Christopher Pyne turns school funding attack on Labor

CHRISTOPHER Pyne has accused Bill Shorten of ripping $1.2 billion from school funding for Queensland, WA and the Northern Territory.

CHRISTOPHER Pyne has accused Bill Shorten of ripping $1.2 billion from school funding for Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory in one of his final acts as education minister.

As Mr Pyne today declared he would not meet with the former government's Gonski funding panel, the Education Minister vowed to introduce a “flatter, simpler, fairer structure” for funding schools.

He took aim at Mr Shorten, saying he had taken away funding earmarked for states that hadn't signed so-called Gonski funding deals.

“Shorten's shocker of a funding model is the legacy the previous Labor government left for Australian schools. It is up to the Coalition to sort through this mess and we'll have more to say on this soon,” Mr Pyne told The Australian.

In the economic statement released in August by the Rudd government on the eve of the election campaign, the treatment of payments for non-participating states and territories was separated from the government's Gonski funding and listed as “nfp” (not for publication).

The pre-election economic and fiscal outlook detailed the funding as $1.2bn over the forward estimates including $118.2m in 2013-14, $222.9m in 2014-15, $352 in 2015-16 and $510.2m in 2016-17.

Mr Pyne said the Coalition would renegotiate the Gonski system, while retaining Labor's original four-year funding envelope.

But NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli said his state had a binding agreement with the commonwealth.

He said Gonski's needs-based funding model must be retained.

“The Gonski report made it very clear that the funding model was broken and they spent a lot of time looking at that model and it's a position that the NSW government has agreed to,” Mr Piccoli told the ABC's Lateline program.

“We have a lot of students who slip through the cracks. That's why I'm such a strong supporter of a needs-based funding model, because it's not just an educational issue, this is a social issue for Australia, it's an economic issue and to a large degree it's a moral issue as well.”

Mr Pyne said it would be “unseemly” to get into a slanging match with NSW or any state.

But he said the model negotiated with the former government could not be delivered.

“The Shorten shambles is so incomprehensible, so over-regulated, so prescriptive, so much command and control from Canberra ... that they have come up with a model that is essentially incapable of being implemented,” he said.

Mr Pyne said a needs-based funding model was a very good principle, but precious funds were going on regulation and prescription rather than at the schoolyard level.

He declined an offer from Gonski panel member Kathryn Greiner to meet to discuss the previously agreed system.

“No, I've studied the Gonski model closely and I have to get on with the job of being education minister,” Mr Pyne told ABC radio.

“It's time for the government to be allowed to get on with the job, and that's exactly what I intend to do.”