Senator O'BRIEN(3.16 p.m.) —Last Friday the Minister for Schools, Vocational Education and Training, David Kemp, announced an unbelievable proposition to Australia; that was, that this government had actually increased funding to the government school area. That reminded me of the events that occurred in the televised world series wrestling. In this case, the Minister for Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, Senator Vanstone, was on the ropes and ready to go down for the third of the best of three falls. Minister Kemp has jumped into the ring to try to save her from that third fall. This is an unbelievable proposition.

As we have just heard from Senator Carr, when the budget was announced cuts to the government school sector totalled $128 million; they are now almost $177 million. That is according to the most recent answers that we have been given by Minister Vanstone and her departmental staff in relation to the impact of the abolition of the new schools policy and the application of the enrolment benchmark measure to the funding of the schools sector in Australia.

There clearly is a case of cost shifting to the states in this area, and a big question mark hangs over what is going to happen to the funding of both the government and the non-government school sectors arising from this policy. The minister and departmental staff have consistently said that what happens with the funding of schools in the states is going to be left to the states, that they are going to be freed up to make their decisions. When you look at the regulation of the non-government schools that applies in the various states, it is pretty clear that they have relied upon the Labor new schools policy as a de facto means of regulating the education sector. There is no doubt it is on the public record and that there are very few tests in relation to the viability of schools, to the establishment of schools which directly compete with other funded educational entities in the same sector, other than Labor's new schools policy.

Labor had announced and established a review of that policy to finetune it. This government is simply saying, `We will sweep all of this away and, as we do so, we are going to make some massive changes to the funding of the sector.' We have been told that we will now see at least $177 million go from the state sector. We have been told that the non-government sector will get an additional $150 million from the enrolment benchmark measure. But if that figure is as rubbery as the figure that relates to the reduction in funding in the government sector, perhaps we can expect that there will be an even greater increase in funding to the non-government sector.   None of the private school areas are able to give us any real estimate of the effect of these measures in terms of the additional funds they will be receiving from the Commonwealth. Some would have us believe that there will be a small impact. Some would have us believe that there will be no impact at all, which makes a deception of the figures announced by this government. There are others who say that the impact of this measure will be to greatly increase the funding of the non-government sector and to reduce the funding of the government sector, perhaps to the effect of doubling the funding of the non-government sector and reducing the funding of the government sector by as much as 20 per cent over a five- to 10-year period. So we have had a variety of answers on this question.

The answers that the minister has given today and earlier are demonstrative of the fact that even the minister does not know just how much of an impact these measures are going to have. Nor does her department and, from the evidence we have had, nor does the private school sector. It is a disgraceful policy approach by this government, an approach that can only destabilise the government education sector.

The minister ought to have a closer look at the figures and this government ought to reconsider its policies and decide to make some real impact on the government sector in this country, because we can see—and all my constituents are telling me—that it is about time some stability were introduced into the government sector, and this policy is not going to achieve that. It is going to destabilise it; it is going to destroy schools. It will see the educational opportunities for 70 per cent of Australians reduced on the basis of choice, a choice which is going to be exercised against the interests of the majority.