Federal election 2025: Peter Dutton takes on ‘woke’ schools funding

Education Minister Jason Clare said the Opposition Leader signed off on the current curriculum under the Morrison government and says the policy is an ‘agenda’ to ‘cut funding from our schools’.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton at Marnog winery in Melbourne to discuss the suburban rail link project.Picture: NewsWire/Thomas Lisson

Peter Dutton is facing a potential schools funding war if he is elected in May, as NSW pushes back against the Opposition Leader’s suggestions he will use federal funding to prevent students from being “indoctrinated” with political agendas.

Mr Dutton on Tuesday said a Coalition government would “reflect community standards in relation to what is being taught at our schools and our universities”.

Citing a recent controversy about a law course at Macquarie University that marked students on their delivery of an acknowledgement of country and protests attended by school teachers, Mr Dutton said in outer Melbourne that this was being “translated into the classroom”.

He said in a separate interview late on Monday night that “we should be saying to states and be saying to those who receive that funding that we want our kids to be taught the curriculum and what our kids need to take on as they face the challenges of the world”.

“That’s the way the federal government can try to influence the NSW government or the Victorian government, whatever it might be,” he told Sky News.

NSW Labor Education Minister Prue Car fired back, accusing Mr Dutton of politicising education.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said Mr Dutton had signed off on the current curriculum under the previous Morrison government and that this was a part of a “bigger agenda … to cut funding from our schools”.

“Given the significant reform NSW has undertaken in delivering its own, nation leading, clear, cohesive and explicit curriculum, I’m reluctant to impose more unnecessary workload onto our hard-working and dedicated teachers for the sake of Peter Dutton’s attempt to politicise our kids’ education,” Ms Car told The Australian.

“It is concerning that Peter Dutton, potentially the next prime minister, is criticising a national curriculum that was signed off by the Liberals and Nationals when he was sitting around the cabinet table.

“We would be happy to brief Peter Dutton on the nation-leading work we are doing here in NSW given he is clearly not across these issues.”

Mr Dutton also cast doubt on the continued scope of the Department of Education and Sky News that “the commonwealth government doesn’t own or run a school and which is why people ask why we’ve got a department of thousands and thousands of people in Canberra called the Education Department if we don’t have a school and don’t employ a teacher”.

Mr Clare said this showed Mr Dutton was threatening “abolishing the department of education”.

“This is the thin edge of the wedge,” he said.

“Peter Dutton’s bigger agenda is to cut funding from our schools. That’s what the Liberals always do.

“This time they will cut funding from our schools to pay for the $600bn of nuclear reactors.”