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

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and could I endorse your earlier comments there. This is a very serious matter of public importance. We've heard from two Victorian representatives who understand some basic mathematics but forgot to point out the big facts. We have heard it from the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the Minister for Education in the parliament over the last week: 'Oh yes, school funding is going up.' Let's go to the basic mathematics. There are more Australians, which means there are more students, which means the funding does go up. But it's obviously all about where it goes and who it goes to. The schooling resource standard is what determines where the money goes.

Right now, in Queensland, kids have one more day of school left. Then they go on school holidays. It's great for those schoolkids. I've got two schoolkids, one in grade 4, one in grade 8, and I'm sure they'll be having lovely holidays. The principals of their schools, one a state school and one a Catholic school, will be sitting down—like any principal would do, like the member for Lalor, who's here in the chamber, would have done—and working out their staffing arrangements for next year. They need to lock in staff long term pretty much right now, and if they don't have funding certainty they cannot do that. Big employers, like the Catholics, the independent schools, the Anglicans and the like, are trying to make decisions about teachers and where they will go. Then we go to the state sector, the biggest sector of all. They are trying to make decisions about where teachers will go. It's especially important in Queensland. You can drive around Victoria in an afternoon. In Queensland, the most decentralised state, it is much more significant when you move teachers around.

We have seen those opposite come in and, in their own budget papers, say, 'There will be savings.' For those mathematical geniuses opposite, 'savings' means 'cuts'. You say savings; we say cuts. That means fewer dollars being delivered to kids, which means you can't have one-on-one education with kids. Gonski, who looked at education with the clinical eyes of an economist and a banker, said: the best bang for your buck is in early education. Invest in early education and it will pay off. It will actually boost productivity—much more than any magical trickle-down economics theory those opposite are embracing. We know that investing in education improves productivity, improves the GDP of a nation. We know that. It's what the expert panel actually told us. That's why, under Labor, we were happy to have sector-blind investment in education.

Today we heard the Prime Minister and his desperate education minister come in and announce a giant bandaid to put over the Catholic sore that Minister Birmingham got festering. Why? Because Catholic education have their own system that basically, to simplify it, involves wealthy schools in the cities subsidising poor schools, like those in Cunnamulla or Palm Island or Thursday Island. That's because of the social justice commitment of the Catholic education system. That's their basic education system.

We know that the Catholics do a great job, but who does the heaviest lifting when it comes to education in terms of kids with disability? Seventy-four per cent of kids with disability are in state schools. Eighty-two per cent of children from the lowest quarter of socioeconomic advantage are in state schools. Eighty-four per cent of Indigenous kids are in state schools. There are a few private Indigenous schools, like the Murri School in my electorate, that do fantastic work—even Carinity Education, which is having its own problems at the moment, does fantastic work with Indigenous kids—but the majority of the heavy lifting, when it comes to disadvantage, takes place in state schools.

We saw the Minister for Education and Training—the bumbling, hapless education minister—when he got up today to try and fix up this mess. He said, 'We'll have a $1.2 billion school choice fund.'

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