Ms PLIBERSEK (10:25 AM) —We have here a piece of legislation, the States Grants (Primary and Secondary Education Assistance) Bill 2000, which proposes that the government spend $22 billion on education. I am certainly not opposed to spending $22 billion on education, but I would like to see a few more details about exactly where the money is going. We have received some details that have allowed us to draw our own conclusions; indeed, comments from the DETYA witnesses before the Senate inquiry support the conclusions that Labor have drawn about where the funding is going. Yet the minister is not prepared to delay debate of this legislation for just a few weeks—until after the Olympics—until we have firm figures available about exactly where the money will be going.

Although the legislation before us lacks significant detail in respect of how individual schools will be treated under the new funding arrangements, it does have one very predictable element: it allows a fine exposition of this minister's ideological obsession with pushing children out of public schools and into private schools. This is a project that he started many years ago. The member for Charlton referred to minutes of an Expenditure Review Committee meeting in 1991 which are evidence of the minister's obsession that has lasted since 1991. The ERC minutes note `that the coalition sought to encourage students to move from government to non-government schools.' Further, in the minutes it was agreed that the minister would report back to the Expenditure Review Committee on `non-government schools—whether additional expenditure could be offset by reductions in grants to government schools and in untied grants'. This is exactly what has happened. It was predicted by the minister in 1991 and he has gone on to fulfil his plans in government.

The untied grants from the federal government were cut by $1½ billion in 1996. The enrolment benchmark adjustment—and this is perhaps the most offensive and inequitable policy that this government has introduced in the area of school education—has taken $60 million out of government schools so far. Of that, $30 million is from New South Wales, my home state, and this has meant an average drop of about $14,000 per government school in New South Wales. While there is no decline in the number of students going to government schools, there is a decline in the proportion of students in government schools. The actual number of students going to government schools in this time has increased by 26,000 at the same time as $60 million has been cut from those government schools.

I should also mention the abolition of Labor's new schools policy, which is a further example of this government's push away from government schools and its desire to see as many young people as possible going into non-government schools. The abolition of the new schools policy has allowed a proliferation of small schools. While I have no doubt that some of them are very good schools, if the government makes a decision to fund essentially anyone who wants to set up a school, it means that, inevitably, money is taken out of the government system and existing schools—and there may be no decrease in the resources those schools need to fulfil their obligations to their school communities.

There is and has been from this government a massive bias of funding towards private schools. This legislation is not the first stage in expressing that bias, but it is a continuation of it. The government, or the minister for education in particular, cloaks this bias. He uses two main expressions. He talks about the needs of schools and school children and he talks about choice. The use of the term `needs' in this argument is particularly Orwellian. There is no way in which it can be argued that this new funding model actually delivers funds to students who need them; in fact, the reverse is true. From the information that we have managed to gather—mainly through the Senate inquiry process—we find that the vast proportion of the funding will go to the wealthiest schools. We should remember, of course, that 70 per cent of students go to government schools. Government schools, of course, deal with any number of fantastic kids who have high educational attainments, who never have any behavioural problems and who have very successful school careers, but they also deal with the kids that non-government schools refuse to deal with. Government schools deal with children who have learning difficulties, who have special needs, who have physical disabilities or who begin to attend school with little or no English. Most of these kids end up in government schools. In fact, well over 80 per cent of students in the major equity target groups—that is, students from low socioeconomic status families, indigenous students, students from rural and remote areas and students with disabilities—are enrolled in government schools.

I want to share with the House an example of such a school in my electorate. Just last week I visited Ultimo Public School. It is a very fine school, and it was a great pleasure to go there. Ultimo school has any number of terrific kids going there, but it also has a lot of kids who have special needs. At Ultimo one of the special needs that a lot of students have is help with English because many of them are recent arrivals in Australia. Some of these students start school with virtually no English. The school has a very good program for teaching English as a second language. The interesting thing about its program of teaching English as a second language is that a lot of school children who start attending Ultimo have, at the same time, put their names down at one of the local, very prestigious private schools—which will benefit greatly from this new funding model. The private school takes their $1,000 deposit and the principal says to them: `We cannot really help you with your English. Go to Ultimo Public School until you have learnt English, then come back and we will teach you.' So not only is the public school dealing with students with special needs and with greatly reduced resources when compared with those of the wealthy private school but also the wealthy private school is shifting the cost of dealing with those special needs students onto the government school. The point is that education in government schools is universal and those government schools cannot refuse to help those kids with special needs. They do an excellent job but they could certainly benefit from increased resources to help those kids.

What we have managed to work out from the information that we have received from the government so far—and, as I have said, it has been fairly sparse information from the minister—is that on average the 62 wealthiest private schools will divide between them $50 million. They will get on average $800,000 each. Many of them will get greatly more funding than that and some of them will receive slightly less, but the average is $800,000. Catholic schools will receive about $60,000 per school on average. What do the public schools get? They get some indexation. That was introduced by Labor in 1993, so they get their automatic indexation. What do public schools get on top of that? They get $4,000 compared with $60,000 for Catholic schools and compared with $800,000 for the wealthiest private schools. So the 62 richest schools get a quarter of the new federal funding for private schools—about $50 million. And how many students do they deal with? They deal with 5.6 per cent of non-government students. So the wealthiest schools get a quarter of the funding; they deal with 5.6 per cent of the non-government students. The Catholic schools, which deal with 65 per cent of non-government students—which is the vast majority of non-government students—get an extra $100 million to share between them. So they get dramatically less, per school, to share between them than the wealthiest schools. Government schools which, as I said, have 70 per cent of students attending them, get $106 million extra after inflation. So thank goodness for the indexation that was introduced by Labor in 1993.

Many of the category 1 schools that the minister claims are needy according to his SES formula have resources that government schools would fall over themselves to have access to. They have excellent libraries; they have great computers; they have swimming pools; they have sporting fields that would probably be the envy of some of the people running some of the Olympic facilities. Many of these schools have excellent resources. I do not begrudge those schools those resources—good on them. The point is that when we have schools in the government sector that need very basic equipment—and I should also say that schools in the Catholic sector need very basic equipment such as computers—why would we continue to skew funding to schools that have swimming pools and carpet? The SES formula deals with the socioeconomic status of the area that the parents live in rather than gives any real measure of the resources that the school has available to it. So it will always favour schools which draw a high proportion of their students from country areas or from any area where there is a large number of people who are not wealthy. It means that a wealthy farmer or doctor living in that area will be treated as though they were someone on a low income. The minister himself has admitted this. He is quoted in a number of newspapers as saying:

It hardly seems fair that millionaires get treated as though they come from a low socioeconomic background for the purposes of this funding model. So the new model is not a real measure of need. It is not a measure of students' needs. I have described how most of the country's neediest students are in government schools, which are not benefiting greatly from this. A number of needy students go to the poorer independent schools, which also are not benefiting greatly from this new model.

It is not a measure of students' needs; neither is it a measure of schools' needs. The resources that schools already have are not taken into account. Donations and gifts to schools, such as Richard Pratt's $1 million donation to Scotch College last year, will not be taken into account because the minister argues this will encourage private investment in education. I bet Balmain High, Glebe High, Plunket St and Erskineville Public are all rubbing their hands in glee, waiting for the million dollar cheques to start rolling in from some of our great and generous public benefactors. This measure will not benefit public schools in the least. The wealthiest schools that have wealthy old boys' networks are probably very grateful that these million dollar cheques will not be taken into account when working out school funding for the next year. This measure certainly does not go to the needs of schools. If you are looking at the needs of schools, it is not the schools that need the help that will get it under this measure.

The minister uses the rhetoric of `need'. The one group who will unequivocally be disadvantaged by the proposals before us is disabled students, students with a disability. They are unequivocally losing out under this new model. There are 32,000 students with disabilities at government secondary schools. They currently receive per capita funding of $126 a year on top of the normal funding they would get, to help with any special requirements they have because of their disability. It is not much money, really. It is going to be even less under this model, down to $102 per student. It saves the government a little over $700,000 a year—not much money, really, in the scheme of things. It is a $22 billion bill. The government is looking to save $700,000 and where does it cut? It cuts funds for students with disabilities who attend public schools. I cannot think of a more heartless approach to students with a disability.

The other main descriptor the minister uses for this legislation is that it is about `choice'. He is quoted as saying:

That is a very noble sentiment. What I am surprised to read, however, is how much the wealthiest schools—which are benefiting most from this new funding model—are cutting their fees by. Is there going to be a great flood of working class kids into wealthy private schools? I do not think so. Wesley College has revealed that it will get a little over $3 million over the next four years. Given the extra $3 million it is getting, how much easier is it going to be for working class kids to attend Wesley? Wesley is going to drop its annual fee of around $11,000 by about $200. Scotch College has said that, because of its vastly increased resources, its annual fee of $11,484 might drop by about $100. I can just see all those people whose children have been prevented from going to Scotch College because they do not have $11,484 a year to spend on their children's education—but they do have $11,384 to spend on their kids' education—rattling on the gates to be allowed in after this $100 decrease. The rhetoric that this legislation increases choice for parents is absolutely false.

Why do I feel so strongly about this? This is something that Labor has had at its core for many years. The reason that it is so important to people on this side of the House, Mr Deputy Speaker Jenkins, as you well know, is that many of us and many of our parents are products of the public school system and received excellent educations there. Also, we have seen people not much older than us, perhaps the previous generation, locked out of many of life's opportunities because they did not have access to decent education. My own parents fall into that category. They left school in their very early teens. They never had access to the education that they should have had because they were intelligent people as there was no universal access to public education. Justice Frank Vincent just last week was quoted in the Age as saying:

and he describes himself as the son of a wharfie—

He went on to say:

Labor does not believe that children are destined for poor educational outcomes or for boring jobs or for unemployment because they grow up in poor families or because their parents have low formal educational achievements. We believe that every child has the right to a decent education at a well resourced school, with teachers who are valued and fulfilled and who have access to ongoing training and career opportunities. Consequently, we are committed to a number of initiatives when we return to government. Unfortunately, I do not have time to go through all of them today, but the abolition of the enrolment benchmark adjustment is vital. Education priority zones will certainly improve the access of kids in poorer areas to schooling and raise the standards of those schools that have been poorly resourced in the past. We will invest more in teacher development. We will invest more in TAFE and in universities, in research and development and in research fellowships. We will increase investment in innovation, as well, which is the end product of an excellent education system. Our well educated students will end up in a country that values knowledge and innovation. We have also spoken in great detail about establishing a learning gateway which will put Australian content on-line. Australian students will be able to access Australian content on-line and teachers after hours. (Time expired)