Kate Ellis (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

All those in this parliament should view an equitable education system as an absolute priority. We should view as a measure of our success as a parliament whether children currently going through our schooling system are seeing greater opportunity than their parents and grandparents saw before them. In no case is that more true than when we look at children with disability. With a lot of focus on the development of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, we have seen in recent years that Australians have stood up and said that enough is enough, that it is not good enough that we have a fragmented system which is letting down far too many people living with disability, as well as their parents and caregivers. This is true when you look at the education system. We know that, for individual students, for teachers and staff at a school and for other students who share a class, we need to make sure that we have appropriate support in place to guide the learning of students with special needs and disability.

We know that additional funding loadings to meet the specific and individual needs of students with disability and learning difficulties were a key part of the Gonski recommendations—the Gonski recommendations which the former Labor government adopted and the Gonski recommendations about which the now Prime Minister assured the Australian people that he was on an absolute unity ticket. We know that, if we are going to deliver additional support for students with disability, money is required in addition to that already provided through the Gonksi reforms—that is, on top of the $14.65 billion promised in additional funding under the Labor government.

We currently have an incredibly unfair system. What these students and their families have at the moment is a lottery of borders. In 2009-10 the Productivity Commission identified a huge disparity between the states in the average levels of support for students with disability. As an example, funding varied from $8,000 per student in the Northern Territory to $42,000 per student in Tasmania. We also know that on different sides of the border disability is defined differently. For some disabilities there is support in some states but not in others.

We set up a process of working with states and territories to finalise a nationally consistent disability reporting methodology ahead of the national commencement of the new loading in 2015. This was incredibly significant—incredibly overdue, some could argue—but very important in our education system and in our progress in making sure that every student at every school had every opportunity to get the best education. When we were in government, we recognised that we needed to make sure that we did the work and that we got the loadings right. So we allocated $100 million in interim funding for 2014—running out at the end of this year—whilst the work was done to finalise the costings for the new loading to come into place by 2015. Of course, we are now just eight weeks from the budget, and this government still has not given a clear indication of how much money will be needed to meet this commitment in 2015.

Before the election, we saw the Minister for Education state:

We have long argued that the current funding arrangements for students with disability and learning difficulty are unfair and inequitable.

If elected to Government the Coalition will continue the data collection work that has commenced, which will be used to deliver more funding for people with disability through the ‘disability loading’ in 2015.

That was further emphasised by the Prime Minister in question time in December, when he said, 'On schools, those loadings will be fully delivered over the coming four years,' yet we now see the Minister for Education walking away from these commitments. In January, he said that there would be the same funding envelope and the same process for students with a disability, as outlined and agreed to by the former government with education ministers and that nothing would change.

That is precisely the problem. We need changes, we need the new nationally consistent definitions and we need the additional funding because we have seen far too many broken promises from this government when it comes to education. If students with disability and their families were promised an additional loading, additional funding and that we would right the wrongs of the past in our education system, this would be the cruellest betrayal of them all. In eight weeks time, we will find out exactly how much this government has played the cruellest trick on these students and their families.