Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Australian Education Amendment (Direct Measure of Income) Bill 2020. I want to be clear up-front: the Greens will be opposing this bill. Crises have a way of revealing the priorities of those in power, and what could be more revealing of the Morrison Liberal-National government's priorities than their decision to rush this $3.4 billion handout of public money to private schools through parliament during a limited sitting week? When we are here to debate measures to support people through a public health crisis, what do they want to do? They still want to sneak through this cash bonanza for private schools.

We face an unprecedented international public health crisis that demands absolute focus. Yet the government has found time to enshrine another decade of educational inequality into legislation while they think that no-one is looking. Surely the government has heard about the struggles of public schools to keep their staff and students safe from the coronavirus. Alarm bells are being rung around the country about inadequate facilities, shortages of soaps and cleaning supplies, and lack of support. The schools crying out for help are the public schools that have been systemically underfunded while this callous government is prepared to once again lavish private schools with public funds.

Today, we are witness to another ridiculous instance of the Liberal and Labor parties working together to please the private school lobby at the expense of the students and teachers in our public schools. This bill fails to take into account the actual needs of Australian students, schools and their communities. It will increase Commonwealth recurrent funding for non-government schools from $13.1 billion in 2020 to $19.1 billion in 2029, without a single cent for public education. It's nothing more than another shameful display of the bipartisan commitment to entrenching inequality between private and public schools in Australia. I want to be crystal clear that the Australian Greens support, unequivocally, the universal right of every child to access education, and that means that, with public money, the 2.5 million children in public schools have to come first.

Public schools teach the majority of Australian children, including the majority of those who come from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. More than 90 per cent of their dedicated teachers are forced to dip into their own pockets to supply basic classroom resources because successive governments have opted to give handouts to private schools instead of doing the right thing and funding public schools. It's certainly not public schools building orchestra pits, Olympic swimming pools or boathouses, like some of Australia's wealthiest private schools are. Even as the myth that private schools save public money has been dispelled, we still see them being favoured. Just last week, we saw research released that found that governments would have been in a better financial position had every new enrolment in 2011 gone to public schools. Those handouts, like this bill, should be scrapped. Every single special deal should be thrown on the scrap heap and every single public school should be funded to 100 per cent of the Schooling Resource Standard.

The $3.4 billion contained in this bill is additional to the egregious $1.2 billion choice-and-affordability slush fund for private schools, which formed part of the coalition government's $4.6 billion special deal concocted to hush private schools ahead of the 2019 federal election. With the recent release of the guidelines for the slush fund, we now know for certain that private schools will have enormous freedom to spend the public's money on practically whatever they want, including investing it or stockpiling it to stave off their return to a fair funding rate. This bill locks in private schools' structural disadvantage in school funding all the way to 2029, with enough caveats to allow the government to go even further to cushion the landing for the few private schools that may see their funds reduced.

As the Australian Education Union wrote in their submission to the inquiry into this bill, 'The current situation with regard to the funding of school education is untenable. For decades it has been widely recognised that Australia’s school funding is among the most inequitable in the world.' It went on to say:

Recent years have seen the coalition government continually prioritise the appeasement of the independent and Catholic school lobbies over the maintenance of the provisions of the Australian Education Act 2013.

Last year, an ABC analysis highlighted the gross inequities in Australia's education funding system. It showed 85 per cent of private schools received more public funding than any similar public school, up from 58 per cent in 2009. The same analysis showed that the median funding gap has grown to a shocking $970 per student.

The Australian Council of State School Organisations noted in their submission to the inquiry that much of this bill is a special deal, and we feel it undermines the principle of fairness that we expect. Likewise, in their submission, Save Our Schools called the bill a special deal for private schools and one for which the Commonwealth has provided no justification, saying:

The additional $3.4 billion in funding for the switch to the direct income measure has all the hallmarks of another special deal for private schools ...

With this legislation, the government has once again passed up the opportunity to prevent 99 per cent of public schools from being underfunded by 2023. In addition to overfunding private schools at the expense of public schools, the Liberal government has restricted federal funding for public schools to 20 per cent of the Schooling Resource Standard. This is an untenable situation for public school students, staff and families because this leaves them with no avenue for reaching 100 per cent of the SRS. While the bill does go some way to improving the accuracy of the capacity to contribute score through a direct measure of income, its failure to account for the income, the wealth and the assets of private schools in assessing a school's socioeconomic status leaves it fundamentally flawed.

The Australian Education Amendment (Direct Measure of Income) Bill 2020 will leave Australia with decades more of unfairness, because of special-deal politics rather than genuine needs based funding. Instead of focusing on lifting under-funded public schools to the national standard and on the infrastructure and the curriculum reform that can ensure accessible, quality education for all our children, the government is firmly in the business of placating the private schools lobby.

I want it known that the government and Labor did their level best to take out this trash bill, under cover of a crisis. The inquiry into this terrible legislation was rushed from the get-go, but the reporting date of the inquiry was then brought forward twice. I want to acknowledge the submitters to the inquiry, whose expertise and fierce advocacy for public schools wasn't given due consideration by government. Your efforts to deal with the extremely short submission period are extremely appreciated. Both the duration of this inquiry and the ridiculous submission period hampered the committee's ability, and this chamber's ability, to consider this important issue in detail—an unnecessarily restricted public scrutiny of this $3.4 billion handout of public money to private schools. I am proud that my Greens colleagues and I will vote in solidarity with public schools against this special deal for private schools.