Page 1843 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 2 May 2012
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doorknocking was quite marked. Many of those people were doing so not because of their traditional commitment to Catholic education but because they recognised the benefits of a Catholic education even if they themselves do not entirely sign up to all the tenets of what the Catholic Church believes and teaches.
It is a very important message in the ACT. As Mr Doszpot has said, 29 per cent of all children in the ACT are educated in Catholic schools. They make a significant contribution to the development of our young people.
I want to particularly emphasise the issue of fair funding for Catholic schools, which was the issue that I was going to move an amendment on. I note that Ms Hunter has an amendment that goes part of the way, but it does just seem to skate around the edges. She says “provide fair and equitable funding to all schools”. This is a motion about Catholic schools and the contribution that Catholic schools make to the ACT community. It is interesting that the Greens cannot quite bring themselves to come out and say, “Yes, we think that Catholic schools should receive fair funding.” That is essentially what my amendment would do.
We have to hark back to debates that we have had in this place in the past and ask the Greens whether they have resiled from the election policies of the 2010 federal election, when they spoke in very derisive terms of funding for non-government schools in general. We had an odd arrangement where Bob Brown, depending on which audience he was speaking to, would have a different message about what his views were on Catholic and non-government education and the extent to which it should be funded.
At the time many people in Catholic education circles raised concerns about Greens policies. They believed that Greens policies, if they were implemented, would force closures or at least cause substantial increases in fees and change the ability of Catholic schools to be genuinely Catholic and, in the words of the then head of the Catholic Education Office in Melbourne, greatly diminish the ability “to help the poor and the marginalised, to serve the neediest students”. He said that the cuts proposed by the Greens would “flow through to cuts to our current programs for recent arrivals and refugees in Catholic schools”. He said:
We estimate the Greens funding policy would cut $427 million from Catholic schools including more than $110 million taken from Victorian Catholic schools …
These were the concerns at the 2010 federal election. It is encouraging to hear Ms Hunter say warm words about Catholic schools in the ACT, but the most important thing that we could see from the Greens is a complete turning of their backs on the published policies of the Greens at the time of the 2010 election when they proposed to take money from the non-government sector. I would like to hear Ms Hunter, and I am sure that my colleagues would be prepared to give her leave, stand and unequivocally dissociate herself from these policies and make a strong policy statement in favour of equitable funding for Catholic schools and independent schools—not just warm words, but a genuine commitment to that. At the moment, as things currently stand, the Greens have a strong record of being opposed to equitable
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