Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have one short question I hope the minister might be able to give me a decent answer to. One of the things that concerns the local community is how trustworthy the information is that the government has provided. As a former teacher, I have to say that people's interaction with the My School website has led to a degree of trust in the veracity of information they can access from a government about the facts relating to their school. So I think the government's decision on the back of that sense of trust that people have in the digital connection they have with governments about their school was actually an asset on which the government drew when they were trying to convince the Australian public that they were actually going to be doing something decent in terms of education.

But, in the context of all of that, there was the establishment of the school funding estimator. With discussion around the bill, and certainly at estimates, there were very many questions about the veracity of the detail embedded in that funding estimator. Parents right across the country and across New South Wales are communicating with me and they are very concerned about how much they can trust that. For some of them, their initial concern was simply because, like me, they really do not trust too much what this government says on education, particularly after they were told they were going to get dollar-for-dollar funding that would match Labor's commitment. They want to know how now they should interpret the school funding estimator given that the Secretary of the New South Wales Department of Education, Mark Scott, has said that the information on the federal government's school funding estimator is not to be relied upon. And that is a direction that has been given to New South Wales school principals with regard to school funding. So, Minister, with regard to what has now been declared by a state entity, the government sector in New South Wales, through Mr Mark Scott, what is your intention with regard to directions about removing incorrect factual data from the school funding estimator website?