Page 1214 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 30 May 2007
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What we had after that were years of hard slog, taking an operating loss, which was at that time about a quarter of the entire budget, and turning it round into a surplus by the time of Gary Humphries’s second budget. It was only a small surplus, a $6 million surplus, but to take us from losing a quarter of the budget every year and turning it into any sort of surplus in that short period of time, those six years, was a phenomenal effort. What we see today is that by any reckoning, except Jon Stanhope’s reckoning, we have been in deficit year on year while he has been the Chief Minister, while he has been the Treasurer and while he has let his departments, his officials and his ministers run riot and waste money.
We had him this morning talking about record levels of spending on education. Yes, there has been a lot of spending on education, but let’s put it in context. The Howard government has provided record levels of spending on education since 1996. Federal funding for state schools has increased 70 per cent in real terms since 1996, while enrolments have increased by only 1.2 per cent over the same time, and 76 per cent of students go to state government schools and receive 75 per cent of total taxpayer funding.
Ms Gallagher: That is because the states fund them.
MRS DUNNE: The Australian government’s recurrent funding of public education has been linked to state government funding by the same formula since 1985. Therefore, the more that state governments spend in their schools, the more the commonwealth automatically increases funding to those states. If Mr Barr is correct and we are spending unprecedented amounts on government schools in the ACT, he will see unprecedented amounts of commonwealth grants for education to match the fact that he is spending unprecedented amounts.
In addition to that, the Australian government provides funding for specific purposes, such as the $1.2 billion for investing in our schools, two-thirds of which goes to government schools and the other third goes to non-government schools, and the $1.8 billion for literacy, numeracy and special learning needs programs. In 2006, the Howard government increased total funding of state government schools by 11 per cent, while state governments increased funding, on average, only by 4.9 per cent. It was higher in the ACT than that but, generally speaking, the states and territories are sitting on their hands and taking money from the commonwealth and then complaining when they get it.
What we had here today was Mr Stanhope saying that the ACT government is spending unprecedented amounts on ACT government schools. While we are doing that, while we are spending more money, there are fewer people in our schools. There are many fewer people. Part of that is due to the demographic shift which Mr Barr talks about. There are fewer people in the schools because the cohort of people five to 19 is just getting smaller through demographic changes.
The other thing that we have been seeing over the last 10 years is that there has been a 1.3 per cent decline every year in people attending government schools and a 1.4 per cent increase in people attending non-government schools. That is the 10-year rolling average. In 1998, 64 per cent of ACT children were in ACT government
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