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

This morning, during the debate on the bill that I introduced for full funding for public schools, Labor spent a lot of time talking up the deal that it has made with the WA government. Labor keeps telling us that this is a deal for full funding of schools in WA. Labor needs to stop misrepresenting the fact that this is not a deal for full funding. This is a deal to lock in public schools in WA—potentially, for the next decade—to 96 per cent of the schooling resource standard, and Labor needs to be upfront and tell the public that that is the case.

Thanks to Morrison era accounting tricks, state governments can count things like bussing kids to school and capital depreciation on buildings as part of their contribution to public school funding. The deal that the WA Labor government and federal Labor have done allows the state to continue to include that four per cent of non-classroom-related funding in their deal to fully fund schools. So stop telling everyone that you're fully funding them, because you're not. And let's be clear: the schooling resource standard is the bare minimum, and you haven't even got to that. And I'm getting sick and tired of hearing how we need to tie stuff to outcomes. Try achieving outcomes when you've been systematically underfunded for over a decade. We see through you. Fund schools to a hundred per cent now!