Thursday, 1 June 2023

 Moira DEEMING (Western Metropolitan) (09:48): Last week I spoke with many working-class parents and dedicated teachers who are dreading Labor’s payroll tax on non-government schools. It is a tax on teachers who are already overworked and whose classes are already overcrowded. Schools need more teachers and teachers need more prep time, and this is inevitably going to result in less of both. It is a tax on working-class parents already facing rent or mortgage distress, who are now going to have to face a sudden and huge increase in school fees simply because they already pay more. And it is a tax on students, who know that being handed iPads and being told to self-direct their learning in overcrowded and poorly supervised classrooms is just not going to work. Labor paint themselves as some version of Robin Hood, taking from the rich and giving to the poor, but it is actually the government who are a rich, bloated, overtaxing bureaucracy, stealing from the working classes to pay off their unnecessary debts.

I will just give one example, but I could give many more. When my husband and I took in Man, a young Vietnamese asylum seeker, to live with us, I took him straight out of the public school, where he was bored and unhappy and had been put into a lower year level than he was capable of, and I drove him straight over to the local Catholic Regional College Sydenham. After just one meeting, as I predicted, they happily enrolled him in year 10, organised a uniform for him and introduced him to some teachers and students to begin right away. Man went to CRC Sydenham for three years. He graduated year 12, all the while suffering from cancer. That school never charged him or me a cent, and they did everything they could to achieve his dreams. There are countless stories like that from private and independent schools all over the state.