Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

ALLMAN-PAYNE () (): Last year, about 130,000 public-school kids finished up their final year of high school. That's 130,000 kids who never experienced a public school that wasn't underfunded. For the entirety of their schooling life, it was always about stretching money, cuts and layoffs. This year, another 100,000 or so public-school kids will graduate, also never having gone to a school that wasn't underfunded. It will be the same the year after that and likely the year after that. This is a national crisis that is affecting kids today and of the future.

Public schools are now underfunded by $6.6 billion a year. Yet, since the original Gonski review, government funding to private schools has increased at double the rate of that to public schools. The major parties have withheld $26.9 billion from public schools and plugged that money into the private system. Public school investment in Australia is below the OECD average.

This funding shortfall is more than just numbers. Underfunding means classrooms built in the 1970s that are filled with asbestos or mildew and mould. Underfunding means teachers working 12-hour days and covering the work of counsellors, administrators, social workers and educators all at once. Underfunding means these teachers are not paid for the hours they pour into marking and preparation, school events and excursions over nights and weekends. Underfunding means one teacher for dozens of kids. It means broken laptops, out-of-date textbooks and parents footing the bills. Above all, underfunding means kids slipping through the cracks, it means failing, it means not setting them up for success and it means widening inequality in this country.

Underfunding means that when NAPLAN results come out it's not surprising to see that so many of our young people are struggling. When teachers and schools don't have the resources they need to support our most educationally disadvantaged students results go down. Every time this happens Labor and the coalition start the distraction game—'It must be our poorly trained teachers,' 'Maybe it's the way we teach reading,' or, 'Maybe it's naughty kids or bad parenting.' They do anything to distract the public's attention from the nub of the problem, which is chronic underfunding.

Underfunding means a kick in the teeth for Australian egalitarianism. We are desperately running out of time. I hear time and again from teachers who are overworked and at the brink, from comrades who are plugging holes and buying classroom resources and even food for their students, and from parents who can't fathom what has happened to their local public schools. Australia and our kids are suffering for it.

At every opportunity to fix this Labor have folded. They backed off from Gonski, their crowning education achievement. They backed off what it actually called for, which is clawing back money from the private sector and putting it into the public one. Ten years later the gap remains. Money is pouring into the private sector. Now we have one of the most segregated school systems in the world. Right now nearly every private school in this country is overfunded. Not only are they filled over and above the SRS with government money but they also charge huge fees on top of that. The public are literally paying for private schools to succeed. We are footing the bill for plunge pools and orchestra pits. We are footing the bill for these schools to charge exorbitant fees—fees that are locking out kids and locking in inequality.

Right now there is no pathway back. Labor needs to own up to its neoliberal mistakes and take responsibility for its role in Australia's surging inequality. That starts with rebuilding public education. This is the last chance we have to save our public schools and to truly deliver an equitable school system that gives every child a chance at a great life. The Labor government must fund all public schools to 100 per cent at the start of the next National School Reform Agreement or they will consign our public schools to collapse.