Page 4895 - Week 16 - Tuesday, 26 November 1991
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There is ample evidence, in our view, for the non-government school sector to do what that sector did in North America and put beyond doubt the bases upon which governments fund the non-government sector. The first step in those famous North American Supreme Court actions was to investigate the causal relationship between the decision taken and the ideology that may have influenced it. There is ample evidence in the statements of the Labor Party that it feels antipathetic towards those schools. Secondly, there is legitimate expectation from the promise of the current practice being maintained and a breach of that promise.
Above all, there is the clear comparative basis in the funding in school systems interstate and the decisions taken here. For instance, you have on one line a comparison between $189 within category A here and the next step up is more than $300 interstate, stretching to $700, when our cost of living index is higher than in all those jurisdictions in significant areas. There is now, as determined in veterans' affairs, social security and other test cases, an unreasonableness of such a measure as to import an error of law.
We believe that the decisions taken in this area, as has occurred in Canada and the United States, must be finally litigated and a standard set by the courts for governments to determine a fair basis for funding. That has been done elsewhere in veterans' affairs, social security and other sectors. It must now be done in that venue, in our view, in preference to a board of inquiry.
We do not know whether we will gain support for our amendment to the Appropriation Bill, but we are prepared to support this motion now. We trust that, contrary to what Mr Stevenson and some of the protagonists want, we will not have an open, unpleasant, divisive community inquiry where the person appointed to head it hears evidence from a whole lot of competing concerns. I wonder whether it is really in the interests of some of those non-government schools to have information on their assets and their spending subpoenaed and brought forward in an emotive fashion.
Of course the Labor Party has jumped at this inquiry. I can predict to the letter how the protagonists on the Labor side will deal with this issue of non-government schools. There will be a very strong attempt to separate the Catholic systemic and other schools from the group who are most concerned at the moment. This inquiry will be divisive. It is an inquiry that must happen in one form or another if the non-government schools affected are not prepared to litigate in the Supreme Court to get the final decisions their confreres got in North America.
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