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

From a tax system that rewards property hoarding by a privileged few at the expense of affordable homes for the many, to a social security system that forces millions into poverty and then punishes them for being poor, to the systematic underfunding of public services, Australia's ruling class has rigged the economy in their favour while pitting everyone else against each other in a battle over artificial scarcity. Nowhere is this war on the working class more evident than in our school system. Under Labor and the coalition, Australia's public schools have been neglected, underresourced and undermined for decades. While elite fee-charging private schools bank millions a year in public subsidies so they can build performing arts centres and hire fashion designers, public schools are forced to scrape by on less than the bare minimum.

Our school funding model is catastrophically broken. Recent data from the Productivity Commission shows that real per-student government spending on private schools grew by 3.7 per cent a year in the decade to 2022. That's 60 per cent greater than for public schools, which saw only a 2.3 per cent annual increase. The same report showed that a third of public school students were from low socio-educational advantage backgrounds, compared with only 13.2 per cent of students in private schools. In other words, public funding to the richest schools is increasing at a faster rate than funding to the poorest. Even more perversely, state and territory governments are incentivised to withhold resources from public schools because their budget bottom line improves for every young person who is forced out of the public system.

School is meant to be a great driver of equity and upward mobility, providing every young person with the same opportunity to thrive, regardless of where they live or how rich their parents are. But under Labor and the coalition, Australia's education system has become yet another way that wealthy elites extract public money to entrench their privilege. It is time we said, 'No more.'