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

They will be distributed in accordance with the approved guidelines, which will be finalised once consultation in relation to the draft guidelines that have been circulated is complete, as is standard practice across any such government program. We are seeing and hearing all sorts of claims being made by the senator. I do not want to waste the time of the Senate as, clearly, Senator O'Neill does—and she is obviously filibustering until Senator Collins comes back. Yet again she wants to talk about 'all of those who might have concerns'. Well, there are of course plenty who have urged the Senate to get on and pass this. I have referenced many of them in Senate debates over recent weeks. I will reference one more, who I have not referenced before, whose comments are new. Terry Hynes, the former Tasmanian branch president of the Australian Education Union, has said: 'This opportunity to establish needs based funding in public schools must not become victim to the purely political warfare being waged by a Labor opposition badly out of touch with its base on this issue.'

Senator Collins, you can keep going on. You keep saying, 'Why do we need to do it now?' Let me refer you back to the comments of the shadow education minister, Ms Plibersek, on 14 March, where she said:

Schools are already planning for next year. They are working out how many classes they'll have, how many teachers they need, what sort of special programs they can offer. Except, these schools have no funding certainty. They don't know how much they will have to spend next year.

Well, the legislation is here. The Turnbull government has put $18.6 billion additional in the budget not just to give funding certainty but to give absolute clarity that there is clear, strong funding growth. We are doing it through a model of clear, needs based funding. Your side can keep going on about what the Labor Party might have done had it magically found an extra $22 billion. That is your right. But understand that the Labor Party are standing in the way of needs based funding. Former union leaders are calling you out now. The Labor Party are standing in the way of giving certainty to Australian schools. You can keep coming in and asking questions that were already answered through the Senate estimates process or the Senate inquiry process or where documents and tables have already been released, but ultimately it just exposes you as doing nothing more than playing cheap politics with this issue.