SA to press Abbott on school funding
South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill will use the next Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting to demand the federal government stick to the deal the state signed over education funding.
Mr Weatherill says he expects to meet with Prime Minister Tony Abbott before COAG and will raise the state’s concerns over education reforms.
“We will insist on behalf of the South Australian people and on behalf of the students of South Australia and their parents that they are not the subject of a broken promise from this federal government,” Mr Weatherill said on Friday.
“They could not have been clearer with the parents and students of Australia when they said that they would honour the funding arrangements of the previous federal government.”
Mr Weatherill said local schools were counting on the increased resources that would have flowed through the deal negotiated before the recent federal election.
“The principals, the teachers, the parents and the students are counting on those resources so that they can provide better teachers, more assistance and better programs so that the unique needs of every single child can be met in our classrooms,” he said.
“This is not a funding disagreement between a commonwealth and a state government, it’s about students of South Australia getting what they were promised.”
But Opposition Leader Steven Marshall urged a wait-and-see approach on what the federal government now planned to put in place before jumping to conclusions on what funding South Australia would get in the future.
Mr Marshall said he was confident, as a South Australian, Education Minister Christopher Pyne, would not “dud” SA.
“Before we all get too agitated let’s just wait to see what the Commonwealth comes up with,” he said.