Melissa Price (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about the students at Mount Tarcoola Primary School, who under this government's new education reforms will stand to gain an extra $3 million by the year 2027. We have heard a lot about how this government's education reforms will change the lives of children living in regional Australia, but I would like to reaffirm the benefits that those changes will bring. On a sliding scale of need there are few places that are in greater need than country Western Australia. We are constantly under-represented in school completion rates, mean school grades and, unfortunately, federal funding for our schools.

But that great injustice has been rectified. Western Australia's regional schools stand as the big winners in these proposed changes. It is interesting to note, considering we have such great need and there is significant need in my electorate of Durack, that we have received in the past such a small piece of the federal education funding pie, and that the member for Sydney does not deem us important enough to receive one of the special 27 dodgy deals that we see from coast to coast on the east coast, while the $20,000-a-year or semester private schools in Sydney and Melbourne receive generous taxpayer concessions, the schools in remote communities in the wheat belt, the Mid-West, the Gascoyne, the Kimberley and the Pilbara received a pittance. It appears yet again that it is left to us on this side of the chamber, the coalition, to fight for a better deal for regional Australia. I am immensely proud to be doing so.