Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Attorney-General (Senator Brandis) and the Minister for Education and Training (Senator Birmingham) to questions without notice asked by the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate (Senator Wong) and Senator Chisholm today relating to schools funding.

Senator Brandis and Senator Birmingham have continued in their attempts to justify what is a policy fraud. They are unable to substantiate the shift to a Commonwealth-only school education funding model, try as they might. I will use this opportunity today to highlight several aspects of that policy fraud.

The first is that this is the real Gonski. Let me quote from Mr Gonski in a speech he gave on 21 May 2014 when he said:

Lost in the discussion for more money were the central tenets of our review. We advocated:- A. Funding to be unified i.e. Given by state and federal governments to the different sectors together rather than states substantially only funding their school system and the bulk of commonwealth funding being as a consequence paid to independent and faith based schools.

This is why we continue to challenge the government embedding this 80-to-20 shift. This is the position that Mr Gonski took. Read as you might the comments by the Prime Minister or the verballing by Senator Birmingham, Mr Gonski has not changed his position. We saw this verballing continue today. We saw Senator Brandis verballing Archbishop Coleridge very much in the same form. The basic fact is that there has been no substantiation for the shift that this Turnbull cabinet has taken. I asked during the Senate inquiry if I could be directed to any academics, thought leaders or anyone else who could justify this significant shift in approach that will deny public schools the funding they need into the future. I was told no. The only thoughts on this shift available are cabinet in confidence. This is simply not good enough. It is not good enough for a policy measure that has been rushed through a Senate inquiry and that this government is attempting to rush through the Senate this week.

But let's look at the other elements of this fraud. There are the fantasy figures. We have all seen the Fairfax report on the fantasy figures that Minister Birmingham and his department have put out using their funding estimator. There is the fantasy of recreating the funds that schools get in the 2017 year on the basis of a formula that will never apply to that year. Now we are seeing the fraud of this government in attempting to rewrite the PBO figures that Senator Leyonhjelm received to his questions to the PBO. Thank God for the PBO, I say! Thank God we have a PBO that can provide some independence in these situations. I welcome its new head.

One further issue I should bring to the attention of the Senate is a correction that was received after the Senate inquiry into the bill on this. First, though, let me read Senator Birmingham's claims in this respect. He said socioeconomic data has been used in the school funding system since 2001 and has been 'refined, expanded and broadly accepted as a credible way to measure capacity to contribute'. This is a fraud. Gonski recommended that that model be reviewed and replaced. Indeed, the department tied themselves in knots when they sought to justify it. They were such a bad knots that Mr Tony Cook needed to subsequently write to the committee to correct his evidence. He attempted to justify the minister's claims by arguing that the measure had gone down to ABS mesh blocks. Of course, he had to correct that, because it simply is not true. There had been no response to the Gonski recommendation back in 2011 that the SES needed to be reviewed.

Instead, now we have a government trying to make significant changes in ways that have not been properly tested, have not been properly modelled and have not been properly canvassed and that will damage a lot of our delivery of school education. Everyone, in their local area, in their local suburb, has a local primary school and usually a local Catholic school. The changes that this government is proposing will ensure that that education delivery cannot continue. (Time expired)