Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We have been having an incredibly important debate in this House over the last few days about education funding. I rise tonight make a contribution to the debate on behalf of my constituents in Hotham.

During the election campaign in September—whether I was doing a street stall in the Oakleigh South shops, down in Springvale South looking at the primary school in the primary school in Athol Road or sharing lunch with the lovely elderly Greek ladies who have their weekly function in Bignell Road in East Bentleigh—the number 1 issue raised with me was education. I think the constituents of Hotham understand some things that we on this side of the House are all well aware of—that is, that education does not affect just parents or children but all Australians, that education is the way we bring about social equity in our country and that education is also an incredibly important part of driving the economy and productivity.

All parts of Australia need the Better Schools funding program, but I will talk specifically tonight about Hotham—the patch that I represent—and about the people who live in the area. Many of you know that Hotham is a very multicultural place; parts of my electorate would, in fact, be amongst the most multicultural in the whole of Australia. Like many areas—and I know some of the members behind me here have similar types of electorates—we in my local area have been the great beneficiaries of many waves of migration. Lots of Europeans came in the postwar period; lots of Latin Americans arrived in the 1970s; many migrants from Asia, particularly from Vietnam and Cambodia, arrived during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s; and, more recently, there has been a big influx of refugees from Sudan, the Middle East and Afghanistan.

We are very lucky to live in such an environment, of course. Students tell me that it makes school very lively and interesting, but teachers are frank about some of the issues that the make-up of the area causes them in the classroom. I hear from teachers that they are likely to be teaching a class in which the skills of their students vary widely. They might have students in the class who have been read to every day since they were very young children mixed with refugees who might have skipped years of their schooling and who have only been able to speak English for a few years. Schools with such classes would be the particular beneficiaries of the Better Schools program.

I will talk specifically now about a few schools in my electorate. One is Westall Secondary College, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. Under the Better Schools funding, this school was to see an increase of 30 per cent on their overall funding; 79 per cent of the students at the school are from non-English-speaking backgrounds. Springvale Rise Primary School was to see a 35 per cent increase in funding; 87 per cent of its students are from non-English-speaking backgrounds. Tucker Road Bentleigh Primary School was to see a 56 per cent increase in its funding. Cheltenham Secondary College was going to see a 56 per cent—$6 million—increase in its funding. These are serious amounts of money.

We have the Better Schools program, and we have been discussing it. But those on the other side have made the very unfortunate decision to take away the schoolkids bonus, which was so important to local families in my electorate. There were 6,300 families receiving the schoolkids bonus. A typical family will, we know, lose up to $15,000 during their children's life at school. I attended the annual general meeting of the Springvale Community Aid and Advice Bureau last week and met a mum from Dingley there who talked to me about a student, about to start year 10, whom she was helping. He was being strongly advised by his school that he would need a laptop, which would have cost $700. Out in Hotham, most families cannot find $700 at the beginning of the school year. This is exactly the kind of thing the schoolkids bonus was designed to assist families with.

That is not all that my local schools are contending with. We know that, under the new so-called agreement negotiated by Minister Pyne, the state government will have the ability to withdraw their own funding. The Victorian state government unfortunately has real form in doing this. There are two schools in my electorate, Clayton South Primary School and Coatesville Primary School, both of which had a commitment from the Labor government in Victoria, before 2010, to some new capital works. Three years later, neither school is aware of where the funding is going. In both instances the construction would have been complete by now, yet both schools have been left in limbo. In Victoria the state government even took away Free Fruit Friday from primary schools. Taking fruit out of the hands of children is pretty small-minded and pretty mean.

All of us in this House know that politics is fundamentally about trust. Almost half of Australia's population are living in family units which have children in the home. Many of those people live in Hotham. My constituents tell me that they are not willing to put up with reductions in school funding, and that is the message I give today on behalf of the people of Hotham.