NEW England schools are the big winners after the federal election, with education advocates hailing the campaign calling for the Coalition to rethink its position on Gonski funding a “big success”.
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With the result of the July 2 poll on a knife edge for more than a week – the Coalition was returned by a slim majority yesterday – the NSW Teachers Federation, Australian Education Union and the NSW Federation of P&Cs have claimed it as a “win for education”, proof voters supported the parties that committed to the full six years of the Gonski funding agreements with the state.
During the campaign, the New England electorate was visited by one of two giant green billboards spruiking the pro-Gonski message, which travelled through 18 marginal electorates across the country.
Susan Armstead, regional organiser for the NSW Teachers Federation, said the dramatically better-than-expected result for Labor could be attributed in part to voters’ belief in the Gonski funding model and the need for the Coalition to commit to the final two, and most lucrative, years of the agreement.
She said returned New England MP and Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce should take no comfort in his 58 per cent two-party preferred result, saying that still represented a lot of voters who’d rejected Coalition policies, including those related to education.
“This says Mr Joyce is not sitting in a safe National Party seat and, as a teacher, I would describe his result as ‘fair to satisfactory’,” Ms Armstead said.
“If people were wholly enraptured with his policies, then he would have achieved a higher result than that.”
Ms Armstead said the Gonski campaign was far from over, with a recurrent needs-based funding system for schools vital for students.
“We’re not going to let this go, because it’s important for our children and the future of this country,” she said.
Ms Armstead said Mr Joyce’s pre-election announcement that the Coalition would conduct a review into equity of education access for rural and regional students was “bizarre and hypocritical”, given he was part of a government that wanted to end Gonski funding after 2017.
“We’ve had a review, that was the Gonski review and what it found was that rural, regional and remote area kids were disadvantaged and (this funding model) was a way of addressing this inequity,” she said.
