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

Let's be up-front. Fundamentally, those opposite do not care about fair education and good education. They do care about elite education—I will give them that. However, the nation is best served when we invest in education for all, as we see it as giving people an opportunity and creating economic benefits. Those opposite might forget that the reason the name 'Gonski' is known and quoted by the Prime Minister is that Mr Gonski was part of an expert panel that looked at the economic benefits of education—benefits that we know. The government are happy to cling to some thin piece of Treasury advice about $65 billion in corporate top-end-of-town giveaways somehow magically trickling down in workers' wages and the like, but they are not benefits that will flow the way that education benefits will flow. How do we know that? The expert panel looked at it and found that that is the case.

When it comes to education and those benefits, you've got to give every student, irrespective of the school, the best possible opportunity. If we stop people from achieving their potential because of the fact that they live in the bush or the fact that they are Indigenous or poor, and prevent those smartest kids from having an opportunity, then we are doing this nation a disservice. We need our best and brightest to be given an opportunity, not just those that are well-off. I particularly ask the members of the National Party to remember this because who did best out of that first wave of resource based funding for schools? The bush. The bush did best from the policy that Ms Gillard started rolling out, as education minister and then as Prime Minister. The bush did best. We know that. It was irrespective of whether you were a state school in the bush, a Catholic school in the bush or a school like the Aboriginal private school at Woorabinda. We didn't care. We wanted funds to go to where there were needs. We wanted funds to go to the school that needed it most, irrespective of what the sign out the front said. We have seen this approach attacked and transformed, zombie-like, into something that now has a set formula, so it's not needs based funding and it's not focused on fairness. Instead, we've got this sort of hybrid that is weaker than was intended by the reforms.

I do know a little bit about education. I was a teacher for 11 years and I've got kids at school as well. Most of my friends are still teachers. In fact, I was in a band; there were five of us and we were all teachers.

Ms Madeleine King interjecting—

You can Google that! The band still plays every three years as a fundraiser, but the other four band members are all teachers—John Carozza, guitar and vocals; Brenden Ballinger, lead guitar; Sharon Weir, vocals; and Brendan Logan, drums. They're all still teaching, all throughout Queensland, doing their bit.

I know that it's been a long time since I was in the classroom. I know it because one of the kids I taught, Nathan Jarro, has just been appointed a District Court judge. Hello to Nathan Jarro! He's the first Indigenous District Court judge in Queensland, actually, and was appointed by Yvette D'Ath. I do know what a cut in funding will mean for schools. I saw it when I went to Sunnybank State School the other day with the Leader of the Opposition and the deputy leader. They had prep classes where 65 per cent of the kids were ESL kids—they spoke a language other than English at home—yet by year 3 they were at the national average. Why? Because they had invested that resource based funding early on so that the kids got intensive support. Those kid will be the doctors, lawyers and teachers of the future—possibly—because they're getting that extra support.

We know that state schools do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to educating kids, because they take every kid in the catchment and then some. That means 74 per cent of the students with disabilities, 82 per cent of the kids from the lowest quarter of socio-economic advantage and 84 per cent of Indigenous kids, and some of the challenges that come with that. So when the Prime Minister stands up and says, 'We have a formula,' appropriating Mr Gonski, he is forgetting what fair education is and the economic benefits that flow from investing in education. He should be ashamed of himself.

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