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

Thank you, Senator Allman-Payne. Well, the short answer is we are not planning to lock public schools or schools in general into another decade of underfunding, quite the contrary. What we are actually putting forward is the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement with the states, which would contribute $16 billion from the federal government in additional funding for public schools.

As I reminded your colleague yesterday, the only way public schools in Australia are going to get more funding is through a Labor government. It will not happen through a Greens government. It is certainly not going to happen through a coalition government, because they will actually get less funding. What they will get from the Greens are more complaints, more memes, more rallies, more whinging but they won't get a single extra dollar. The only way they will get an extra dollar is from the Albanese Labor government, and that it is that we be doing through our Better and Fairer Schools Agreement.

Now, I think all Australians would be concerned to see some of the NAPLAN results that we have seen coming through. What these results show is that literacy and numeracy standards have remained steady, with around two-thirds of students considered to be strong or exceeding in most domains and year levels.

Like last year, this year's results show that nearly one in 10 school students need additional support to meet minimum standards in literacy and numeracy, but that's not the case across the board. Almost one in three students from poor backgrounds need additional support. One in three First Nations students, one in four students from remote locations and one in two students from very remote locations require additional support. What that shows is that the education of your parents, where you live and your background have a massive impact on your likelihood to start behind or fall behind at school.

I think it is really unfortunate that we had a decade of coalition government that did nothing about it. It's particularly shameful that the Nationals did nothing about it, because they say that they support rural and regional Australia, which we know has greater disadvantage from an education point of view, and they did nothing about it at all. (Time expired)