Mr GUNNER - 2015-04-29
Yesterday you denied cutting funding to government schools, but every other commentator in the Territory and your budget figures confirm an overall $12m cut to government schools. Compared to Labor’s last budget of $686m, this budget of $663m represents a $23m cut in dollar terms, and a cut of $18m in real terms to government schools. Your budget also includes an additional 3% ongoing in teacher salaries, estimated at $18m this year. This is an $18m hole in our already stretched school budgets. When will you stand up for Territory children, parents and educators, and properly resource our public education system?
ANSWER
Mr Deputy Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition should go back to school and learn how to read budget papers. Over the last few years we have seen increasing budgets in education.
Yesterday I tried to describe that we have gone from an old, dodgy, smoking Dodge and turned it into a very efficient sports car. Over the last few years we have taken a fat bureaucracy, where all the decisions were centralised – just the way Labor wanted because it fears that principals and school councils cannot make decisions at the school level – and transformed education in the Northern Territory.
They are jealous that we are getting better results than Labor did when it was in government.
Mr GUNNER: A point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker! Standing Order 113: relevance. The question was specific; page 231 of your own budget paper shows a $12m cut to government education. Why are you cutting education?
Mr CHANDLER: There are a couple of line items where you see a reduced budget, but put that into context. We have about 750 fewer students in the public sector at the moment. We lost about 250-odd students from Nhulunbuy. It is a shame that the mine there closed its operations and so many people moved out of Nhulunbuy. It had an effect on the number of students in the school.
Another issue is – guess what – the federal government stopped the boats so we have fewer children in centres at the moment. Those children were funded by the federal government. We do not have as many children in these centres today, therefore they are not in our school system and the funding is not there from the federal government.
A number of federal programs have also been cut. Some of those funded programs may come back to the fore later in the year when the federal government announces its budget.
We cannot at the moment put those figures into the budget, simply because we do not know 100% whether the federal government will fund them. Should it fund them, they will be back in the budget. There is a growing budget of $1.12bn worth of investment into education, the largest the Country Liberal government has ever delivered.
ANSWER
Mr Deputy Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition should go back to school and learn how to read budget papers. Over the last few years we have seen increasing budgets in education.
Yesterday I tried to describe that we have gone from an old, dodgy, smoking Dodge and turned it into a very efficient sports car. Over the last few years we have taken a fat bureaucracy, where all the decisions were centralised – just the way Labor wanted because it fears that principals and school councils cannot make decisions at the school level – and transformed education in the Northern Territory.
They are jealous that we are getting better results than Labor did when it was in government.
Mr GUNNER: A point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker! Standing Order 113: relevance. The question was specific; page 231 of your own budget paper shows a $12m cut to government education. Why are you cutting education?
Mr CHANDLER: There are a couple of line items where you see a reduced budget, but put that into context. We have about 750 fewer students in the public sector at the moment. We lost about 250-odd students from Nhulunbuy. It is a shame that the mine there closed its operations and so many people moved out of Nhulunbuy. It had an effect on the number of students in the school.
Another issue is – guess what – the federal government stopped the boats so we have fewer children in centres at the moment. Those children were funded by the federal government. We do not have as many children in these centres today, therefore they are not in our school system and the funding is not there from the federal government.
A number of federal programs have also been cut. Some of those funded programs may come back to the fore later in the year when the federal government announces its budget.
We cannot at the moment put those figures into the budget, simply because we do not know 100% whether the federal government will fund them. Should it fund them, they will be back in the budget. There is a growing budget of $1.12bn worth of investment into education, the largest the Country Liberal government has ever delivered.
Last updated: 09 Aug 2016