in education—particularly at the disadvantaged end, which so many schools in my electorate cater to. I quote from an article by Jessica Irvine in The Sydney Morning Herald:

Economists call it picking the low-hanging fruit: the strategic policy choices that deliver the biggest social return for lowest cost … It is spending money to help disadvantaged students get the best out of their education. Kids from low socioeconomic backgrounds are our greatest untapped source of potential growth. They are our most undervalued stock—

if we put it in human capital terms—

Investing in public education for disadvantaged students makes solid economic sense.

So, of course, the government's response is to cut the most funding from the most disadvantaged schools!

The member for Hughes in lecturing us about the budget did not mention that the government's choices are a two per cent tax cut for everyone in this chamber. Everyone in the country earning over $180,000 gets a tax cut. There is a $65 billion tax cut, which is unfunded, for big companies, and a $36 billion part of that is in a bill which is back on the Notice Paper again. And there is a $22.3 billion schools funding cut, which their own advice admits. Of course, they will fight to the death to protect tax breaks that overwhelmingly go to the top end. With negative gearing, the top 20 per cent of income earners get around a 50 per cent benefit, or, even worse, with the capital gains tax, the top 10 per cent receive a 70 per cent subsidy.

The choices that the government chooses to put forward and call them 'fair', to me, reveals an eternal truth about the Liberal Party. They do not actually care about equality of opportunity. It is a lingo they have picked up. They talk about needs based funding; it is a spin. They are a party of privilege and established wealth. They are not wealth generators. They are wealth preservers. I was thinking this morning that, if they were a financial advisory firm and you were knocking on their door, they would not let you in unless you already had $5 million in the bank. That kind of high wealth advisory firm is their market niche.

There has been a lot of focus on money in the contributions that I have heard in this debate. We argue about figures and 'Is it a cut?' or 'Isn't it a cut?' 'I know what will be said next and what we will say—and here we go.' There is a lot of focus on money, but there is an irony that, in this debate, the marketing spin on the bill is about convincing people that the government are spending more dollars and that it is outcomes now that matter. You might remember the MPIs which many of us sat through before the government made this announcement—this was late last year and earlier this year—where we said there was a $30 billion cut, because there was. The government said: 'No. Money doesn't matter. It is not about money. Really, we are just wasting money. Look, we spent money for a couple years and our results haven't gone up and so really we should just stop spending money. Money doesn't matter, because it is outcomes.' Now we have entered a parallel universe where a $22 billion cut is spun as an $8 billion increase. I cannot work that out—but anyway. Meanwhile, another shocking aspect to the bill is that the government are quietly crab-walking away from outcomes.

Labor's funding model, under the Australian Education Act 2013, enshrined the following objective into Australian law:

All students in all schools are entitled to an excellent education, allowing each student to reach his or her full potential so that he or she can succeed, achieve his or her aspirations, and contribute fully to his or her community, now and in the future.

Then there are a series of targets—hard targets. Governments of all persuasions avoid enshrining hard targets, because they know that they can be held to account for hard targets. But we put clear targets in legislation that if we did the full funding that was recommended, the full funding that was required, we were prepared to sign up to Australia being in the top highest performing countries by 2025 based on the performance of school students in reading, mathematics and science. We set further targets about school completion for year 12, certificate II and certificate III levels and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander student completion. But this bill removes that goal; it removes those targets from legislation—and that is a disgrace.

We on this side will not forget, we must not let the other side forget and we must not let the people in our electorates or the electorates we will seek to win at the next election and form government forget that this government was elected on a lie that they would not cut a single dollar from education, that it did not matter who you voted for, you were going to get the same cents and dollars on either side. They were elected and it was cut, cut, cut, cut. It is this kind of behaviour that breeds cynicism and breaks trust, as we all hear from our electorates, and it frustrates me. We know outside the chamber that many of us do get on.

Ms Madeleine King interjecting—

Many of us do. They are not all bad—misguided but not all bad. Bipartisanship is desirable, compromise, dialogue. I never give up hope. There is always room for improvement on the other side, member for Brand. But we are stuck in this ridiculous debate with alternative facts, where the government pretend this is not an enormous cut overall in school funding that had been agreed. They hide behind this fig leaf of half a truth. I think the member for Hughes talked about 'an acorn of truth' when he admitted there is a $22 billion cut, but that is just an acorn of truth!

Sure, this legislation replaces what was in the legislation—a slightly lower funding level. But this is a claim that is fundamentally misleading, because the dollars in this bill are less than the agreements which were struck with the states. This is a cut. It is a reduction, whichever way you look at it. I hope that sense may prevail and that a negotiation may proceed. It will not happen in this place, we know, but it may happen through the Senate process. In the coming weeks and months, however long it drags on, the people in our communities, the principals who I have been speaking to, the parents, the teachers, the state governments, the minor party senators and others will see sense, will reflect, and perhaps some agreement can be reached that we can all vote on. But, until that time, Labor will not give up our campaign to remind the community what this bill and what the government's plan really represent: it is a funding cut, and in my community it is, unambiguously, an attack—a reduction in funding for some of the most disadvantaged schools in our state of Victoria, and, indeed, the nation, and we should not stand for it.

See this speech in context