Funding Cuts Undermine Indigenous Education

Member for Lingiari and Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Indigenous Affairs and Northern Australia Warren Snowdon said today the 2004 Government cuts to the Indigenous Education Direct Assistance Program continued to have a negative impact on school participation in Aboriginal communities.

Speaking during debate on the Indigenous Education (targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill, Mr Snowdon said the cuts meant parents had less say in schools and were less inclined to become involved.

'They're voting with their feet and you can't blame them,' he said.

'The cuts killed off the ASSPA committees and access to the Indigenous Tutorial Assistance Scheme.

'And you could have predicted the result.

'Fewer kids are able to access tutorial assistance and the revised scheme is in fact significantly underspent – by $124 million in 2004-2005 alone.

'While the Bill proposes to extend ITAS to Year 9 students, which I welcome, the cuts have militated against higher achievement and better success rates because access to ITAS is based on underperformance in the MAP testing.

'If students are identified as underperformers when they enter school, why make them wait until after tests three years later have proved it?

'This is ideological idiocy, it's cruelling Indigenous kids' chances and it's a classic example of this Government's inability to see beyond the one size fits all model.

'The Minister needs to big enough and imaginative enough to go back to before 2004 and reinstate what worked.

'To underspend on a program that's supposed to target an area of huge disadvantage is criminal,' Mr Snowdon said.

2006-09-06