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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Finance (Senator Cormann) to a question without notice asked by Senator McAllister today relating to school funding.

I rise to take note of answers given by Senator Cormann to a question asked by Senator McAllister. Just to remind the Senate, this was a particular question to Senator Cormann in relation to what is becoming a growing discrepancy between what the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Education have been saying about the future of education funding and the future of school funding.

What it really represents is the quagmire that this government has found itself in, when it has been trapped between what it said before an election and what it has been trying to do since an election. Let us not forget that, before the election, Minister Pyne said that you can vote Liberal or Labor and you will get exactly the same amount of funding for your school. That has now been patently shown to be untrue. In particular, what we have seen is a discrepancy between what the Minister for Education has said and what the Minister for Finance has said. The documents are very clear and the budget documents are very clear. These are documents that have no need to be tabled in this place, as they are already publicly available, but the documents and the budget documents say:

From the 2018 school year onwards, total recurrent funding will be indexed by the Consumer Price Index, with an allowance for changes in enrolments.

That is what the documents say. Yet you have a discrepancy when the minister is out there floating that there will be some kind of a change and that this is not set in stone. There is a discrepancy between what the Minister for Finance has been saying and what the Minister for Education has been saying. Clearly, there is a division at the moment within the government on what and how they intend to fund the future of our schools and future school investment. I am always a bit careful about necessarily believing everything that is in the media, but there was a story today—