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

Okay—so we are getting to the point where the minister does not want to answer these questions. All this SRS and SES funding stuff that we are talking about gets very confusing for people. Can I just read into the record what it actually means when you do not have the student resource standard that I was talking about in my contribution a little earlier this evening. All this talk about money and transitional funding all goes down to what actually gets to the classroom so that the teachers can do the work that they need to do.

Right across the country, the money from the reforms that were advised by Mr Gonski has gone into every school and has made a massive difference. And it has been different in every school, which is great, because principals are wonderful professionals. They know what they are doing. No system is perfect, and there is always going to be the odd aberrant one, but generally we have amazing principals who are leading educational communities across this country. They know what to do when you give them enough money to interact with their learning community. They know what to do. They have been putting in speech pathology; they have been putting additional teachers into classrooms; they have been putting additional support staff into classrooms to help students; and they have been gradually, deliberately, every day, making advances in helping our kids become better readers, better thinkers and better citizens because they are learning and they are getting the resources that they need. So, when the SRS is not at the level it needs to be, there are big problems.

This is what a teacher had to say—and believe me: I am going to trust a teacher who has committed their life to serving children and serving this nation through education. I am going to believe them and what they are telling me every day over the glib language that we are hearing from this minister. The teacher said: 'As a public school teacher, I struggle to keep my classroom at a minimum standard to meet the requirements to teach the syllabus. This weekend alone I spent $133 on stools for my classroom. Why on earth can't my school afford furniture? Because we are so far below the minimum resource standard. The original Gonski NIRA arrangements made me feel secure in the decision to send my own daughter to a public school when she hits school age. I am not confident in this decision, if the local public school is inadequately funded, while the grammar school is able to provide opportunities above and beyond whatever I could imagine in my own classroom. I cannot provide my students with the future opportunities they so very much deserve without the proper funding that will put my students on an equal footing with those from higher socioeconomic areas.'

That is what is happening across this country. Some of our schools are so desperately underfunded, in terms of the student resource standard. I have been in classrooms to observe students and teaching and found that there was only one novel between two children. They cannot take them home and read it, because there are not enough to go around. I have been to parents and friends and parents and citizens meetings where communities that are not exactly replete with cash are raising $10,000 to buy school readers so that their children in kindergarten years 1 and 2 can actually have readers for learning how to read.

The other day I was on a plane with a person who works for Defence. He told me about his partner, a teacher, who spends money every single week buying paper and practical resources to take to the classroom for the students to be able to learn. That is what the money that is going into education is supposed to address—those terrible things that are missing. It is to give schools the capacity to deal with those things and all the extra things that are needed to help students learn. So, the money we are talking about in all these formulas is all caught up in responding to the real challenges that are out there in classrooms.

Minister, I asked you before about the primary capacity-to-contribute curve. I asked you about the average non-government school SES 100 situation. Can you confirm that those students will lose $438? With the non-government school SES 110, can you confirm that there is a loss of $800 per student. Minister, could you possibly advise, in the complexity of all the special deals you are doing here with the Senate, how many different arrangements will you have in place at the end of your dirty deals? You have eight different indexation arrangements for each state government system. I am not sure if the minister is shaking his head at me or if he is having an unpleasant conversation with somebody on the other end. It would be hard to be getting this sort of critique in stereo, I suppose. There are eight different indexation arrangements for Catholic schools, separate transition arrangements for each independent school, transition arrangements for ACT Catholic, and potentially some others, and some schools transitioning over 10 years and others perhaps over six years. How many deals do you have going, Minister, and are there still some afoot tonight so that you can get this done and get your legislation through?