APPROPRIATION BILL 2012

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading (resumed on motion).

Mr PISONI (Unley) (12:43): I rise to speak on the Appropriation Bill. I note that for the first time in my memory, and I think for the living memory of many members in this house, education was omitted from the Treasurer's budget speech. On analysing the bill and the budget since then, you can understand why, because there really is not much for this government to be proud of when it comes to the education it has delivered over the last 10 years and what it is planning to deliver in the future.

Whenever questions are asked of the education minister about schools, NAPLAN scores, or maths and science, they are ignored and replaced with comments about early childhood development. Of course, we all support early childhood education and early childhood development, but what concerns me is that this government has given up on that cohort of students who are already in the school system. I am referring to those students where we have seen four years where the NAPLAN results have been worse than for the previous year, those students we are seeing continually not turning up for school for two or more weeks per term, as per the government's own figures.

If you look back at the history and the rhetoric of the Labor government on education, I know that there was fanfare and a cry, if you like, from the then opposition leader, Mike Rann, that he was going to be an education premier here in South Australia. But let's look at what has happened in the 10 years Labor has been controlling and running of the education system here in South Australia, and you do not have to go much further than the Grattan report, which was released in February this year, and the Gonski report, which was released in March this year. There were two consistent findings from those reports, and that was that in Australia the education system has gone backwards compared with our trading partners and our nearest neighbours—that we have gone backwards in relation to educational outcomes.

What is even more concerning about those figures is that the distance between those from a difficult socioeconomic background compared to those in the leafy green suburbs has expanded, the difference in educational outcomes has expanded. In other words, we are seeing fewer opportunities for those who start life in a position less privileged than others, and that has been happening across Australia over the last 10 years, according to David Gonski.

The common thread of what has also happened over the last 10 years is that every single education system in this country has been run by a Labor government. We had Labor governments coast to coast. Remember how excited Labor was about the 'Kevin 07' campaign in 2007? Not only was the Labor Party in government right across the country, running all of the education systems but, for the first time ever, there was also a Labor government in Canberra—and that was achieved in 2007.

It is almost as though, now that the Labor Party has achieved that, nothing else matters. If you look at what has happened since then, we have seen the embarrassment of a change of leader in the Labor Party. The Labor Party powerbrokers and the trade unions thought that Kevin Rudd was doing a terrible job, so he had to go. Of course, they replaced him with Julia Gillard, who only just held on in the subsequent election, with the help of Independents, forming a minority government. It was the first time since 1929, I think (I am sure the member for Croydon will correct me if I have it wrong), that a first-term government had been reduced to a minority on the floor of the house at a federal level. Of course, the sadness of all of that is that, during this period of Labor governments coast to coast, we saw a decline in the educational standards in Australia and South Australia.

Let's look at that promise that Mike Rann would be an education premier, and let's look at what actually happened. We always hear about these historical numbers, 'An all-time high.' Of course, it is all relative because every year things go up and every year the budget grows. Even this year, when we have been told that we have been stripped of all of these revenues, we still have an increased budget compared with the previous year. But there has been one consistent theme when it comes to education expenses as a percentage of the budget since the last Liberal budget in 2001-02, where 25.5 per cent of the budget was spent on education, to this year's budget, where 25.4 per cent is to be spent on education. If you look at the figures in between there, we have seen some variations. In the first Labor budget, we saw that 25.2 per cent of the budget was spent on education. In 2008-09, we dipped down to 24.3 per cent of the budget spent on education. The bottom line is that the government has made no greater contribution to education per size of the budget than was in place when this government took office.

Let us look at what has happened since then. Under this government, we have seen 13,000 students leave the public system and go into the private system. We have seen a very close relationship develop with the Labor Party in government, the department and the Australian Education Union. We have seen a shift in emphasis from teaching being the profession it once was to becoming a job or an industrial situation, where industrial agreements and industrial concerns, through the EBA, become the focus of the government and the union, and consequently children's education must work around that. Nothing could be more damaging to the outcome of children's education than having a system in place that ignores good teaching and that prevents principals from choosing their staff and from managing their staff.

The last EBA, which we all remember was cobbled together by this government in the lead-up to the election because it had done such an appalling job of managing the EBA process for two years prior to that, saw the establishment and firming up of powers of the personnel advisory committees. A personnel advisory committee is made up of the principal, a union rep from the Australian Education Union and an occupational health and safety rep. Any decision to do with staffing levels and even the complexity and make-up of the school staffing—even if a principal wishes to move a teacher from one class to another—must be discussed at a personnel advisory committee. The principal is outnumbered. The principal is supposed to be running the school, but he is outnumbered; his is only one of three votes on that committee.

In that situation, can you imagine any business where the person who is entrusted to run that business, the person who is held up to account for any failures of that business, cannot make any decisions unless he has the agreement of the union representative? That is what we have in our South Australian schools. I had a briefing just recently in Western Australia by the Department of Education about their very successful independent public schools program. We discussed some of the things that were happening here in South Australia with those departmental people—these are not political people but people within the education department of Western Australia—and we discussed how the personnel advisory committees worked. They could not believe that a government would burden a school leader with such a draconian system of management.

I think it goes to the point that, from the government's capitulation on this issue, we can see that it does not trust principals to run their schools, it does not trust school communities to make the decisions for their schools. If we look at the education outcomes, we ask, 'How's that been working for you?' We have seen fewer of our students attending government schools here in South Australia, worsening NAPLAN results year after year and very worrying 'absentee without reason' figures in our schools.

We also need to look at how over the years this government has developed a cost-shifting culture for parents in government schools. Here in South Australia our school fees are determined and gazetted every year, and schools can decide if they want to increase those fees. There have been cuts to schools over the years—not to the department but cuts in schools. If we go back to Premier Weatherill's first budget as education minister, there were about $100 million in cuts to schools. These cuts included things such as basic skills testing grants ($8.1 million).

We had co-located schools, forced amalgamations, and we saw the outcome of that just recently when this government put parents through the charade of pretending that they were listening to what they had to say when it came to school amalgamations. Initially they were going to save $4 million a year, but FOI documents have confirmed that figure is much bigger now at $6 million a year, and they spent $375,000 establishing those committees so that they could argue that they were consulting when the minister made that decision.

As to the continuous intake, we were told that we needed to bring ourselves into line with the Eastern States, and that was a justification for that, but if you look at the budget papers you will find that the real justification was $8.2 million in savings over the forward estimates. That is $8.2 million that has been pulled out of our schools as a budget measure. Why did the government need those budget measures? Because it was not prepared to increase the percentage that education receives in this state from the budget, but it had to make provisions for the increase in non-instruction time awarded to teachers in the latest EBA. South Australia now has the greatest non-instruction time for teachers in the country, and that was funded through cuts to our schools, not through additional funding to the budget. As a matter of fact, about $48 million just this year alone is this government's contribution to EBA arrangements.

Everybody has to be paid, and the government signed off on these EBA arrangements, but it did not make provisions in its own budget to pay for them. It took them—certainly Jay Weatherill, as education minister, took them from schools. If you look at other areas where Premier Weatherill, as education minister, took money from schools, you will see that it included $3.2 million from family day care centres. Green school grants: remember the big announcement on green schools? It was the windmills first and they ended up in storage because they did not work and the company that produced them went belly up. Then the solar panel program simply did not deliver on the expectations that the government had for installing those panels. Consequently, that has been completely dropped from the budget.

IT learning technologies: $8.8 million in cuts from IT at a time when this government has accepted hundreds of millions of federal dollars for computers in schools at a time when we need those computers to be utilised. We have seen cuts in IT learning programs in our schools to the tune of $8.8 million.

This is a sad budget for education here in South Australia, and it is no wonder that the Treasurer omitted it from his speech because he was embarrassed about the last 10 years and he was embarrassed of what he had provided as a treasurer for the future of education here in South Australia. We debated in this place a couple of weeks ago about TAFE and further education—but even with the announcement about the government's new training program, the advanced training facility for mining at TAFE at Regency Park—they have ripped $10.5 million out of the Sustainable Industries Education Centre that they announced in previous budgets. They have discounted one promise to help fund another, even before that one has got off the ground.

Of course, let's remember the promises that were made when that was first announced. It was about 8,600 new jobs at that Sustainable Industries Education Centre at Tonsley Park at the former Mitsubishi site. Now the latest figures from this government are down to about $3,500 with the latest revamp of what is going to happen down at that site. So, we are seeing a government that has dropped the ball on education, that has lost interest in education, that has not even been focussed on training. This government has had seven training ministers. I seek leave to conclude my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

[Sitting suspended from 13:00 to 14:00]