Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, like everybody in this debate, support 100 per cent the right of every Australian child to be educated in an excellent school. For the one million children who are educated outside capital cities in this country, 660,000 of them, the majority of them, are in state schools. They are located right around regional Australia. My communities, my party, and my own family is invested in ensuring that there is excellence in state education right across this country. My own experience as a university lecturer within the education system gave me the privilege of training so many of the young teachers who are going to head out into state schools. And I want to confess that, in my own experience as a schoolteacher, I never taught at a grammar school. I only taught at state schools, because I believe that every child should have access to excellence in education.

Our government is the best friend the state system has ever had. We have had record funding across state school systems, and we have done more than that. We have not just thrown money, because we know that just throwing money will not make a difference and will not stop the decline in standards that is occurring despite filling up the buckets of money—it is how we target it. It is also different policy settings, or whether it is the national curriculum or the minister's TEMAG initiatives, which are actually going to ensure that there are quality teachers in our state schools and that quality teaching occurs within our state schools. If you want to ensure that every child has the best chance to succeed and the best chance for quality outcomes, the one thing this government can control—we cannot control the type of family they grow up in or where they grow up—is the quality of the teaching they receive, and not only in the Catholic and independent schools, which have so much more freedom and so much more autonomy on how they staff their schools than state school systems do. What we, the Commonwealth government, can do is ensure that our public purse is significantly subsidising the tertiary education of every teacher who is graduating from our universities, and that every teacher who is in front of an Australian child, whether in the state school system or in Catholic or independent schools, is of high quality, because that is the thing that we know will make the biggest difference.

But it is only the ALP and the Greens who will actually come in here and attack the fact that there is a range of ideas and options out there, that there is not a one-size-fits-all policy solution to this very complex and vexed issue of how we actually have a sustainable federation. We saw their approach to a tax review: we will have a tax review, but we will keep the most contentious parts of our tax system out of that public conversation. And so when you see the Henry tax paper, it neglected to actually deal with the complexities of the tax system as a whole. We are not afraid of ideas. We are not afraid of options. Just because they are on the table does not mean they are going to be taken up. But to actually restrict public debate before you have even started to have it really says more about you than it does about us. We respect diversity and we respect choice.

We welcome the initiative and we welcome and support an incredible, excellent public education system. What we also want to do is give freedom to our principals to hire and fire, to ensure that those quality teachers are actually in front of the classrooms. We want to ensure that public schools have the independence and autonomy that Catholic and private schools enjoy. I think if you want to talk about excellence in public schools we really need to look no further than my home state of Victoria, where you see, for instance, Balwyn High School—a fantastic public school. House prices just within that catchment area have increased by $250,000. There is an assumption that if you are a wealthy person you are going to head off to grammar and pay upwards of 25 grand a year per child to have an education, but why would you do that? There are a lot of parents in Victoria who are choosing to send their children to excellent public schools, and I applaud them for that. And they are prepared to pay the price for that. I look at Mac.Rob, a high-performing public school in Victoria, and at Melbourne High and Nossal High. Excellence in public education is something that we should all be championing, and I thank the minister for his strong support of state school systems.

We have heard today about issues around needs-based funding models. Even Senator Gallagher said, 'We do not have the Gonski model.' The reality is we never had Gonski. We never had the model envisaged by Gonski, because the political reality and the political mettle of the leadership of the Labor Party at that time saw us end up with 27 different agreements around what constituted a needs-based funding model when it came to public education in this country. So for those on the other side to somehow, once again, try to steal the rhetoric and the public debate and conversations, and somehow reframe reality now, is absolutely abhorrent. We never had the Gonski model. It was 27 funding agreements because people would rather play politics with public education.

Senator Wright interjecting—

Through you, Mr Acting Deputy President, Senator Wright: rather than actually focus on what is best for students, what is best for schools, the Labor Party in partnership—hand in glove—with the Greens went to the last election desperate for deals with the states and ended up making promises they could never keep: that no school would miss out; that no student would miss out.

When you put parameters on this sort of needs based funding model, I am sorry: it is absolutely unachievable. What we saw was an absolute dog's breakfast. This government came to power and has actually given more money to Queensland, to WA—money that you ripped out of those schools, that you were not going to provide to those schools in desperate need in those states. I find it a bit rich at this end of the debate.

How do we move forward? We all spruik how wonderful the Finnish system is, and indeed it has a lot of good things going for it. We need to get serious in this place and stop being political and partisan about school funding and have a bipartisan approach which puts students, teachers, school communities and parents at the forefront of any policy discussion. The reality is: the Commonwealth government provides about 15.6 per cent of the funding for state schools.

So, Senator Wright, you might actually be in the wrong place. If you care so much: run for state parliament, get the balance of power and make all your dreams come true.