Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

I will respond in part to Senator Hanson-Young's points here, which perhaps warrant some thought depending on whether these particular amendments succeed. As I said earlier, Labor has its own amendments but we are open to improving those if this one does not succeed. We still are concerned about the lack of independence of this body. The points that Senator Hanson Young has made here are quite critical. If the body is not independent, we risk returning to things like the fantasy figures that the department has published—and that is to know is advantage. I agree with Senator Hanson-Young that transparency is important, but it needs to be well-informed transparency.

I am sure Senator Hanson-Young appreciates what some people looking at the information that might be available do not necessarily understand. For example, across any school system, public or private, the most significant cost factor is teachers wages, so school budgets are often the captive of the composition of their teaching staff. For schools in the nice leafy suburbs of Melbourne or Sydney, whose teachers are quite happy and comfortable teaching in that environment and have been doing so for decades, the wage costs are different compared to the issues facing schools in more disadvantaged urban areas or in regional and remote areas. That is not to say that that factor alone should mean that those schools should continue to be able to capture, by virtue of student-teacher ratios or other formulas that systems might apply, the larger amounts of funding.

That is why a composite review of those issues is important for any school system. That is what informed the process that the Gillard government went down—in fact, it was the first Rudd government—with the national partnerships for school funding. What the government said at that time was that we had to find a mechanism, running across these other factors that operate in how schools are funded, to get more money to the areas where we know that money will make a difference. I was incredibly privileged in government. One of my roles was to visit the best-practice versions of those national partnerships and see what a difference that additional funding was able to make in many disadvantaged Australians schools.

In that case, the Commonwealth rather than any particular individual school system used the approach of saying, 'All right, if we just use the basic accounting arrangement about how to distribute funds we are still not going to get the money where we know it will make a difference; we need to look at other funding mechanisms than just this minister's one-size-fits-all approach to target disadvantage.' That is what those national partnerships did. They targeted disadvantage.

It was that policy work that then informed the development of the Gonski loadings. But of course we have not reviewed those loadings to see how effectively the settings of those loadings currently work. Senator Hanson-Young, those loadings were part of that design feature to overcome the basic accounting assessments of how funding for schools should be distributed across schools and systems. If we just rely on the factors around the number of students, the number of teachers and the wage cost of those teachers, who will quite naturally prefer live in, stay in and teach in more comfortable environments, then we are not going to get the resources to the schools we know we need to.

Sure, you can pick up Senator Back's concerns about co-responsibility and systemic concerns about co-responsibility and do some things that way, but what Gonski 1 did was attempt to draw that into the funding formula itself. What Senator Hanson-Young is quite legitimately saying is that schools and systems need to be accountable for how they are following that formula. As I mentioned before, there will be factors in individual schools or individual localities that involve quite legitimate reasons for why one school will not be funded exactly as per the formula, which is why I asked the minister questions in relation to accountability factors that we have already addressed in amendments to the bill. But an independent, well-resourced student resourcing body that will allow for properly informed accountability on these issues is important. We need that debate to be well informed. We need people who understand how these arrangements work and can make competent recommendations about how these issues can be addressed or, indeed, about how change can sensibly be achieved.

We have seen discussion during the debate on this bill and in the committee process on different views about how different systems have responded to Gonski 1. I have been pleased to see that there obviously has at least been some response to the issue that systems need to rethink and not be bound by these narrow accounting formulas about how these funds should be distributed. I say, 'Hear, hear!' on that point. I am with you, Senator Hanson-Young, on the need for systems to continue to be accountable. I understand too the point that you have made, which is that the government system also directs funding to more prestigious public schools in ways that need to be addressed. You are right, Senator Hanson-Young—we do need to get the funding to the most disadvantaged schools if we are ever going to achieve a difference in our educational outcomes.

The concerning thing is that Gonski 1 set up some settings to try to shift systemic thinking about some of these things—and some systems have done better than others historically on these factors—but we have never reviewed the settings. The process that was established in the national education reform agreement was not reviewed because this government was lazy. Sure, you can say responsibility shifted from Christopher Pyne to Senator Birmingham, but that is really not an excuse. It is not an excuse because this minister has been in this portfolio long enough to have received advice long ago on the consequences of these matters not having been addressed.

My understanding is he received information in relation to the SES and its need for review 12 months ago, and yet now he sits in this Senate and now we have to spend many hours fighting this issue when a competent minister would have responded to this issue 12 months ago and saved the Senate the time and occupation that has been required to ensure that that matter has properly been addressed.

But I am still a long way from convinced that it has been competently addressed. The minister has not even taken up my invitation to use the time available between now and when we return to this bill to come back with the information about what would be the estimate of the amount involved in this fund to deal with the system-weighted average if it were calculated on the current provisions in the bill. So I will return to that issue now and highlight for the Senate—and the Nationals here groan because they do not like being held accountable for their poor behaviour in cabinet—

Senator Williams interjecting—

We are on the issue. We are very much on the issue. To help Senator Williams, who is not really following this debate: I am on page 11 of the bill.