Wednesday, 2 August 2023

Schools payroll tax

Matthew BACH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (18:32): (361) Yesterday I tabled a petition in this place that had been signed by no fewer than 4436 of our fellow Victorians, and my view is that this petition should be respected and that these Victorians should be heard. These Victorians said to our Parliament that Labor’s new schools tax:

… was announced without prior consultation and is based on an arbitrary definition of a ‘high fee’ school.

These many Victorians went on:

Many schools have indicated that they will be forced to cut services, programs or staff to foot the new tax with some indicating they will have to pass the cost directly onto parents.

They went on:

Many parents work incredibly hard and make significant sacrifices to send their children to independent schools and should not be punished by the Government’s deteriorating debt position and budget mismanagement. This new tax will increase cost of living for many families.

The exact wording of the petition – that being the preamble that was agreed to by 4436 Victorians – is that the Parliament:

… reject the Government’s proposal to impose payroll tax on many independent schools in order to support and uphold diversity and choice in education in Victoria.

On this side of the house we are great believers in choice in education. We do not believe that the many, many Victorians who choose to send their children to state schools, for example, should be forced by the Department of Education to send their children just to one state school that has been determined by some bureaucrat down the road who happened to draw straight lines on a map. We also believe that the many Victorians – 42 per cent of Victorian parents – who want to send their children to an independent school or another denominational school, perhaps a Catholic school, should not be punished for doing so.

The Premier, when he unveiled his schools tax, said that these schools had received a sweetheart deal on payroll tax. They were ‘high-fee’ schools. High-fee schools? This petition has actually been brought forward from a parent at Aitken College in the electorate of Greenvale, and Aitken College has fees of under $8000. Under the initial proposal from the Labor government, this school was deemed a high-fee school.

At a now-famous dinner that the Minister for Education went to and I went to too that was organised by Independent Schools Victoria, I happened to sit next to the outstanding principal of Aitken College Josie Crisara, and I was talking to her about the demographic make-up of her school. So many people in the north of Melbourne, so many people around our state, work so hard to be able to choose to send their children to independent schools. The action I seek is for the minister to scrap this regressive tax.