Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I join my colleagues in speaking on the Australian Education Amendment Bill, which, frankly, encapsulates just how out of touch this government has become. You would think, when you listen to this debate, that we are talking about two different pieces of legislation, with those on the other side touting the bill as the best thing for our schools and those on this side joining with state governments, who run our public education system, joining with the Catholic education system and joining with those who have been fighting for such a long time, our teachers and our parents, for proper needs based funding for our schools.

I do not think there are many on the backbench who actually understand the complexity of what this government has done with the formula for schools funding. I do not think they understand that what they have now done is take as a baseline the $30 billion of cuts that former Prime Minister Tony Abbott inflicted on our schools and then use that to claim they are providing additional funding to our schools. That is not the Schooling Resource Standard that was part of the Gonski reforms, and it is a very poor decision that this government has made. Make no mistake—the government's legislation cuts $22 billion from what the schools, the states, the Catholic Education Office and the independent schools were expecting as part of needs based funding for our schools. That is what this legislation does—it removes from law the commitments to deliver quality teaching and learning. It entrenches inequality in our school system and it will mean that far too many students will be left behind.

In order to understand why we have ended up with this piece of unfair legislation before us, we have to look at the government's approach to schools and education overall. At every moment, this government has attacked school funding and undermined Labor's needs based reforms. Who can forget the promise that voters saw as they were heading into the voting booths in 2013, that the Liberals would match Labor's school funding commitment dollar for dollar? They said that they were on a unity ticket when it came to school funding. Well, that absolute untruth turned out to be a complete untruth. Those promises did not even last a year.

And then we had the former education minister, the member for Sturt, boasting about how he was handing over school funding with no strings attached, undoing the transparency and accountability mechanisms that the previous Labor government had put in place. The government could not be trusted then and they cannot be trusted now. A change in Prime Minister and a change in minister have not changed a thing when it comes to their unfair approach to school funding.

What we have on the table is a desperate attempt to re-badge their failures in education policy. What we have is a $22 billion cut. They are trying to distract from their appalling history on schools policy and trying to distract from their damaging plans for the future of our schools. There are clear and compelling reasons why we need to fight this government's proposal. Access to education is fundamental to the economic and social progress of our nation. Education, alongside universal health care, is the most important investment a government can make to tackle inequality. It is the difference between lifting children out of intergenerational poverty; closing the gap on outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples; ensuring that children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds are included; and providing opportunities for children with disabilities to reach their full potential and not be left behind in what is becoming such a fast-paced world.

We ask a lot of our education system: our teachers, our students and the parents of these children. We want to support better quality teachers. We want better educational outcomes and we want to lift the outcomes for children who experience disadvantage. We want to develop children who are great readers and who are able to unlock mathematics; children who learn to code, to participate in healthy physical activity and who learn music, art, other languages and about other cultures. We want all of these things for our children because we know that these are the skills that are required to grow and develop our economy. And yet we have a government which does not want to invest properly in our schools in a way that is needed to achieve all of these things.

The fact that this bill seeks to remove as one of the objectives of the Australian Education Act the words:

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.

says everything about this government. They want to remove that objective; they are simply not interested in the power of education to actually change people's lives.

In government, Labor developed the Schooling Resource Standard, a funding model that clearly defined the funding required for each child to attain a great education regardless of which school sector they were in. It includes loading for specific disadvantage, targeted to the students who need the most help: extra support for Indigenous students, students with a disability, students in remote and rural areas or students in areas of particular disadvantage. The funding commitments we made for the Commonwealth were based on the total resources available within each state and within each school sector.

Let's just remember what the review into schools funding itself said:

Not all states and territories have the same capacity to fund their school systems adequately.

This is something that the government seems to have been forgotten. To get all our school systems onto an even playing field across the country and to close the cross-border gaps we have to recognise that different states and territories are in different places with different starting points, and that different sectors are at different starting points, in order to lift everybody up to that standard.

We reached agreements with states and territories to ensure that schools whose total resources fell below the Schooling Resource Standard would reach that funding level by 2019. In the case of my home state of Victoria, that year was set at 2022 in recognition that it needed further time to lift up to that resource. We offered two-thirds of the extra funding needed to get all the schools up to the Schooling Resource Standard, tying our contribution to state commitments to increase their funding by one-third. What this government has done is said that none of that matters. They say that the total funding that schools have does not matter, and they have now retreated in this bill to a Commonwealth-only funding model, an offer that does not lock states into keeping or increasing their commitments to schools.

Let's look at what exactly they are proposing in this bill. I really hope that the backbench have actually read and understood the complexities of this funding model and why this is actually a substantial retrograde step for schools in their own electorates. When you look at the detail it does become pretty clear that it is not needs based funding—and it is certainly not fair. Their plan would see a transition to a flat Commonwealth contribution—remembering you are not looking at the total resourcing of schools now—of 20 per cent of the Schooling Resource Standard for all government schools, and 80 per cent for all non-government schools. It is not sector blind, it is absolutely sector specific. This rule locks in a sector specific rate for different systems and will result in some wealthier schools being better off, and those schools that desperately need extra support continuing to be left behind.

Importantly, there is no requirement for the states and territories to ever lift their contribution to get our public schools closer to the Schooling Resource Standard. They are walking away from the targets in the current act. These targets were put in place by Labor to build internationally competitive education systems across our county to meet our future needs. The impacts of the government cuts are very clear. It is an average of $2.4 million from each school across the nation. That is what the $22 billion is.

Over the weeks since the budget, I have spoken to a number of principals in my own electorate, and they have told me how much they stand to lose under this government's proposal. The local Catholic Education Office has told me firsthand the damage that it will do. We are in a fairly disadvantaged lower socioeconomic area, but they are saying that even in that circumstance where they get additional funding—not under this model but the one in which the distribution works—they will still have to charge their parents $100 to $200 extra in school fees in their Catholic primary education system. And that of course is at the current rate of growth that the government is proposing. They are saying that in future years that will potentially blow out to $1,000.

Parents in my electorate are not wealthy, and families sending their children to Catholic parish schools are not wealthy. Many of them choose to go to Catholic parish schools because they have kids with special needs and under that system currently they are able to access better services—or more support services—than they are through the public education system, because the public education system is so poorly funded. What this government is doing is cutting those Catholic schools. But what it is doing to public schools is frankly absolutely appalling. The Catholic Education Office says that they were not consulted on these changes; they were ambushed. They are facing cuts and they are going to have to, as I said, raise fees for parents who send their kids to Catholic schools. Local public schools in particular are worse off. According to figures released by the Victorian government, schools in my own electorate stand to lose over $14.7 million in funding just in the next two years, 2018 to 2019.

I cannot believe that Ballarat Specialist School, a school that has some of the most disadvantaged children in my constituency, is set to lose $1.1 million. Bacchus Marsh College will lose $1.4 million. Mount Clear College will lose $1.6 million. Ballarat Secondary College will lose $900,000. Daylesford Secondary College will lose $500,000. Darley Primary School will lose $300,000. Buninyong Primary School will lose $300,000. Urquhart Park Primary School, who were here in this parliament in the last couple of days, will lose $200,000 over that period of time. These are not just numbers on a page; they represent fewer teachers, less resources and less support in our public classrooms. These cuts will mean that kids who need the most help will not be given the support they need.

Many of us—and I do not talk publicly very much about this—have children who have disabilities and children with special needs. I see, every single day, the enormous struggle those kids have in school. And it is heartbreaking—absolutely heartbreaking—that they cannot get the support they need to learn. Teachers are trying with the resources that they have to do the best they can with those kids. Kids on the autism spectrum disorder who are not eligible for aides because their IQs are at a certain level beyond where they would be eligible are not causing great disruption in classrooms, but they are falling behind every single day. Children with dyslexia, other speech disorders, other learning disorders and ADHD are all falling behind in our education system. The results are lifelong. If they cannot catch up, if they cannot keep up, if they do not get the support they need academically, socially and emotionally in those schools, we know that those children end up with greater mental health problems. They end up not having the same capacity and opportunities in life. They end up, really, having major disadvantage going forward.

As a parent of a child with a significant learning difficulty, it breaks my heart that you are doing this. I cannot believe that you are doing this to children in public schools with disabilities. I am lucky that I have the resources to try and support my child and my school. But there are parents struggling every single day. You are now saying, 'Your kids do not matter. Your kids in regional areas, areas of disadvantage, do not matter.' That is what you are saying with this bill.

For students with disability, as I said, the cuts are particularly harsh. The Catholic Education Office in Ballarat has told me that their funding for students with disabilities will fall by roughly half. That is simply unacceptable. When you have the government telling us that they are now great champions of the NDIS, you should hang your heads in shame.

Remember: this government went to the 2013 election promising to fund the full disability loading. But students with disability have seen nothing but broken promises. In government, Labor put in place the More Support for Students with Disabilities program, with $100 million of year in additional funding, to specifically support students with a disability. Frankly, this government's decision to cut the funding for children with disability and impose $22 billion of cuts is an absolute disgrace.

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