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

I, like many of my colleagues, am a product of a state school education—and a fine one it was. I was raised initially in Rockhampton. My school, Frenchville Primary School, was on the outskirts of Rockhampton. It is a tiny little school so small that, when I drove past it last time, I missed it. I remember it being much bigger. But it is not much bigger than this room, actually; it is a very tiny little school. And then we moved to Brisbane when my father joined the Army, and I went to Somerset primary school and then Everton Park High School, which were both in the middle of public housing estates. They were not wealthy schools by any means—and Everton Park had quite a troublesome reputation at some points—yet they gave me a fantastic education.

I remember some of the circumstances of some of the children I went to school with. I remember one particular young boy who was smart, witty, good looking, physically skilled at sport and skilled in his academic achievements. He got special dispensation to leave school at the age of 14 because his parents could not afford to feed him. So, like quite a few children in the suburb I was in, his schooling was cut short because of the poverty of his parents—and, no doubt, he went out to take a job that did not require skill. Whether he ever achieved the completion of high school, I do not know. When I was going to school, there were many children who left school for that reason.

In my electorate of Parramatta I see children in circumstances where their education may be cut short because of the capacity of their parents. I see children whose education will never be what it should be because of the trauma they have experienced in some dreadful places around the world. We have children of refugees arriving in Australia whose schooling has been incredibly disrupted. We have children who turn up at school without being able to speak English. We have children whose parents do what they think is the right thing and do not teach their young children to speak English; they are afraid their child might learn to speak English with an accent, so they wait until their child goes to school to learn English.

We have many challenges in my electorate. It concerns me that we have a government right now that is hacking away at our capacity as a community to support those children to be the people they can be. They do not understand that there are many children in our community right around this country who actually need the kind of support that the original Gonski model was going to give them. And they have cut that support the way. I thought I first heard this quote in a mosque, but it turns out it was from the Talmud: 'Every blade of grass has an angel bending over it whispering "Grow, grow, grow!"' And so it is for children. You need only watch a tiny child figuring out what to do with their fingers—trying to work out how to move things, how things work, how to run and how jump—to know that 'every child has an angel bending over it whispering "Learn, learn, learn!"' Whether they fulfil that potential as a child and whether they fulfil their potential as they grow up is largely dependent on how well we resource some of the remarkable teachers who work with children to make sure they are the best they can be. Our future depends on education—not just the future of an individual child, but our economy depends on it. And the needs that we will have in our workforce in coming years are such that our education must be extraordinary from the day a child first arrives at school.

It seems that there are two stories in this House at the moment. We have a government saying they are increasing funding to schools and we have an opposition saying it is a $22 billion cut. Those two things cannot actually be true. One of the reasons I know there is a $22.3 billion cut to the education budget is that the government's own documents actually say so. A document that the government produced and put around the press gallery, 'Funding, figures and qualifiers—30 April agreed costs', says 'compared to Labor's arrangements, this represents a saving of $6.3 billion over four years and $22.3 billion over 10 years'. The government's own document says it is a $22.3 billion saving—a cut, effectively. It is a reduction in the amount of money that schools would receive by $22.3 billion.

Given they have already said it in writing, how can they say it is more? It is a nice little trick. Remember that just before the election back in 2013 Tony Abbott said that they would support the Gonski agreement in full but then straight after the election, in 2014, cut $30 billion from schools. The government is basing its new funding after the $30 billion was cut. So they cut $30 billion from schools, then they put a bit back and claimed they have increased it. They do not tell you that. They cut $30 billion, put about $8 billion back and said: 'Wow, look at us. Aren't we great? We deserve a medal. We have just put $8 billion back.' They say they have increased funding, but they cut first and then put it back.

They also say, 'You can't trust Labor's plans because they were beyond the forward estimates.' So is this school funding model, by the way. So is the tax cut that they are giving to big business and multinationals—that is a 10 year plan. That is well beyond the forwards. But to them, if it is a tax cut for big business you can plan 10 years but, for some reason, if it is education, if it is about the future of our children, you cannot, that is fantasy. Tax cuts, certainly—they are absolutely fabulous and you can plan 10 years. Schools? Do not. If it is not possible for governments to plan for 10 years because it extends beyond the forwards then this country is in trouble, because there are a lot of things take more than four years and there are a lot of things that you have to plan longer than four years for. It takes more than four years to train a doctor. It takes more than four years to get the skills in universities to train a doctor. It takes more than four years to build submarines and large boats. It takes more than four years to build an airport. It takes more than four years to educate a child. And it takes more than four years to get schools ready for the kind of work they need to do as our children grow. That is why Labor put in a substantial plan that actually was about the future.

It was a plan based on years of work consulting right across the education sector and it centred on the views of a man called Gonski—a person that the government refers to quite often. In his review, he came up with something that makes a great deal of sense. He pointed out, really, that the states and the Commonwealth together had been funding schools—the Commonwealth giving a bit more and the states a bit less, but no-one was really responsible. It sort of flicked backwards and forwards so we could both blame each other. He said something really simple: it is about the child. He said it is not about who funds it and it is not about whether it is a catholic, private or state school; it is actually about the needs of the child. He set about setting a standard for each child—a basic school resource standard plus a needs based loading, depending on the circumstances of the child.

He came up with this sector-blind needs based funding model which put the child at the centre and said to state and federal governments: 'Go and do your thing. Get together, work it out and make it happen.' That negotiation was hard. It was hard because not all of the states were in the same place. They do not all face the same challenges. There are parts of the Northern Territory, for example, where the children face far greater challenges than they do in my suburb—even though in my suburb there are quite substantial challenges, largely because of family background and history. Gonski said something really quite smart: 'Put the child at the centre, figure out what each child needs, set the school resource standard and add a needs based loading based on the fact that they are in a remote region, their English is poor or they have special needs. Work it out.' Then he set the Commonwealth a task: to work with states to work it out.

And we did, in the most—but not with all states. I will say that up-front. It was a hard negotiation. We said that the funding needed to increase and, if the federal government put in 65 per cent of extra funding, the states had to come up with 35 per cent. There was a hard-headed negotiation where we said, 'We'll put in the bulk of the increase, but you have to do your share.' Again, they were hard negotiations. Some states came on very easily and some states came on with greater difficulty. The deals that we did varied between each state because the circumstances varied. The Prime Minister seems to think that is a bad thing—that every deal you do with every person has to be the same—but that is not the world that we live in. That is not transparency; that is simplistic. Every state was different and there was hard negotiation, but we actually managed to do it.

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