Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Corporate Governance and Responsibility) Share this | Hansard source

The Schools Assistance (Learning Together—Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Amendment Bill 2006 being considered by the Senate today proposes to amend the Schools Assistance (Learning Together—Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Act 2004 and, according to the explanatory memorandum, the specific provisions in this amendment bill have the following objectives: to move uncommitted capital infrastructure funding for government schools from 2005 to 2006 and to bring 2008 funding forward to 2006; to move unspent funding under the Tutorial Voucher Initiative from 2004 to 2006; to allow funding to be carried over or brought forward to another year for all non-per-capita programs, such as capital grants, targeted programs and national projects; to provide maximum general recurrent grants for a small number of non-government schools that cater for students with emotional, social or behavioural difficulties; and to make a minor technical correction to one of the defined terms in the act.

The bulk of the taxpayer funds provided through the principal act—that is, the States Grants (Learning Together—Achievement Though Choice and Opportunity) Act 2004—are provided as general recurrent per capita grants, and these grants are not affected by the proposals in the bill under consideration. However, there is also significant funding provided for capital works and for targeted programs for schools and students with special needs, and it is this type of program which is the focus of the amendment bill before the Senate.

The government’s major 2004 election commitment for schools was its Investing in Our Schools program, where supposedly $1 billion over four years was provided for capital projects in schools—$700 million for government schools and $300 million for non-government schools. However, an integral feature of the design of this program was the Howard government’s ideological obsession with bypassing the states and the government school systems that deliver education to most Australian children. For government schools, the government has decided to bypass state authorities by calling for applications directly from schools and local parents and citizens associations.

The previous minister announced that Australia’s 6,900-plus public schools would be eligible for up to $150,000 each under this process, but unfortunately the Howard government has been overwhelmed by its own processes and has failed to deliver the funds to schools. Most schools are still waiting for the money announced in the 2004 election, and schools around Australia are getting sick of funding dates getting pushed back. The previous minister for education promised that grants would be announced by May 2005. It is now almost April 2006. The new school year started some months ago. Many schools promoted their facilities to parents on the basis of the projects they expected to have completed—not commenced—in time for the 2006 school year. Now many parents are questioning schools on what happened to the promised shadecloths, computers or the like.

The government’s incompetence has caused all sorts of collateral damage. There is one contractor in South Australia who has had to send employees on leave, some without pay, as a direct result of the delays in getting the promised money out to the schools. In this case, the jobs of over 20 South Australians have been put at risk because of former Minister Nelson’s administrative incompetence. I do not even need to go into the round 2 larger grants process. Schools were first told that successful round 2 grants would be announced in October. Then this was pushed to December. Then we heard February, and now it is supposed to be April. It is irresponsible behaviour by this government to raise and then dash again and again the hopes of schools which are desperately in need of funds.

Although this program was clearly targeted in the election at all government schools and their parent associations, the minister has trotted out the flimsy excuse that the department was surprised by the volume of applications. DEST has been unable to administer the program in a timely way, despite significant increases in staffing for the program and despite the fact that this was a major election commitment. The bill before the Senate is a direct and inevitable result of government incompetence. All government schools were promised additional funding for capital projects in the election, so why is there any surprise at all that most schools and P&C organisations were keen to apply? There can be no excuse for not preparing to handle applications from many of the nation’s schools. As Minister Nelson sowed, so Minister Bishop now reaps. She is today saddled with trying to clean up the mess left for her by Dr Nelson—and the incompetence of the Investing in Our Schools program implementation is only the first example of Dr Nelson’s incompetent hand grenades he has left for his successor. No doubt she will uncover many more in the coming months.

The fact is that the Howard government has bungled its management of this program by trying to become a small-scale capital developer for Australia’s 6,900-plus government schools. It tried to paint itself as rescuing school communities from state bureaucracies but has instead created its own administrative monster. The government set up a duplicate administration for getting capital funding to schools, and it did so for blatantly political and ideological reasons. Now we see the inevitable result of this ideological obsession, with an ad hoc administration overwhelmed by its own application process. If there is a salutary lesson in all this for Minister Bishop—if she is to learn at all from the schoolboy mistakes of her predecessor—it is that it is much better to work in cooperation with state authorities for the benefit of all Australian schools. Proper consultation with the states, which after all do run school systems day in and day out, would have led to a much more effective and efficient means of getting capital funding into schools.

Labor does support the involvement of parent organisations in planning decisions about the allocation of capital funds, but this should be done in a strategic, efficient and targeted manner—in other words, done in cooperation with the states and territories. Labor’s concerns with the implementation of this program are not only about incompetence. The approvals so far also reveal a high degree of inequity in the allocation of funds between electorates. The figures clearly show that political advantage was a primary motivation in the decisions behind the Investing in Our Schools program. What has become clear is that the approvals process has been handled differently across the electorates, with Liberal and, especially, National Party electorates being far more successful in winning substantial funds than Labor held electorates.

Let us briefly have a look at the figures Labor has drawn out of a reluctant government. The average funds per Labor electorate are $550,000. The average funds per Liberal electorate are $705,000. The average funds per Nationals electorate are $1,350,000. The average funds per coalition electorate are $1,025,000. The average grants per coalition marginal electorate are $830,000. Of the top 20 electorates in terms of total funding to an electorate, guess how many are coalition held? Nineteen—19 out of the 20 top electorates in terms of total funding to an electorate are coalition held. The first Labor held electorate appears at 20—Bendigo. And nine of the top 10 electorates in terms of average grant per school in an electorate are—guess what?—coalition held. Reid is the only Labor held top 10 seat. How can the government possibly justify such huge discrepancies? How could a credible, accountable and transparent assessment process possibly arrive at such a flawed distribution of funding?

What has been clear throughout this process is that the fix was in early. Coalition members had the details of the program first, had more detail about the application requirements and were given extra material to encourage schools to apply. Is there any possible reason for the Howard government distributing million-dollar handouts to its own blue-ribbon seats? Does the former minister, Dr Nelson, really expect the parents of Australian schoolkids to believe that the schools in St Ives and Pymble in his North Shore seat of Bradfield deserve significantly more funding per school than those in Cabramatta in the electorate of Fowler? Like many other areas of education funding distribution, Labor wants to know why this funding was not allocated on the basis of real and objective need.

The combined effects of incompetence and political pork-barrelling have discredited this program, which should have been targeted at meeting the real needs of schools and students in partnership with parents and school communities. In light of the demonstrated incompetence and politicisation of this billion-dollar fund, Labor only supports the increased flexibility in the bill for the minister to move funds around within the funding quadrennium so that schools actually get the money they have been promised. This flexibility includes the capacity to bring forward 2008 funding to 2006. Students certainly deserve to have this money put to good use in supporting their education. But be warned: this flexibility ought not to be used for political purposes, for media releases and stage-managed activities for coalition politicians. Labor and the public are onto the political misuse of this fund.

I will turn now to the Tutorial Voucher Initiative. This tutorial vouchers program is yet another example of the Howard government’s incompetence when it comes to administering programs, with unspent funding from both 2004 and 2005. It is another example of ideology over good sense. The government has insisted on tendering out for brokers to provide tutors for the children who need literacy support, including some brokers with doubtful qualifications and operations. In 2004 the government introduced the payment of tutorial vouchers of up to $700 to parents of children who had failed to meet national benchmarks of reading literacy in national testing of year 3 standards in 2004. Once again the Commonwealth has tried to implement this scheme without discussion with the states. Now that the pilot program has failed to deliver, the government is trying to blame the states instead of working with them from the beginning. As part of the original design of the pilot, the initiative is administered by brokers that are responsible for facilitating the contracting of tutors, confirming child eligibility, providing parents and caregivers with choice of tutors and managing its administration. Some of the brokers are, sensibly, school authorities, but others are private providers and enterprises.

Answers to questions at Senate estimates revealed a nationwide take-up rate of 36 per cent by mid-November last year. However a state-by-state analysis of the figure shows a much poorer performance on the part of commercial brokers for this program, particularly in comparison to the performance of school authorities. For instance, state education departments in New South Wales, South Australia and Tasmania topped the table of take-up rates, ranging up to 69 per cent of eligible students. The most notable failure of this program is the performance of a private company, Progressive Learning, which has spectacularly failed to deliver tutorial programs to eligible students in Queensland and Victoria.

Figures provided by DEST show that just 656 of 5,717 eligible Victorian students received any help through the tutorial vouchers program, only 12 per cent of eligible students. The vast majority of students assessed at their year 3 benchmark testing as requiring extra literacy assistance have now sat the year 5 literacy benchmark test without having received any tutoring whatsoever. Progressive Learning also charged a $250 administration fee, so the few students in Victoria who actually received any tutoring at all only got $450 of the value of their $700 vouchers.

The federal government issued contracts to companies to deliver the tutorial voucher program with the full knowledge that the companies could not talk to the parents because they were not legally able to obtain their contact details, nor were the companies authorised to talk directly to the state governments, which actually had the contact details. This sounds like a Yes, Minister program. The program has been an administrative disaster, being more about an ideological obsession with bypassing state school authorities than about helping students who desperately need support.

The government has established a cautious evaluation exercise of this pilot program and engaged a commercial consultant, Erebus International, to undertake this evaluation. The opposition is, of course, very interested in what this evaluation concludes about the efficiency of delivering a program in the way insisted on by this government and the effectiveness of delivering literacy programs while cutting schools out of the equation. For this reason, the opposition lodged a freedom of information application to get access to relevant material, including any summary, analysis, report or documents prepared by Erebus International for this evaluation. On 13 March the department refused to release those documents on the basis that, amongst other things, disclosure would be contrary to the public interest. And, yet, within two days, a selective summary of those evaluation documents was prepared by Minister Bishop’s office and released to a national newspaper. Isn’t it amazing how in one context something may be contrary to the public interest but, if you are able to determine precisely which aspects of the documents you disclose, suddenly they can appear with the minister’s apparent approval in a national newspaper? Clearly, disclosure of the original, unedited documents would have been contrary to the interests of the Howard government or they would not have hidden behind the public interest claim to refuse the FOI request.

We in the opposition will continue to pursue this evaluation because we actually believe the Australian public has a legitimate interest in knowing just how this pilot program did operate and what effect it had on the literacy development of students identified as needing extra assistance. Labor will support the carrying over of unspent moneys from 2004 and 2005 because there are children in this country who need literacy assistance and support. But we also need to protect the integrity and value of this funding.

I am foreshadowing that Labor will move a substantive amendment to strengthen the conditions of funding to ensure that only qualified and accredited educators deliver. This amendment would require persons and organisations other than already approved school authorities to meet national standards of quality, such as professional teaching standards of tutors, and probity, such as financial and administrative records of private enterprises. I urge the Senate to support this amendment at the committee stage.

We have also circulated in the chamber during the course of my contribution our second reading amendment. I have set out in reasonable detail Labor’s concerns regarding the administrative incompetence and the political misuse of the two significant funding programs dealt with in this bill. Both the Investing in Our Schools program and the Tutorial Voucher Initiative highlight the operational and political mess left to Minister Bishop by her predecessor—a mess this bill only starts to deal with. For these reasons I move:

At the end of the motion, add “but the Senate:

        (a)    condemns the Government for:

              (i)    failing to deliver urgently needed capital funds and literacy support in time for schools and students to achieve the benefits of those funds,

             (ii)    failing to protect the integrity and probity of its program for tutorial literacy vouchers, especially in the appointment of brokers for the delivery of tutorial assistance in some states,

            (iii)    approving capital funding under its ‘Investing in our schools’ program in an unfair and unequal way between schools and regions, and

            (iv)    failing adequately to take into account the relative educational and financial needs of schools in the allocation of capital funding under the ‘Investing in our schools’ program; and

        (b)    calls on the Government to:

              (i)    ensure that all programs are administered in ways that deliver maximum educational benefits for students,

             (ii)    take steps to assure the educational integrity and probity of its tutorial assistance for students with literacy needs,

            (iii)    direct some of the unspent funds for tutorial assistance for students with literacy needs to use by schools to develop appropriate programs for their students, in consultation with parents and for the professional development of teachers to improve their literacy teaching skills, and

            (iv)    support improved accountability provisions for funding under the capital grants and tutorial assistance programs”.

I urge the Senate to support this second reading amendment. In doing so I note that it ought not to have been necessary for this amendment to call on the government to ensure that all programs are administered in a way that delivers maximum educational benefits for students. One would have thought that was self-evidently required. It should not have been necessary, but on the Howard government’s performance specifically on these programs this statement of the obvious unfortunately needs to be explicit.