School funds fight hits Longman

The Catholic funding feud has spilt into the by-election with revelations last night that $57 million will be ripped from the Queensland sector.

Bill Shorten said the government was ‘not lifting funding enough’.

The feud over Catholic school funding has spilt into the Longman by-election with revelations last night at a local school forum that $57 million will be ripped from the sector in Queensland over the next two years under the Turnbull government’s reforms.

The Australian has seen a state-by-state breakdown sent to opposition education spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek’s office of what the National Catholic Education Commission claims total $250.6m in funding cuts under the $24.5 billion Gonski 2.0 funding package announced last year.

NSW will suffer the largest cuts of $71m for 2018 and 2019, with Victoria losing $63.1m and Queensland losing $56.9m compared with the funding that would have been provided under the previous policy settings.

South Australia, the home state of Education Minister Simon Birmingham, faces cuts of $26.6m, Western Australia $13.3m, and the ACT will lose a disproportionably large slice, with a cut of $20.5m.

The Queensland Catholic Education Commission had privately warned that by 2023 $44m a year would be stripped from the state sector. This was the equivalent funding to pay for 300 teachers.

Speaking to parents, students, representatives of the Catholic education system and Longman candidates at the forum, held at St Columban’s College in Caboolture, Bill Shorten acknowledged the government was “lifting funding” but said it was “not lifting funding enough”. “A 3.7 per cent increase, for argument’s sake, is not enough. There are 12,500 staff in the education system in the Brisbane diocese. They all get a pay rise, that’s fair enough. There’s been an EBA, a wages agreement, concluded at 2.5 per cent, but once you pay that and look at the on-costs that’s about an increase of 4 per cent,” the Opposition Leader said. “Just simply increasing it a bit is not good enough. If you take this money out of the ATM of the Catholic education system, there are consequences. Your fees go up, schools lose. Why should smaller schools be made unviable because of a government decision?”

The flare-up in the war between Catholic schools and the government comes four days before the by-election in Longman, which Labor held on 0.8 per cent.

Senator Birmingham, who yesterday met with the Queensland Catholic Education Commission, insisted funding was growing and said there had been “a lot of misinformation”. “The Queensland Catholic Education Commission received around $55m more this year compared to last year,” he told the forum. “It’s projected to receive a further increase next year — around $57m next year. That keeps increasing, in fact in a decade’s time the annual funding would be some $654m more than it was last year.

“Having outlined to you the rate of projected funding growth over the next decade for Catholic education in Queensland, that is the bare minimum.”

The Turnbull government had believed that its battle with the Catholic education sector had been resolved following a promise to restore some of the funding. Senator Birmingham had consistently refused to acknowledge that the sector would be disadvantaged but after internal pressure was forced into a partial backdown. To date the dispute had been largely confined at a public level to Victoria and NSW, with the Queensland Catholic schools having been ­reluctant to enter the debate despite acknowledging that it stood to lose significant funding.