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

Senator Birmingham seems to think that that is a question that is not worthy of an answer, but I want to put on the record that I am a parishioner in the Diocese of Broken Bay and know many teachers in that sector. I know that three very powerful women have taken action in the last week to come down here to Canberra—to leave their small children behind—as advocates for that sector. They have been walking the halls of the parliament, making sure that those on the government benches understand the devastation of the proposed cuts to funding and the failure to deal with the system-weighted average and capacity-to-pay measures that have been the subject of some considerable questioning from our side—still without adequate answers from the other. Those parents from the Broken Bay diocese have been here very alarmed about the impact of government decision-making on their capacity to continue to send their children to the school of their choice.

Those women describe what I think is a very common phenomenon for many Australians around the country who are right now waking up to the disaster of what this funding model that you are proposing is. It has been around just long enough for them to notice the filthy smell of what it is that you are attempting to push through the parliament under the cover of darkness. People are just figuring out that something smells really bad about this. As described to me by these wonderful advocates for 25 per cent of the school population across the country—these three women came in and said, 'We thought at first maybe it was a slight overreaction.' They went to check the facts on the school funding estimator. They actually had faith in the government to put accurate data on the website in the government's name. What a terrible mistake they made. They went to the government website that was being constructed by your department on your watch, Minister. They went and they looked. They thought they could trust those figures, but bit by bit they found out how inaccurate they were, as the systems did and as the systems have gone to you and asked you, Minister, to correct the misinformation that is on those. You have just ignored that. You have made commitments you cannot even remember, it would seem, or are going to deny. Either way, the fact is that those calculators are still incorrect, and parents who are relying on information from you have suddenly started to figure out that they simply cannot trust any of the numbers that you are producing. It is like there is an asterisk and a few more little asterisks and a few more little asterisks. If you sit there and you read all the tiny asterisks—including the ones that you forgot to put in there—you might actually somewhere approximate something near the truth. But people cannot get a straight answer. They cannot get the truth from the school funding estimator and they are not getting the truth from this government in this place tonight.

Mothers who would perhaps normally be ready to put their feet up after a hard day of looking after their families, balancing their work-life and their commitment to their community have asked me to ask you these questions. 'Why does the senator want to pass a bill where it has been proven that the SES model is fundamentally flawed? Why doesn't he fix the modelling first and then present the bill?' What an insightful question from a mother who probably just a few weeks ago did not realise that she would have to sit down and spend hours and hours trawling through the misrepresentations that have been put out into the public place in the government's own school funding calculator? How many mothers of young children sit down and have to trawl their way through this data?

The Senate trans cript was published up to 22:30 . The remainder of the transcript will be published progressively as it is completed.