Page 3603 - Week 12 - Thursday, 19 September 1991
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I can understand those groups' desire to find some reason to pick holes in the Liberal Party's education policy and they may, from their point of view, find many such holes; but I must say that describing the system as a voucher system, advocating voucher-based funding such as that advocated by Milton Friedman, is a criticism which it cannot reasonably be accused of.
Mr Wood: We know that you have more sense than to go down that path.
MR HUMPHRIES: Indeed. Mr Wood has had the good grace to acknowledge that. Certainly, we are talking about base funding for all schools in the Territory. But the Liberal Party goes beyond that to talk about, on top of that, funding especially for government schools, to acknowledge the Government's particular responsibility for government education. Therefore, to suggest that any non-government school would get anything like as much money as any government school would be a gross distortion. You cannot describe that system as a voucher system.
The suggestion also made by some of those opposite is that the Alliance Government, had it remained in office, would have been cutting non-government education funding by $1.6m in this financial year, and $1.9m in the following financial year. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, there are many factors that one has to take into account before deciding on levels of funding in any given year. As far as the Alliance Government is concerned, there was a very clear policy laid out for funding of education and that was that if cuts were to be made in education they were to be sustained proportionately in both the government and non-government sectors.
The Alliance Government made a very deliberate and very well-articulated decision that it would cut both sectors, if it was going to cut at all, proportionately across both sectors. So, every dollar cut per child out of the government sector would be matched by a cut of similar measure in the non-government sector. That was our repeated assertion. It was a policy we proposed to achieve in that area and, in fact, it was the policy I think we ended up achieving for last financial year.
I sincerely hope that that would have been the product of any changes in the area of non-government education in this financial year. But you must bear in mind, of course, that the proposed reductions in government spending proposed by the Alliance Government were greatly reduced as the result of a number of developments, particularly the Hudson report. As a result, the $3m-odd that was talked about originally for cuts in government education before the Hudson report was whittled back to, from memory, something like half a million dollars. I could be wrong about that; certainly, it was much less than was originally proposed. Of course, since that time, those cuts virtually amount to nothing.
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