Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

The intention is that the one lever we have over states and territories is the funding we provide to those states and territories. So if a state or territory is not going to provide a full pass-through of Commonwealth funding to increase contributions to their state and territory schools then the Commonwealth would have a power in the mechanism to be able to withhold some future level of funding from that state or territory in the hope that that would incentivise the state or territory to ensure that extra funding means extra funding rather than extra Commonwealth funding simply being a cost-shift from the state onto the Commonwealth.