Education and the election - Dollar for dollar?

From Maurie Mulheron
President NSW Teachers' Federation

The election on September 7 will provide Australians with an opportunity to determine how schools are funded in Australia.

There is now a clear choice. Teachers, principals and parents can either have a fully funded six year growth model that commits both the state and federal governments to jointly provide additional funding or a four year model which does not require the state government to make a contribution.

The real Gonski funding model is a formal national agreement signed between the NSW Liberal/National State Government and the Federal ALP Government, which provides certainty for all schools for six years, with two-thirds of the funding scheduled for the final two years. Both governments have to commit to additional funding for the six years.

This agreement requires states to maintain, rather than cut, their education budgets for six years, to grow the schools education budget by 3 per cent and to allocate funds to schools according to need, based on student enrolment profile.

However, the Federal Opposition leader, Tony Abbott, announced a pretend ‘Gonski’ model, which is one-third of the funding, for only four years, which does not require the State Government to stop the education cuts, which does not require states to grow their education budgets at all, and which does not require states to allocate funds according to student need.

As the election approaches, it is clear that the Federal Opposition is attempting to neutralise schools funding as an issue.

On August 2, Mr Abbott announced he was on a “unity ticket” with Mr Rudd on schools funding. Going further, he claimed that he was going to match the ALP’s commitment “dollar for dollar”. But this claim does not hold up to scrutiny. As Maralyn Parker, education writer for the Daily Telegraph, wrote in her column on August 15, “The [Liberal/National] Coalition has not matched Labor’s school funding policy. There is no ‘unity ticket’ on schools funding, as Tony Abbott claims.”

Later in the same article Ms Parker explains, “Abbott’s plan is to copy only the first four years of Labor’s Gonski school funding reform plans, investing only $2.8 billion. This is not even a half Gonski. It misses the bulk of the $10 billion in federal funding that would go to the most needy Australian schools under Labor’s six-year schools funding plan.”

We have provided in this edition of the journal data for all federal electorates covering NSW. Using the funding figures that were the basis for the national agreement signed by the NSW Government, Federation determined how much each electorate should receive under the full six year agreement. By calculating the federal component of that figure using the 65:35 split between the federal and state governments, it is possible to calculate how much schools would lose out on under the Abbott ‘one-third’ model. Readers are invited to peruse the figures for their
electorate.

This election provides an opportunity for Federation members to send a clear message to all politicians to commit to the full Gonski model for all six years. Our children are worth this commitment.