Sam Dastyari (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Those pieces are the bits that tend to be true, Senator Conroy! I try to be careful about believing everything that is in the paper, but it appears that the government may even be backflipping, and there is talk of the government backflipping on their $30 billion of cuts in education. Let me be clear. That is something that someone like myself would actually welcome. I hope they do backflip. I hope they do reverse their changes. I hope they do end up finding a way of funding the Gonski school model, because that would be the best outcome for Australia. Unfortunately, however, there seems to be no intention by the government to do this. What there seems to be are a couple of flippant lines, flippant comments and throwaway statements. But in the dead of the night in the lead-up to the Christmas period we saw the government abandon the Gonski proposals.

So, on one hand, we have heard a lot of rhetoric from the government, talking about the importance of school funding and the need to improve schools but, on the other hand we have not seen the government put any actual money or the necessary resources on the table. There has been a straw man argument that has been thrown up by the government that says, 'The answer to everything is not funding.' That is true: the answer to everything is not funding. But you cannot fix the fundamental problems within our education system if you are not funding schools properly. The funding is a start, and the Gonski model demonstrated how you can make the best use of funding to get the best outcome and deliver the best results for our students.

We now have a government in disarray when it comes to its education policies. It is a government where one side is not talking to the other and there is a clear division being drawn between those who are responsible for policy development and those who are responsible for finance. We see a growing clear division between the Minister for Finance, Minister Cormann, and the Minister for Education and Training, Minister Birmingham, around how this needs to be funded.

The reality is that there is a proposal on the table. There is a plan on the table that is supported by teachers, by teachers' representatives, by principals and by students. That plan is out there and needs to be funded. Labor has come to the table with a fully costed plan on how to fund that proposal, but all we have seen from the conservative side of politics is disunity and division.