Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I thank all members for their contributions to this debate, including the former Deputy Prime Minister for your mostly kind and very generous remarks, and also spend a moment to recognise the work that your daughter does amongst many hundreds of thousands of teachers across the country. I truly believe that our teachers do the most important job in this country, and I want to thank her and every teacher across the country for the work that they do.

This is a really important piece of legislation that we're debating here in the House today. This is a bill that will increase funding for public schools. As I said, when I introduced the Better and Fairer Schools (Funding and Reform) Bill 2024 a few weeks ago, education is the most powerful cause for good in this country, and public education, public schools, does most of that heavy lifting. At the moment, non-government schools are funded at the level that David Gonski set all those years ago or they're on track to get there or they're above it and coming back down to that level, but most public schools are not. This bill is about taking action to fix that, to close that existing funding gap, but it will also do something else. It will close the education gap that exists in this country, by tying that additional funding to important reforms.

As members will know, earlier this year, I signed an agreement with the Western Australian government's education minister, Tony Buti, that will see all public schools in Western Australia fully funded at that Gonski level by the start of 2026. That's now just over 12 months away. Since I introduced this bill a couple of weeks ago, I've now signed a bilateral agreement with Jo Palmer, the Minister for Education in Tasmania, that will do the same. That will see all public schools in Tasmania fully funded at that Gonski level by the start of 2026. Again, that's just over 12 months away. I was at Warrane Primary School in Hobart with Jo just a couple of weeks ago, where we signed that agreement. That's a classic example of Labor and coalition governments working together—forgetting about the politics and forgetting about the parties and focusing on what really matters here. This bill is necessary for us to be able to implement that agreement to be able to provide that additional funding.

This bill also enables us to honour the agreement that I've struck with the Northern Territory government that was signed with the former Labor Territory government and the former Northern Territory Minister for Education Mark Monaghan. I'm so glad to be able to inform this House that recently in the Territory parliament Jo Hersey, the new Minister for Education, has confirmed that the Country Liberal government in the Territory will honour that agreement. The former Deputy Prime Minister talked about the differential here and how this is designed to double Commonwealth funding to public schools in the Northern Territory. As he suggested, that's important and that's necessary if we're going to make sure that all public schools are fully funded across the country. At the moment, effectively one in five children in the Territory is not receiving any funding at all. The former Deputy Prime Minister talked about funding levels in Queensland. For the Territory it's below 80 per cent. So effectively one in five children is not being funded at all. This agreement, by doubling the amount of Commonwealth funding from 20 per cent to 40 per cent, helps to fix that. What it effectively does is bring forward the day that Territory public schools will be fully funded from 2050 to 2029. That's by more than 20 years. But we have to pass this legislation in order to do that—in order to make those additional payments and make that happen.

At the moment, the way the Australian Education Act works is that the Commonwealth government can provide a maximum of 20 per cent of the schooling resource standard, that standard that David Gonski set for public schools. What this bill does is turn that current maximum into a minimum. In other words, it turns the ceiling into a floor. It enables us to provide that additional funding and ratchet up funding for public schools. It means that when we, as a Commonwealth government, sign an agreement with a state or a territory government to increase funding to public schools that bigger Commonwealth share becomes the new floor for states and territories. In other words, it's locked in for good. It can't go backwards at the whim of a future government.

But it's not just about the money. It's not just about the additional funding that this bill enables. It's also about what that money is invested in. I've made it clear that the additional $16 billion that's available to provide additional funding to public schools, to all states and territories, is not a blank cheque. That money needs to be tied to real reform, like reforms intended to help turn around what I was talking about earlier in parliament today, which is the decline in the number of young people finishing high school. It's worth remembering this for a moment: the percentage of young people finishing high school in the last eight years has gone backwards from 85 per cent to 79 per cent, and in public schools it has fallen from 83 per cent to 73 per cent. When I found that out, it shocked me. Eighty-three per cent of young people in public schools finished high school back in 2017, and it's now 73 per cent. We've got to turn that around. It's more important than ever that more young people finish high school, because of the world we live in today and the world that will exist tomorrow, where more people will need more skills, whether that's from TAFE or university.

This funding in the agreements that I'm striking with the states and territories needs to be tied to the sorts of reforms that are going to help turn that around. That includes practical things like phonics checks and numeracy checks to identify children when they're really little, in kindy or year 1 or year 2, who are already falling behind. And then there are things like evidence based teaching and catch-up tutoring, identifying children that are behind really early, before they sit the first NAPLAN test in year 3. In early intervention, with things like catch-up tutoring, we know that, when it's done properly, if a child's behind in reading or in maths, if you take them out of a class of 30 into a class of three and you give them intensive support—it might be four days a week, 40 minutes at a time—they can learn as much in six months as they'd normally learn in 12 months. In other words, they catch up. You might think, 'Well, that's easy; that happens all the time.' But what we know is that most young people who are behind when they're little never catch up. If we can fix that, then we can turn around the decline in the number of young people finishing high school.

I also want to make sure that this money glows in the dark, and that's why this bill and the agreements that are linked to it strengthen reporting and public transparency requirements around how this extra funding is to be invested without placing additional burdens on schools or on teachers. The agreement includes a requirement for states and territories to outline how this additional money is going to be invested in those key reform areas that I just talked about. It also requires a new public reporting dashboard. The bill includes a new annual ministerial statement to this parliament where the education minister would be required to report on progress of the implementation of the school education reform agreements.

This goes to the second reading amendment by the Greens: it's important that this be a joint effort. The Greens' second reading amendment wants the Commonwealth to bear the entire burden of closing this funding gap. That ignores the way that funding of our public schools works and how it is a shared responsibility. I have consistently said since I got this job we need to fill and fix this gap and the way to do it is where the Commonwealth chips in more money and the states and territories have got to chip in more money as well. That's what WA has done, the Labor government there. That's what Tasmania has done, the Liberal government there. That's what the Northern Territory government has done as well. It's worth us just remembering here, when we contemplate how we close this gap and how we fix this funding gap, that, yes, we've doubled the money for the Northern Territory but the Northern Territory is going to chip in an extra six per cent as well. That's the way that we do this.

The member for Mackellar had a second reading amendment, and I want to thank her for her contribution to the debate. I agreed with a lot of what she had to say. I've said earlier in this debate that there is no more powerful cause for good in this country than what our education system does. I think that we have a good education system in this country, but the truth is it can be a lot better and it can be a lot fairer.

Making that a reality is what drives me in this job, and that's why there are equity targets built into the national agreement. It's why, in the agreements that I've struck with WA, Tasmania and the NT, we want to see funding go to the most disadvantaged schools first. It's why this funding is linked to practical reforms that are designed to help children who fall behind to catch up and to keep up. Guess what? They are overwhelmingly, disproportionately children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

I don't want us to be a country where your chances in life depend on who your mum and dad are or where you live or the colour of your skin. But the sad reality is that we are today. If you look at our higher education system, our school education system or our early education system, you can see evidence of that. Almost one in two young people today have a university degree, but not everywhere. There is an underrepresentation at university of people from disadvantaged backgrounds. If you look at the evidence of who completes school, fewer young people from disadvantaged backgrounds finish school than children from more advantaged backgrounds. I go back to the point I made about children falling behind when they're little. Overwhelmingly, it's young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The evidence is clear even before school begins. The Productivity Commission report that I released a few weeks ago told us that it's the most disadvantaged kids in our country, the children that don't see a book until they start school, that are the least likely to go to early education and care and the most likely to benefit from it. Everything that I'm trying to do as education minister is about this, about fixing this.

That's what this agreement is all about. The reforms that funding is tied to and the targets that are in that agreement are about helping those young people who need additional support and making sure that they get it.

I also want to thank the member for Curtin for her contribution to this debate. She has a second reading amendment, and it relates to transparency and accountability. Transparency, as I said in my remarks a moment ago, is important as well, and I want to note that her second reading amendment emphasises the importance of transparency and accountability. As I said earlier, the provisions of this bill will give greater oversight in relation to Commonwealth investment in schools and the implementation of reforms. It's about making our education system better and fairer and about building a country where, as the Prime Minister often says, no-one is held back and no-one is left behind. At its core, that's what public education is all about. It's what it has always been about, and it's what this bill is about.

I thank all members for their contribution to this important debate and for their support for this important legislation.

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