Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

I know it is a little unusual for me to speak on the third reading of a bill, but I do really want to make it clear, because we have delayed until tomorrow the third reading, that Labor does support the Australian Education Amendment (Direct Measure of Income) Bill 2020. We do support a more accurate measure of parental income. It is something that we sought to do coming out of the first Gonski review. There was a desire at that stage to have a more accurate measure of parental income to calculate the capacity to contribute at that time, but of course we didn't have the data available to us in the way that it is now with the project that the government has engaged in.

We also, of course, saw coming out of the National School Resourcing Board the suggestion that we would do this more accurate measure of parental income. It is possible to have two schools that are located in the one community. One of those schools might have very high fees. It might be a very wealthy school in terms of the resources, the buildings and so on. Another non-government school in the same area, drawing from broadly the same community, might be a low-fee school drawing from parents who have a lower capacity to contribute. In that instance you will see that school with the lower fees and lower resources will likely see that its funding from the Commonwealth will increase. We've never objected to this increase for non-government schools; in fact, it was Labor that stood side by side with non-government schools when—

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