Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

My Irish granny always told me, 'Education changes lives.' She would tell me stories of growing up in poverty in Northern Ireland and how she made sure her children—my mother and her brother and sisters—got a good education, so they could avoid the same poverty that she grew up in. And the stories always ended with this message: 'Education is important. Education gives you opportunities. Education means you can look after your family.' She and my grandad were lifelong Labor voters, because they knew that Labor supports public education—education for everyone, not just those who can afford it. I count myself very lucky to have grown up in a family that values education and values education for girls, and I'm incredibly lucky to be living in Australia—a country we chose to come to; a country that values universal education; a country that values the high levels of literacy and numeracy that universal education brings.

As we move from the information age into the digital age, or the data age or the AI age—whatever the preferred term is—education will only become more important. Education helps people make sense of their world. It helps people gain skills, to make the most of the opportunities that come their way—and, increasingly, we know that those opportunities will be the skilled jobs that we need now and that we will need even more in the future. We want Australians to be ready for those opportunities. We want Australians to prosper as individuals and Australia to prosper as a country, and that requires, as my Irish granny knew, education for all, so that we are all ready to grab those opportunities.

Labor values education for all, which brings us to this bill. The Better and Fairer Schools (Funding and Reform) Bill 2024 allows the Commonwealth to deliver more funding to public schools. It puts in place protections to ensure the Commonwealth's share of public school funding can't go backwards. It also introduces new transparency reforms, so that parents and school communities can see what improvements this funding is delivering to students across the country.

The 2011 Gonski review stressed the need for an equitable school funding system; it stressed that government should fund schools based on need, to the schooling resource standard, or SRS; that the system should ensure that differences in educational outcomes are not the result of differences in wealth, income, power or possessions; that social disadvantage shouldn't impact educational outcomes; and that each child gets educational opportunities according to their abilities, talents and efforts. That shouldn't be controversial.

So the Australian government has committed to working with state and territory governments to get every school on a path to a hundred per cent of its fair funding level. The Australian government has negotiated the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement to deliver the pathway to full funding. The agreement will run from 2025 to 2034, providing a consistent focus on key reforms for schools and teachers to implement over the next 10 years. This will see the Australian government lifting its share for government schools in states and the ACT, if they sign up to the agreement, to 22.5 per cent and to 40 per cent in the Northern Territory. If agreed by all states and territories this equates to an extra $16 billion in Australian government funding for schools. This is the biggest investment in public education by an Australian government in this country's history.

Amendments to the Australian Education Act 2013 are required to enable these new funding agreements. This bill will enable the Commonwealth funding shares for government schools to be tailored to support the varied funding arrangements across each jurisdiction. It will set a funding floor for the Commonwealth share of government schools at 20 per cent for 2025 and later years and at 40 per cent for the Northern Territory government schools from 2029. It will establish a ratchet mechanism that ensures that, once the Commonwealth share is set by regulation, it cannot be reduced without further legislative change. It should be self-evident that the provision of good, quality education to all children is a public good that benefits the whole country and should therefore be a key role for government. So establishing this ratchet mechanism in legislation means the funding cannot be sneakily reduced without scrutiny.

The bill is essential to delivering full funding to government schools, changing the current inflexible funding cap to instead be a floor. The current provisions in the act do not allow for the Australian government to set different shares across jurisdictions. This means that the uniform and inflexible funding cap in the act does not allow the varying agreed final funding shares and trajectories of jurisdictions agreed in the BFSA. This includes the increase to 40 per cent for Northern Territory schools by 2029 and to 22.5 per cent for Western Australian schools and Tasmanian schools by 2026 and 2029 respectively. Legislative agreements are also required to deliver other important funding mechanisms, including the funding floor and the ratchet mechanism, which strengthen the certainty of Australian government funding shares.

The bill will also strengthen transparency and accountability of school funding, including establishing transparency and accountability in relation to funding arrangements for school education as a purpose of this act, and require the Australian government minister to prepare an annual statement to parliament relating to progress made or to be made in relation to school education reform agreements, including the BFSA. If you believe, as I do, that the role of government includes the provision of basic community-level services, such as education, that help individuals but also set up our country for future success and that the role of government is about enabling the provision of public goods at a community level, providing benefit back to individual taxpayers in both the services they directly use and the broader standards of the community that they live in, then this is something that's worth protecting and monitoring.

Boothby has many fantastic schools, from Hamilton Secondary College, which I visited with the Speaker a year or so ago and which features a 'mission to Mars' educational experience, and Brighton Secondary School, which is a selective music school, to Suneden Specialist School and Springbank Secondary College, which provide inclusive education for children with disability, and so many others. I love visiting these schools and hearing from students about what they are learning and what their hopes are for the future. Our children deserve the best education that we can provide them, and our country deserves the best education. This bill gives these students and the students that follow them a great education and a great start to life.

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