Remarks at Launch of Parliamentary Friends of Cath Schools

St Patrick’s Primary School Parramatta and Parramatta Marist are able to trace a continuous line with the school founded by the first Catholic Chaplain to the Colony, Fr John Joseph Therry, on his arrival in 1820. So Catholic education in Australia will celebrate its bicentenary in 2020; this also means we were running schools three decades before there were any state schools.

With the advent of Australia’s first Catholic Bishop, John Bede Polding, a number of religious orders established schools: English Benedictines, Irish Sisters of Charity, Sisters of Mercy, Christian Brothers and many others including the home-grown Good Samaritan Sisters, and, most famously, Mary MacKillop’s Sisters of St. Joseph. Obviously these schools focused on Catholic kids at a time of sectarian divides and fear of other schools; but even from the beginning Catholic schools welcomed children of all faiths, especially the most disadvantaged in remote areas and poor suburbs.

Until 1882 the NSW government assisted with grants of crown land and recurrent state aid, but after the secularist push of the 1870s and ‘80s Church schools were frozen out. Catholics fought back by building more schools than ever and funding them through parish contributions and parent fees. By the middle of the 20^th century the disparity between the well-funded government schools and the poor Catholic schools (with substandard facilities, oversized classes and under-qualified teachers) had become a public scandal. The Menzies, Whitlam and Howard governments, in particular, sought to ensure every kid, whatever their faith, could received a good education in Australia; and so the Commonwealth became a major funder of Catholic and Independent schools while states remained major funders of government schools.

Today over 5.2 million Australians self-identify as Catholic; they and their parishes own, sponsor, feed or neighbour 1700 Catholic schools, which serve more than 700,000 students and families (by no means all Catholic), and employ 70,000 staff, making us by far the biggest non-government educator, employer and charity. 595 of those schools are in NSW and over a quarter of a million of those students.

This means that the Catholic system makes an enormous contribution to our educational ecology. It relieves the state of considerable cost, ensures parental choice, and provides particular charisms of prayer, witness, catechesis and pastoral care. Thus far the Catholic system has been a major factor:

• in raising the poorest part of the Australian community up to the middle class;
• in originally reflecting but ultimately reducing sectarianism and ethnic tensions in this country, and
• in ensuring we are a nation that celebrates cultural and religious diversity rather than seeking to homogenise people.

Today Catholic schools are the equal of other schools in Australia in facilities, pedagogies, and professionalism. But we mustn’t be complacent. There are those who would oppose all religious institutions, including faith-based schools, religious freedom for schools (even niggardly exemptions in Australian law) and state aid. 2017 saw the Commonwealth announce a funding arrangement that would have seen Catholic education funding plateaux or decline in real terms every year for a decade, Independent School Funding grow by 2% in real terms per year, and state school funding more than double that rate of growth. This would have seen Catholic schools become less and less competitive, and made 300-600 Catholic schools financially unsustainable.

That catastrophic result has happily been averted by the Commonwealth and State governments in recent weeks and for this we are grateful; but the low-fee Catholic system must continue to survive on significantly less government funding than kids at neighbouring state schools in the same demographic and make less go further even after parents’ fees are added in. And so we must carefully watch the Commonwealth and the state to ensure that no hidden reductions in recurrent grants or percentage of SRS covered.

Going forward, the Catholic sector hopes to bear its share of the burden of the growing school-aged population. In NSW we are planning for around 10,000 additional students over the next three years, 11 new schools and the expansion of 41 others; yet the NSW Government’s total annual capital contribution is barely enough for one K-12 school per year. It remains a mystery to me why the Victorian & Queensland Governments provide so much more capital funding support each year for their (smaller) non-government school systems than the NSW Government does; they seem to understand that if the Catholic system builds more schools, it relieves the state of building or expanding as many schools itself. It is, therefore, very much in the state’s interest for the Catholic system to maintain its presence; Victoria has announced a huge boost in capital grants for non-government schools, but this hasn’t got through in NSW…

The Catholic sector also wants to bear its share of the burden for early childhood learning centres: but we face inflexible regulations designed for a for-profit sector that can effectively shut us out. This is not a matter of sector rivalry or envy: I care passionately about state schools and independent schools too. First, because one-half of Catholic kids are in them; secondly, because good citizens want every kid to get a first-rate education; but I don’t ever want to return to the situation of the 1960s where Catholic schools had double the class-sizes of their neighbouring schools and inadequate facilities (indeed, the so-called ‘Goulburn Strike’ was because we couldn’t afford sufficient toilets).

Given the extraordinary contribution of Catholic schools to our social capital and our children today, it is essential that our kids and families not become hostages in political battles and that as far as possible there be fair bi-partisan support for them. And so I welcome the establishment of Parliamentary Friends of Catholic Schools and their every effort to ensure that going forward we focus on real, principled, needs-based funding of schools: funding that addresses the need of every kid to have a quality education; the need of every parent to have choice in education, including the choice of a faith-based school; and therefore the need of every government to support low-fee, local, faith-based schools along with all other schools.

Thank you all for your commitment to that vision!