Tuesday, 23 May 2023

Adjournment

Jewish day schools

David SOUTHWICK (Caulfield) (19:01): (191) My adjournment tonight is for the Treasurer, and the action that I seek is for Jewish day schools to remain exempt from payroll tax. After a decade of mismanagement, blowouts and overspending, the Andrews government wants to claw back $420 million from independent schools over three years to foot the bill. There are a lot of assumptions when it comes to many of these independent schools, and for this particular adjournment I am focusing on many of the Jewish day schools because the assumption, particularly when it comes to many of those Jewish students at the Jewish day schools, is that these kids can afford to pay. Nothing could be further from the truth. We have 11 Jewish day schools throughout Victoria and about 5000 kids that go to these Jewish day schools, and if you take a school like Yeshivah-Beth Rivkah, which has 900 kids, 85 per cent of those kids are on fee relief.

We know that many of these families are doing it tough, and recently we had a report from the Jewish Education Foundation that suggested that many of our schools would have to amalgamate because many of the kids are leaving the Jewish day schools and going to other schools because the parents simply cannot afford to pay. We have seen from the last census to this census the number of Jewish kids going to Jewish primary schools drop by 5 per cent. This is something particularly concerning for a lot of these kids. It is not by choice: many of the parents that were surveyed actually have said that when choosing between buying a house and paying these school fees, they have chosen to pay the school fees because they know that particularly around faith, particularly around culture and particularly around what these kids are learning, it is very important to invest that money into their Jewish education at the expense of many of their livelihoods.

I do ask the Treasurer to actually look at exempting these particular schools. I would be happy to make available many of the parents and many of the principals in a discussion forum to talk firsthand so he can hear from these kids. I just received a text from one of the parents today that said:

The removal of Payroll Tax concessions to non-Government schools is a pretty low act. Higher costs will be passed on to parents.

This government simply assumes that all parents can afford to pay more in school fees. This simply is not reasonable. It is absolutely concerning today that many of the families scramble to put money together to be able to put their kids through Jewish education. It is the Latham hit list mark 2; there is no question here. This is what Mark Latham did – target those schools. We need to absolutely ensure that these schools can afford to exist.