Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

The Schools Assistance Bill 2008 provides the legislative authority for the funding of non-government primary and secondary education for the years 2009 to 2012 and seeks to appropriate $28 billion for this purpose.

The Education Legislation Amendment Bill 2008 is complementary legislation that seeks to simplify the legislative arrangements for Commonwealth funding of schools with a high proportion of Indigenous students. To streamline Commonwealth funding, six Indigenous education programs will be consolidated into one per capita payment. The bill provides for a total of $742.6 million through the appropriation of $640.5 million for non-Abstudy payments and an estimated $102.1 million for Abstudy Away from Base payments.

A couple of concerns have been raised concerning the Education Legislation Amendment Bill. Firstly, with the mainstreaming of targeted assistance to Indigenous education and the increasingly diverse sources of reporting, care must be taken by government to elicit a concise and consistent understanding of targeted assistance and its outcomes. As accountability is critical in this context, the opposition will continue to monitor outcomes in Indigenous education.

Secondly, concern was expressed by the Queensland Catholic Education Commission, particularly on behalf of the Townsville diocese, to the Senate Standing Committee on Education, Employment and Workplace Relations in their inquiry into the provisions of both bills that the new funding arrangements may have a detrimental effect on some Indigenous students attending boarding schools. In short, funding will be allocated according to the location of the school, not where the students come from. The bill, it was argued, does not adequately recognise the higher needs of Indigenous students from remote areas who attend boarding schools in regional or indeed metropolitan areas. While the government has reiterated that funding will not decrease across the non-government sector, that is no guarantee that most disadvantaged Indigenous students will continue to receive the same funding. Given that the Townsville diocese is home to a greater number of remote Indigenous students than anywhere else in the nation, the opposition will continue to monitor the impact of the funding changes. Notwithstanding these concerns, the opposition supports the Education Legislation Amendment Bill, noting that the aim of the bill is to simplify funding arrangements and improve educational outcomes for Indigenous Australians.

I will now move on to the Schools Assistance Bill. There has been much debate, both within the parliament and, indeed, within the broader community, about the reform of education in our country. Most of us can, perhaps, agree on one issue: the focus of our concern should be the educational attainments of our children. They must be our central focus; our central concern. Evidence that, despite substantial increases in per-child spending, literacy and numeracy rates are no better now than they were back in the 1960s and 1970s supports the conclusion that reform of education in this country is absolutely essential.

I note that the chief executive of the News Corporation, Mr Rupert Murdoch, expressed these sentiments just last week in his ABC Boyer lecture. He said:

The unvarnished truth is that in countries such as Australia, Britain, and particularly the United States … our children seem to be learning less and less—especially for those who are most vulnerable in our society.

While Mr Murdoch addressed his comments at public education, his prescriptions for reform apply equally to both government and non-government schools. Fundamentally, he argues, bad schools do not pay a price for their failings; it is their students who ultimately pay the price for their failure. What we must do, concludes Mr Murdoch, is to hold schools more accountable and to ensure that they put students on the right track.

I would be delighted if the minister, Ms Gillard, and the government were to move in this direction. If the old Labor prejudices of class envy and its offspring, a sometimes seething prejudice against non-government schools, are gone, then progress is definitely possible. If the minister and the government are seeking to put the welfare of students before the interests of teacher unions, then the opposition will certainly not stand in their way. There are, however, some indications that this might not be the case. While there is a lot to agree with in both of these bills—and, indeed, much to support in the broader spirit of the minister’s recent public announcements on education reform—the bill before the Senate does contain provisions which are objectionable. With that in mind, I foreshadow that, at the committee stage, I will move some amendments on behalf of the opposition.

There are essentially four problems we see with this bill. Firstly, there are changes to the grounds upon which the minister can refuse or delay payment to a non-government school. Clause 15(c) of the bill provides for new reasons upon which the minister may refuse to authorise or delay a payment to a non-government school—namely, if an audit authorised by a Commonwealth or state law ‘is expressed to be qualified’. What concerns the opposition and the non-government schools sector is that there may be grounds for an auditor to qualify an audit that do not go to financial viability but instead to hesitation about a school model, whether a financial hesitation or otherwise. The recent inquiry of the Senate committee into the provisions of this bill heard testimony to that effect—for example, from Geelong College and the Association of Independent Schools of Victoria.

Secondly, there is the new requirement that schools comply with a national curriculum. Clause 22 of the bill mandates that under a funding agreement a school ‘implements the national curriculum prescribed by’ regulations made under the future act for primary education, secondary education or perhaps both. At this stage, we have little idea what the national curriculum in maths, science, history and English will actually look like. One of the issues that arises is how prescriptive the curriculum content in these particular discipline areas will be. Will it be prescriptive of content and materials or, alternatively, will it be a framework within which schools can determine content? This question is yet to be determined definitively. As the Chief Executive of the Association of Independent Schools of Victoria, Ms Michelle Green, said in her testimony before the Senate committee:

I had a principal from a school phone me the other day and say, ‘We tell our students not to sign up to mobile phone plans unless they absolutely know what they are signing up to, and here we are with something that is far more important to us and we’re expected just to sign without knowing.’ I think that people are extremely concerned about signing to deliver something when they do not know what it is.

This is a particular concern for schools, such as Steiner or Montessori schools, offering alternative educational philosophies and for schools that currently can teach curricula that are broadly equivalent to state determined curriculum standards. The avenue for innovation is now seemingly closed by this bill.

The final documents will not be presented until sometime next year, yet this bill seeks to tie school funding to that curriculum’s acceptance. The parliament and the schools are asked to take the government on trust. In addition, proper parliamentary scrutiny of the national curriculum will not be possible until it is detailed in regulations to be made in the future by the minister. Why this urgency? Why not separate the issues of funding and curriculum and deal with the latter more appropriately at some future date? Even if there were no controversy about the framers of the curriculum—and Mr Pyne has spoken about that in the other place—the manner in which this process has been carried out would still cause concern, as it is doing to the non-government schools sector.

Thirdly, there are additional reporting requirements for schools, particularly relating to funding sources. Clause 24(1)(b) of the bill requires a school, as a condition of funding, to provide the minister with a report in relation to, among other things, its financial operations, including financial viability and funding sources. Contrary to the government’s arguments that this clause simply follows the form set out in the previous legislation, ‘funding sources’ is a new concept in this context and might specifically include details of scholarship requests, funds and other sources of funding such as profit-generating activities or community fundraising undertaken by parents and friends associations. This section gives the minister substantial new powers to demand information about the internal financial affairs of a school community, and it also allows the minister to require schools to make this information public. Such detailed financial information is not relevant to calculations under the SES system, and, on questioning during Senate estimates in October, departmental officials were unable to give any reasons not only why their minister would require this information but also, much more importantly, why this information might need to be made public.

This has created great consternation among non-government schools. In their evidence before the Senate inquiry into the bill, various peak bodies of non-governmental schools expressed their concern that such financial information, when made public, would invariably receive tabloid treatment from the media and be used by the opponents of the independent education sector to create a politics of envy style campaign against non-government schools. Given previous statements by the minister and her colleagues, one can only draw the conclusion that clause exists in order to, if necessary, lay the groundwork to build up a public case and whip up public sentiment to radically alter the SES funding system in the next funding period, 2013 to 2016, to one where the so-called ‘rich schools’—those whose school communities are successful at fundraising—are to be penalised through reduced or abolished Commonwealth support.

It is also very ironic that not so long ago in this chamber we had another debate about accountability and transparency. It was in the context of universities and governance protocols. I recall the government arguing then that we should not micromanage, that it was illiberal to do so, that we should instead trust the universities more to manage themselves and administer all the billions of dollars they receive from the Commonwealth. We should trust universities to do the right thing, we were told, but obviously what is good enough for universities is not good enough for non-government schools.

Fourthly, there is the removal of the new non-government schools establishment grants. I note the opposition’s disappointment that the government did not see fit to renew the new non-government schools establishment grants. In phasing out these grants immediately, Labor appears to be returning to the ideological position taken in their previous new schools policy, making it increasingly difficult to set up new non-government schools.

As always with this government, while the initial ideas sometimes sound good—mostly because they have been stolen from the coalition—one has to be constantly vigilant. With Labor, the devil is always in the detail and, more so, in the implementation of the policy itself. We have seen it time and time again this year, most notably in the case of the computers in schools fiasco, underbudgeted by at least, on the government’s estimates, $800 million. No matter how good the government’s intentions, we will not be taking the government on faith. We will be watching very carefully to see how this issue unfolds and will take any action necessary to ensure that the best interests of Australian students are served. When it comes to implementation, this government has a very poor record, whether it is computers in schools, broadband or the cluster of other absolute fiascos. Although on the face of it this may be an appealing policy proposal, the coalition are very concerned that these seemingly worthwhile policies are implemented appropriately and securely.