5AA

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
Interview – 5AA Leon Byner
Thursday 11 February 2016

SUBJECTS: School/ Hospital funding; South Australia‘s share of the GST

LEON BYNER: Now the federal Coalitions’ funding increases in education and indeed in health reflect a commitment to deliver the first four years of what’s known as the Gonski Funding Model. Just a bit of history here. This package was a six year funding deal in which the bulk of additional funding was to be provided in the last two years , the last and most expensive two years of the funding deal. Never appeared in any budget papers and the previous Labor government never explained how they intended to fund them. Likewise, the current Coalition government never committed to delivering the final two years of the deal; in fact they expressly ruled it out well before their first budget was revealed. This means that the so called cuts or savings of which the Weatherill Government is likely to use your money to tell you that there’s $80 billion worth of cuts, never actually existed. Now before I went to air, I thought Leon, better check your facts again so I rang Michael O’Neil from the Centre of Economic Studies and he said that is absolutely spot on. So schools are not getting less money than they have now, they will be getting less than they were lead to believe they might but was never funded for. Chris Pyne is the Federal Industry Minister, Chris what are the facts on health and education? Just for the record.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Good morning Leon, nice to be with you. So in terms of school funding, the total Commonwealth funding to all schools across South Australia will increase by 24.9 per cent so 25 per cent from 2014 to 2018, that’s an increase of $267 million. If you break that down to government schools, their funding will increase over that time by 31.6 per cent. To non-government schools it will increase by 21.3 per cent. So in the four years of the forward estimates and the funding agreement that is a four year agreement, there is an increase in school funding. In terms of health funding if you want to know that as well, did you want me to tell you what that is?

LEON BYNER: Yes

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: The Commonwealth is increasing funding for South Australian hospitals by 19 per cent over the next 4 years, that’s on top of an increase of 12 per cent last year, so well in advance of the CPI which means their funding is going up from $1.1 billion in 2014 to $1.3 billion in 2018. So the idea that there have been cuts to schools or hospitals in South Australia from the Federal Government is just absolutely untrue.

LEON BYNER: If the state government get together with the unions and then they use taxpayer money to run another advertising campaign against the feds accusing you of another $80 billion of cuts, what are you going to do?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well we can’t stop the South Australian government from using taxpayer’s money that way. But I think that they will get a serious backlash from the Australian public, their GST receipts for example are going up, so when they say that they need more money from the GST well the GST receipts for South Australia, so the money the Commonwealth sends to South Australia in GST, in 2015/16 is $5.556 billion, rising next year to $6.1, the year after that to $6.5, the year after to $6.68 so the GST receipts are going up, spending on schools and hospitals is going up, and the promises that Labor made were blue sky promises which most people didn’t believe, because as you pointed out in your introduction they were never in the budget papers because the Labor party never had the money for them.

LEON BYNER: Chris, thank you for clarifying the matter I just though you know what I think Jay Weatherill could make himself an absolute hero of a Premier is rather than advertise this sort of stuff, he gives that money back to the very vulnerable in more rebates for their energy costs, maybe for water and power, I think people would appreciate that and it would be a great act of goodwill.

[ends]