NSWTF: Abbott One Year On - Delivering Division and Disadvantage

The Coalition promised a ‘unity ticket’ on schools funding but have delivered division and disadvantage.

On August 31 March in Australia protesters turned out again in Sydney and
across the nation to denounce the policies of the Abbott Coalition Government.

Maurie Mulheron President

We have had 12 months of lies and broken promises from a Government that is happy to entrench inequality and turn its back on the country’s most vulnerable students.

Within three months of being elected, public anger forced Federal Education Minister Christopher Pyne to back down on a flagrant attempt to break his election promise and end Gonski funding agreements after just one year.

Instead, the Abbott Government waited until the May Budget to tell schools the last two years of the Gonski funding agreements would be abandoned. That means that two-thirds of the Gonski funding will not be delivered and many schools will not reach the minimum resource standard recommended by the Gonski review.

In Opposition Tony Abbott promised the public he would “fund schools ever more generously”, but in Government he changed his tune to “we must reduce the rate of spending growth in the longer term”.
This government has also broken its promise to increase the disability loading from 2015, and will, in fact, strip $100 million out of disability education by not extending National Partnerships funding.

But in Opposition, Christopher Pyne committed to increasing the disability loading, saying then that funding for students with disability was “unfair and inequitable”. His breaking of that promise will lead to more hardship for some of the most vulnerable students in Australia.

There are more than 100,000 students with disability missing out on the support they need in schools. It is an indication of this government’s priorities that it has no money for them but will spend $243 million to continue its attempt to push religious chaplains into public schools.

A few weeks after the Budget Christopher Pyne told a private audience in Canberra that he and Tony Abbott believed they had a “particular responsibility for non-government schooling that we don’t have for government schooling”.

These comments are a clear rejection of the principles underpinning the Gonski Review with its emphasis on sector-blind, needs-based funding.

The Gonski report is the most thorough, most credible analysis of schools funding this country has ever had. It demonstrates that funding schools on the basis of student needs will provide all children with the best opportunity to achieve their full potential.

This Government wants to ignore it, and the growing body of international evidence that equity in funding is the best way to deliver excellence across a school system.

In school funding, as in so many areas, the fiction of a “budget emergency” is being used to justify an ideological agenda that views education as an individual cost rather than a national investment.
We are seeing this agenda in all parts of the education system: from cuts to childcare, early childhood education, schools, TAFE, through to the 20 per cent cut to university funding and the prospect of $100,000 university degrees.

One year on, under the Abbott Government, Australia is in danger of entrenching inequality and disadvantage for generations to come.