Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

First, the Australian Greens support this raft of amendments. We have been advocating for this. As a result of the Senate inquiry we put this in our recommendation and over the past couple of weeks we have been advocating for the government to do something to tie the states into the process. I think this is a good step forward and I am thankful that the crossbench has seen the sense in supporting this, as well. It is absolutely important to ensure that we do not have just the federal government doing their part of the bargain, without ensuring that the states are fundamentally tied into this process. We do not want to see state governments crab-walking away from their commitments to education, thinking that in next year's budget, or the year after that or the year after that, that they can cost-shift and find savings in education. We know that state and territory governments routinely do this.

Sadly, despite the fact that we are in 2017 and you would think wiser heads would prevail, state governments, as well as federal governments, somehow still think that budget savings in education are a smart idea. We all know that cuts to education are dumb cuts, whether it is in the schools sector, in early childhood or in our tertiary and higher education sector. Cutting funding to education drives this nation backwards. At a time when they have high youth unemployment, when we have low job growth, when we have an immense transition of the workforce, the absolute last thing we should be doing is finding cuts in education.

This amendment, as the minister has outlined, is designed to try to tie the states in, to bring them to the table to ensure that they too play their part in the role of bringing schools up to the resource standard and ensuring that everyone across all levels of funding is committed to genuine needs based distribution.

I have a couple of questions for the minister. In regard to the criteria for maintaining funding, obviously it is a condition of federal funding that states maintain their level—they cannot drop below. What type of indexation rate will that be set at, because, of course, it is in regulation and not in the act itself?