Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens are always happy when the government spends more money on providing improved education services to those in need. The government would have us believe that this is what the Schools Assistance (Learning Together—Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Amendment (2007 Budget Measures) Bill 2007 does in both of its parts because it delivers more money for new migrants and refugee arrivals in the first half and in the second half it delivers more money to private schools. The Greens welcome the increase in money for the English as a Second Language—New Arrivals Program, which is very much needed, but we do not support the further increase in funding to private schools in this bill. I will move on to the reasons for that later.

First I want to talk about the English as a Second Language—New Arrivals Program component of this legislation. This bill doubles the amount of per capita funding for this particular program. It is a program that is designed to give intensive support to new migrants to Australia who come in either through the normal migration stream or through the humanitarian refugee intake. These are young migrants who need both the language skills and the basic learning skills necessary to integrate into further schooling, into further education or into the workplace. The Greens welcome this funding increase because we have long held the view that Australia can and should provide a welcoming environment for immigrants and refugees whom we accept and that part of the welcoming environment we provide must include adequate English language training for those who do not have English language skills.

Sadly, the funding increase in this bill is not part of, or combined with, the other necessary support for public education that is needed to ensure that the increased money into this program can work. So we see a situation where students go to intensive English language centres—like the one that I visited in Beverly Hills in Sydney on Friday—and are able to get fantastic support for the time that they are there. But the government’s funding limits the support they can receive to three terms. Then you see a situation where perhaps a 17-year-old young man from Sudan, who has come to Australia through our refugee program, has been put into this intensive English school but only for three terms. He is not able to get the English language skills that he needs to go on. Because the federal government has reduced the funding to other public education services, migrants cannot go on to a well-funded TAFE where they could do a course like the adult basic English course, which used to be much more accessible in TAFEs. Since the federal government has cut funding to TAFEs, we have seen a lot of TAFEs around the country getting rid of their adult basic English courses because they do not have the funding to continue to run those courses. What this means is that the benefits that are provided through the funding program that we are dealing with in this legislation—benefits that might enable a young Sudanese boy who comes to Australia to get three terms of intensive English language support—cannot be continued for him because there is no TAFE course available for him to attend so he can get the English language skills that he needs.

Three terms of intensive English language support does not provide you with the capacity to go out and get a job in the workplace. I will give an example of this. When I visited the school on Friday one of the teachers told me about the afternoon she had sat down in front of a computer with a number of young African men who had come to Australia as refugees. They were only allowed to spend three terms there, so they were looking at what they would do when they left. There was not a TAFE course available for them to go to, so she was trying to help them to find some employment. She went online to the Coles website because these boys wanted to register themselves to pack shelves at night in the local Coles supermarket. But three terms in this English language centre for African migrants who have never been in a formal schooling situation is not enough for these boys. It meant that they were not able to read the questions on the website about their work history. They needed to do this in order to register their names to pack shelves at the local Coles supermarket at night.

There needs to be an increase in the availability of options for students—not only what is provided through the increased funding available in this particular bill but ongoing assistance in order to ensure that they can find a place in the workplace and contribute to our society. If we do not do that and we continue operating as we are now, with more refugees coming in from Africa—many of them have never experienced formal schooling and they are currently only able to spend three terms at an intensive English language centre, and then there is not another further educational opportunity for them—those people will end up not being able to contribute to or engage with our society. Many of them will end up in our prisons. That is what we are already seeing happen. Young boys are coming through as refugees and going through the English language program, but, because there is not the ongoing support that they need to get a job, to get into TAFE or to go to a normal school, they are ending up in prison. That is not the way to run our immigration system. Accepting people as refugees and then not providing them with the support to gain the English language skills that they need means that they end up not being able to integrate within the broader community. They end up not being able to engage and instead find themselves in prison. That is, unfortunately, the pattern that we are seeing.

I met a young girl at the intensive English centre on Friday who was an asylum seeker trying to come to Australia. She was turned back by the Australian government and had spent the last couple of years in Lombok in Indonesia, where the Australian government pays to keep asylum seekers that they have turned away. She is one of a lucky few who have recently been accepted to come to Australia. But her brother was not so fortunate. He was on a boat trying to get to safety and drowned. He drowned as a result of trying to get protection—from the Australian government in this instance. This young girl was sitting in the reading class on Friday, making a real opportunity of the experience that she was given through the program for which funding is increased in this bill. But she needs more support than that.

The Greens would like to see the federal government increasing the amount of support that is available for this program, which is a very good program. They do that in this bill, but there is a need to ensure that students are able to spend longer in intensive language centres getting support and that there are other services like full-time school counsellors to help people, such as this young girl, who do not have the English language skills that they need to attend a normal school. She also has to deal with the trauma of having lost her younger brother who drowned while fleeing the Middle East on a boat trying to get to safety. There needs to be an increase in the support available not just in relation to the programs but for school counsellors at intensive English language centres as well.

The intensive English language centre I visited cannot apply for support for infrastructure because of the way the government structures its funding for capital infrastructure at schools. Schools can apply for funding if they have a Parents and Citizens Association at the school. This school does not have that, because the parents are newly arrived migrants or refugees and they are trying to get on with their own lives. They are not in a position to spend a lot of time and effort setting up a P&C at a school where the kids will only go for three terms. The school is not able to have a functioning P&C that can write funding applications to get capital infrastructure from the federal government for their school. At the Beverly Hills school you see committed teachers who are doing fantastic work all through the week going in on the weekend to build a mound around the edge of the school right next to the railway line in King Georges Road, one of the busiest roads in Sydney, to stop the noise getting into the school. There is no capacity, through the way in which the federal government funds capital infrastructure at public schools, for them to apply through government mechanisms to get any support for such infrastructure. So the teachers have to come in on the weekend and build the mounds so that the students can continue with their work.

The Greens want to hear from the minister—and perhaps he can address these comments—whether negotiations have occurred with the state government about how this funding will be implemented. In New South Wales the state government contributes additional funding to these programs and to the funding of intensive English centres. We welcome the increase in the bill and we want to make sure that the response by the New South Wales government is not that it will reduce the funding it makes available to these intensive English centres. The Greens would like to see the state government follow the funding increase in this bill and also increase its component of funding for intensive English centres so that the schools can get the additional funds that they need to provide the quality education that they give students.

I will now turn to the second part of the bill, the increased funding to private schools, which the Greens do not support. It is very hard to keep track of the new and innovative ways the government dream up to give legislative expression to their preference for private schooling. Since they came to government they have tinkered so many times with the way the Commonwealth subsidises private schooling that it is no wonder that the public, the media and parliamentarians get confused about how it all works.

At the time the government introduced their socioeconomic status—SES—funding model they would have had us believe that it would clarify the process and bring some simplicity to the way in which the funding operated. But it does not do that. The mess of funding get-out clauses, of special cases and of cosy arrangements continues to proliferate. We have seen SES funded schools, then SES ‘funding maintained’ schools, then SES ‘funding guaranteed’ schools, then there were the Catholic ‘funding guaranteed’ schools and now, presumably, with what is proposed in this bill, there will be some SES Catholic ‘funding guaranteed remote bonus’ schools. It is hardly a simple system for people to understand.

The cosy arrangements in this particular bill are not the worst that we have seen. The Greens recognise that, like public schools in remote areas, there are private schools which are not as well resourced when compared with other private schools. On the other hand, there are some which are very well resourced and most would be better resourced than their local public school, as is the case across the country. But this bill does not contain any provisions for finding out how rich a school is before deciding that it needs more public money. It does not means test the schools, which may be in receipt of large fees, generous bequests, endowments, earnings and other income streams. How do we know that the schools really need this money, given that there is no assessment done? How do we know that this will not be a foolish waste of taxpayers’ money—money which is urgently needed in other areas, like teaching English to new arrivals and to migrants? The answer is that we do not know. Even if we believe that there is a genuine need for some increased public subsidies to rural and remote private schools, which remains to be proven, we know that the area that needs government funding most is the public school system right across the board.

The Greens reject as bogus the argument that the Commonwealth is somehow responsible for private schools and the states are responsible for public schools. It is an argument that has no basis in law, in the Constitution, in history or in practice. Both levels of government choose to subsidise private schools, and both are significant contributors to public schools. The key point of departure between the Greens’ view and those of the Labor and the Liberal parties in this area is that both those parties are happy to allow much-needed public funding go to the wealthiest private schools while public schools suffer. Neither is prepared to stand up for the rights of public schools in this country. For example, the federal government does not impose an appropriate or an equitable level of accountability or responsibility to go along with this public subsidy to private schools.

Many, indeed the majority, of the remote and rural schools that will receive a boost from this bill are in fact majority publicly funded—that is, they receive most of their income from the government. Yet these schools do not have the same responsibility and accountability requirements. They are able to not adhere to antidiscrimination legislation. They are able to avoid the level of financial accountability and openness required of public schools. And they are allowed to teach content that simply would not pass muster in a public school. The Greens cannot support the extension of this subsidy to private schools with no means testing and no equivalent subsidy to public schools. I will be moving a second reading amendment to this piece of legislation, which I will foreshadow. That Greens second reading amendment:

… condemns the Government for devising a funding system for non-government schools that:

(a)

fails to take into account the relative wealth and income-raising capacities of each school;

(b)

does not require an appropriate level of accountability and openness from non-government schools in exchange for the receipt of public monies;

(c)

consistently favours non-government schools ahead of government schools;

(d)

continues to allow non-government schools which are now largely publicly funded to discriminate against prospective students based on ability to pay fees;

(e)

unfairly ties the funding of non-government schools to the cost of education provision in government schools;

(f)

is formulated without any reference to its effect on the quality of school education as a whole . . .

The Greens’ policy seeks to end this ineffective approach to schools funding and instead establish a national scheme that would be guided by need, by fairness and by the basic principles of educational outcomes—and in the spirit of cooperation with the states, rather than coercion. We do not propose a final blueprint for such a system. We propose instead a nationwide inquiry into the effectiveness and the equity of current arrangements with a view to introducing complementary legislation at state and federal levels to give life to a simpler, a fairer and a more effective funding system. I cannot say exactly what such a system would look like, but I can tell you what it would not look like. It would not allow remote public schools teaching the neediest children in the country to go begging whilst super-rich private schools in capital cities continued to receive government subsidies. It would not allow some schools to discriminate on the basis of wealth whilst receiving government funds. It would not dish out public money to schools without allowing open public scrutiny of the financial arrangements of those schools. And it would not allow public funding to support schools that promote discriminatory values and impose those values on the children in their schools.

The Greens want diversity and excellence in our school system. The Greens believe that it is not beyond the wit of Australians to construct such a system. And we believe that what we have now falls well short of that goal. I hope to see steps taken by both the major parties that address the influence that those components of the community with strong vested interests, through the churches and rich private schools, are having on the way in which public funding is being distributed to schools in this country. I want to see governments at the state level and at the federal level putting the priority on public education, making it the centre of the responsibility of the federal government to provide government funding to our public school system. We need to see, particularly in the lead-up to an election, a commitment from both the government and the opposition to invest in our public schools and to provide their much-needed support. We need to see a statement of support for the work that is done in our public schools. Let us see some value of the great work that is done. Let us see some acceptance of how much they are contributing to our society. That is what I would like to see. I would like to see both the government and the opposition talk about how much they value the work that is done in our fine public schools. (Time expired)