Capital Hill

SUBJECTS: Education E&OE............................... Lyndal Curtis: Welcome to the Capital Hill. Can you see the Government managing to get all the jurisdictions to sign up to its education proposals that haven’t yet signed up in the time it’s allowed? Christopher Pyne: Well no, I can’t is the short answer Lyndal and I’d also say that the Government has abandoned any pretence of establishing a national school funding model. You remember that the Gonski Report, one of its central elements was that there should be one model across the country for every jurisdiction and every kind of system. What the Government has created is a terrible mish-mash of different models for different states, territories, independent schools and Catholics. This morning we’ve seen report of the Catholics in fact, will be taken out of the new school funding model; they’ll be funded quite differently. In fact the only group that will still be funded under the Gonski Report recommendations of a new national school funding model will be the independent schools; the 900 independents. Every State and Territory is being offered side deals and special arrangements and chicanery and special deals and sugar, sweetheart arrangements is no way to manage a new school funding model. Curtis: But the Executive Director of the Catholic Education Commission Ross Fox says that the needs principles that were identified in the Gonski Report remain. Doesn’t it, if those principles are there, doesn’t it actually make sense to allow school systems flexibility in where they place their money in where they see the greatest need. Pyne: Well I support and the Coalition 100 per cent supports the systemic funding of the Catholic Schools and have done so since 2000 when the SES funding model began and so therefore you won’t get any argument from the Coalition about funding the system. My point is that the Government’s model which had a whole lot of arrangements, one of them which was to fund each school individually has been tossed out the window, along with the Government’s credibility on a new school funding model. Now the Catholic’s might be pleased to have wrought yet another breakdown from the Government over its school funding model, another concession, but that doesn’t mean that they have a national school funding model, they simply don’t. In fact their model is now more complicated, more complex, less transparent than it was before and it still has at its heart a $325 million cut to schools over the next four years. The Minister ‘Bill the Backstabber” should explain how much money will be granted in 2014, 2015 and 2016 to schools and prove that they will be getting more money because the Auditor General agrees with the coalition that in fact, schools will be getting less money over the forward estimates, not more money. Curtis: If we could look at your policy, Tony Abbott told a forum in Adelaide earlier this year that he agreed with the principles of the Gonski recommendations is it something you would like to take a look at and move to eventually? Pyne: Look, the new school funding model that Labor is proposing bears no resemblance at all to the Gonski model …. Curtis: …but I’m talking about what David Gonski proposed rather than what the Government’s doing. Pyne: If we were in power we would keep the current funding model for twelve months to sort out the chaos that Labor has created. We would focus on teacher quality, a robust curriculum, parental engagement and expanding principal autonomy across the country. There are elements of the Gonski report that we are attracted to, for example loadings per student really is a model where funding follows the student if they are a disadvantaged student and we think that funding should be sector blind for children with disadvantage whether their a non-English speaking background, disabled, indigenous, etc and therefore, we would adopt that recommendation from the Gonski which reflects the Coalition policy in the 2010 election Curtis: So how would that work? Would that be done through specific purpose payments to the States to distribute according to need? Pyne: Well it could be done in a variety of different ways. The Gonski Report suggested a percentage loading per student which would be paid to the school or in the case of the Catholics now, into the system, or to the States. We will, if we get elected, we will sit down with the States; we’ll try and continue the current arrangements for twelve months. We will sit down with the States and the Territories, with the Catholics and Independents and try and work out a fair model that reflects needs based; that is based on objective data and gets the money to where it is required for children with a disadvantage. Curtis: Under your policy, you’ve said a lot about not having Federal bureaucrats determine schools policy, you want control closer to or at the schools but what sort of accountability do you need if you’re giving systems or schools money for loadings that money is actually going to the students who need it? Pyne: Well of course you need to make sure that the money, that Australian taxpayers money, is being spent wisely but you don’t want to load up schools with the incredible regulation and red tape they have now which means that most principals spend an inordinate amount of their time or even hire extra staff whose only job is to fill out forms and comply with red tape and bureaucracy from Canberra or Macquarie Street or North Terrace or wherever. It’s gone too far in one direction and we need schools to be freed up to get on with better teaching. We need teachers to have more time in their day, to unclutter their day so they can concentrate on high quality teaching and professional development and that’s where the Coalition will head. We won’t head down the track of another new institute. Labor’s proposing the Australian School Performance Institute; another bureaucracy another layer of red tape collecting data that we don’t need to collect at the federal level. Curtis: There’s been a lot of talk about indexation under the current formula that you were proposed to stick with for a year. It is the case isn’t it that the indexation is based on an average of what the States spend if their spending goes up then their indexation formula goes up if their spending goes down the indexation formula falls, doesn’t it? Pyne: Yes, but their spending very rarely goes down and I can tell you that the average over the last ten years has been 5.6 per cent indexation so schools have done very well out of the AGSRC indexation method and that is the method the Coalition will keep. I could also tell you that New South Wales in the last year has announced $1.7 billion of more spending. Victoria has settled its pay dispute with teachers; Queensland has announced $600 million of extra spending; Tasmania and South Australia have announced extra money; so there’s no possibility that the AGSRC will not increase which means the current indexation arrangements are more generous than the one that the Government is offering in this new school funding model. Ironically, if a Coalition Government is elected, we’ll have to find $325 million to fund the cut that Labor has made to school funding over the forward estimates. Curtis: What do you do with the States that have already signed on? New South Wales was an early adopter of the proposal of the Federal Government because it said it was already moving in the direction of the Gonski recommendations anyway. Do you think to renegotiate the agreement or can you just pull the agreement? Pyne: Well New South Wales must be second guessing their agreement with the Commonwealth Government because they had as a clause of their agreement that they could, no other State could get a better deal and yet Victoria has been asking for a better deal, Western Australia was offered a better deal, more money was found for the ACT, Tasmania’s been offered a better deal as has the Northern Territory …. Curtis: What happens if you win government, you want to move back for a year to the existing system, what happens to that deal with New South Wales? Pyne: We’ve said time and time again if there is a national agreement, we’ll honour it, if there isn’t a national agreement, we won’t. I’m not going to be in the business, if we get elected of presiding over a model that operates differently across all the States and Territories and across the Catholic Sector and the Independent sector. If that is the mess that Labor leaves us with, which I think is what will happen, then we will keep the current system which is more transparent, less complex, less complicated and delivers more money to schools and we’ll then sort out the mess over the next twelve months. Curtis: Christopher Pyne, thank you very much for your time. Pyne: It’s a pleasure Lyndal. ENDS