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

I rise to speak today about the crisis in funding in our public schools. Private schools funding across the forward estimates will now be $1.7 billion more than the amount Scott Morrison committed in his final budget.

David Fawcett (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator, I remind you to use the correct title for members in the other place.

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

Thank you. As a proportion of total funding, private schools funding is growing, and funding for public schools is shrinking. The government's budget has moved Australia even further away from reaching 100 per cent of the minimum schooling resource standard for our public schools, and a greater proportion of federal funding for schools is now going to private schools, which is worse than under the previous government: over $70 billion for private schools over the next four years compared to only $45 billion for public schools.

Labor has clearly given up on fighting for a fair education system, and it's completely disgraceful. At a time when our public schools are in dire need of adequate resourcing and upgrades, this additional funding simply cannot be justified. Public money should be for public schools. It is not justifiable that private schools are receiving ever-increasing funds, when public schools are consistently under-resourced and struggling to get the money that they need to make basic improvements to school amenities.

Some people will rightly point out that there are small Catholic schools that are hard done by and could use more funding. But let me be clear: poor and struggling non-government schools are the result of funding decisions made by the private sector in how they distribute funds. We provide huge sums to each state's block grant authority, which are run by Catholic or independent education, effectively outsourcing and privatising the accountability function. This has led to a massive inequity between the large, well resourced and extremely expensive private schools and the poor, low-fee Catholic schools that service some low-income communities. Yet, despite the huge amount of money that governments are providing to private schools, both in general funding and as capital works grants, the average independent school has raised its fees by over 50 per cent in the last decade, and some have raised them by as much as 80 per cent—so much for the idea that funding private schools relieves fee pressure on parents.

I understand the value of the work that public school teachers do and I recognise the complexity of the work. I have been a teacher for almost 30 years and, prior to joining the Senate, I was a high school teacher at Gladstone State High School. I have seen firsthand how the current system is failing our public school students and their teachers. I have seen firsthand the ever-increasing pressures placed on teachers and the lack of funding they are given to meet the challenges of more and more work with less and less. I have experienced the continual frustration in not being able to fund the programs for the students at my public school, while the private school down the road got more public money per student than mine did. How can that be right?

No other country in the developed world pumps as much money into their private school system as Australia does. We are an outlier. It is costing us our children's' future, and the inequality gap is getting wider and wider. This is the last chance for public schooling in Australia; it is 10 years since the Gonski report. If we don't reverse this trend we are giving up on equity in Australian education. I won't give up on our public school teachers, their students and families. They deserve nothing less than a world-class public education system, and it is time the Labor government started fighting for that too.