Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Allman-Payne, yes. As I've made repeatedly clear, the Albanese government and any Labor government believes that public education needs its fair share of funding. We recognise the right of families to choose other forms of education for their children, and we will support those choices as well, but we do acknowledge that public education has been grossly underfunded under 10 years of coalition government, and we intend to reverse that.

That is exactly why we entered a one-year extension of the current National School Reform Agreement—a school reform agreement which, under the coalition, saw public funding levels fall for public education. Under us, in just our one-year agreement, education funding is going to increase from $27.3 billion to $28.6 billion, including an increase of half a billion dollars for public schools alone. In the meantime, we are obviously in the process of negotiating a national school reform agreement with the states and territories, and we've made it very clear that we're committed to ensuring every school, public and non-public, receives 100 per cent of its fair funding level.