ABC Brisbane
HOST: Keeping the Prime Minister of Australia on hold for the golf, Prime Minister Gillard good morning to you. Sorry about keeping you waiting.
PM: That's fine, I well and truly understand and big news, and lots of nail-biting around.
HOST: Correct. Now Queensland would receive an extra $3.8 billion for education over six years in the Gonski funding that you've offered the state.
$2.5 billion of that would be from the Commonwealth; it's a two-for-one offer, so that basically means the state of Queensland would have to raise $1.3 billion is they accept your deal.
Where do they find the money Prime Minister?
PM: That's a question for the Queensland Government and the budget choices it's prepared to make.
I understand that it's hard to make budget choices.
I understand what it's like to live in an environment where revenue is constrained.
That's what's happening to us federally.
We're getting less money per unit of GDP into federal government coffers than at any time since the early 1990s.
So what does that mean? It means you live in a world of tough choices; we've made some to put our kids first, I'm obviously asking Premier Newman to do the same.
And when I say put our kids first, that's to make sure that every child goes to a school that is properly resourced and that we get the school funding system right for generations to come.
And we tie that new funding to a school improvement agenda.
Because I've just been to the region, I've been to China, I can tell you our competitors are improving their schools and if we just sit and let them get in front, then that only ends one way.
It ends up with us having a weaker economy and less ability to have the high-skilled, high-paid jobs of the future.
HOST: As I understand the calculation, Prime Minister, this means that schools will get roughly 1 or 2 million dollars per year.
How will that change in the classroom what a school principal can do with his or her school?
PM: Sure, I think that's a really important question, what does it mean for the kids?
What it means for the kids is whatever choice mum or dad has made about which school to go to - Catholic, independent, state school - they know that there are the resources in that school to give their child a great education.
For the children, what it means is that the teachers in their classroom would be from the best and brightest.
We're moving the teacher education model, and would be continually supported to get better at what they do.
And in particular, teachers would be supported so they can manage disruption in the classroom and the scourge of bullying, including cyber-bullying which is stopping so many kids from learning.
HOST: These issues that you've just pointed out, they're not really funding issues, they're more home discipline and teacher quality issues aren't they?
They're not about shovelling money at the problem.
PM: Well teacher quality is pivotal, but in terms of buttressing the quality of our teachers, improving the quality, it does take resources.
We know how to get it done, we've already piloted these things through a national partnership on teacher quality, but I want every teacher in every classroom to be a great teacher.
I also want to make sure through these new resources that schools can employ specialists - librarians, science teachers, language teachers.
That every student has a personalised learning plan, so that means that if one child's falling behind they get the reading recovery work that they need to get them up to where the rest of the class is-
HOST: So this is remedial money almost?
PM: No, no. It's personalised learning plans.
So if one child's behind, they get the work to get them up to where the class is.
But if one child is cantering in front, instead of sitting there being bored to snores by the work the class is doing, they get a personalised learning plan that extends them beyond the work the class is doing so that they're not there bored and disrupting which can happen for our bright kids if the work doesn't keep up with them.
It would mean too that schools have got enough resources to have equipment like the smartboards and iPads, the kind of equipment schools need today.
Every school would have a school improvement plan, and you, me, everyone would be able to benchmark how schools are going-
HOST: Sorry, who drives that school improvement plan? Does the Queensland education department do that, the federal education department, or the school principal?
PM: The schools themselves work out their school improvement plan.
HOST: So that's a tied requirement of the funding if they take it?
PM: That's right, and they're held to account against it.
If you say you are going to do these things to improve your school, and that they will make a difference to the kids' learning outcomes in the following ways, then you're accountable.
It's transparent, it's not just transparent to Premier Newman or to me as Prime Minister or to education ministers sitting around at a ministerial council, it's transparent to everyone because you'll be able to get onto My School and have a good old look.
HOST: So it's accountable to the federal education department?
PM: No, accountable to the Australian community. You will be able to get on My School and have a look-
HOST: Who will they send the plan to, I mean, if the plan is a federal requirement-
PM: The plan goes on My School, you can see the plan, and you can see how schools are achieving against their plans.
HOST: Which is your website, which is the federal government's website.
PM: Yes, well of course, it's a website I determined the nation should have.
But we needed to work with state education departments and state ministers to get it done otherwise we wouldn't have the data for it.
HOST: Now we know that you've come up with this funding model by cutting funds from universities.
I'm going to speak with the vice chancellor of the University of Queensland in just a moment, but Adam Bandt from the Greens said on the weekend that the Federal Government saved more money from pushing single mothers onto Newstart than from the mining tax.
If you hadn't bungled, or if Wayne Swan your Treasurer, hadn't bungled the mining tax, wouldn't you have not needed to cut federal funding to universities to do this?
PM: No, completely untrue. We would always have had to have made savings for these important reforms for schools.
We always said, and I said this last year at the Press Club when I spoke about this big picture reform for the future, really properly resourcing our classrooms for generations, I said then I was going to ask the nation to make some tough choices and that's exactly what I'm asking the nation to do.
But looking at university funding, we have increased funding to universities by more than 50 per cent since we came to government. That's a lot, by more than half.
Universities will continue to get more money next year and the year after than this year.
What we are looking to do is to moderate the rate of growth so that we can make a difference to school funding now for 3.5 million kids and of course get school funding and school reform and improvement right for all of the children to follow.
HOST: So you're doing to universities around Australia what you did to state health departments late last year?
PM: That's completely untrue as well.
There is more money going into Queensland Health from this Government than has ever flown in the history of our federation.
I have ensured that we have stepped up so that when costs are there in Queensland hospitals - costs grow, new money is required to fund that growth - that we are an equal partner in that growth.
That is against former governments like the Howard Government where that percentage was going down and down and down, and was in the 30 per cents.
I've brought it up to 50 per cent.
HOST: Now the total HECS debt in Australia is $26.3 billion.
That's people who have received a free education but have not bothered or for some reason can't bother to pay it back.
Why don't you try and recoup some of that $26.3 billion which is owed to the Commonwealth by Australians?
PM: Well we do make strong efforts to recoup HECS debts, so I can assure you we do do that.
HOST: $26.3 billion is an awful lot of money that's owed to the Commonwealth.
PM: And of course for the vast majority of people it's repaid over time when they hit the income thresholds for repayment.
HECS is a great system, it's enabled us to expand our universities and to make university education affordable for people who never would have got an opportunity to go if there were upfront fees.
People pay the money back when they're earning over an income which shows that they've got some benefit from their degree and that's a good system and of course we do pursue the debts and the debts routinely get repaid.
HOST: Now you just mentioned you've just come back from your successful trip in China, you'd seen what they were doing with education there.
A listener has just sent me a note pointing out that Asian schools have much larger class sizes, more hours in school and much fewer computers than we do already in Australia, and they do much better.
Doesn't that undermine your argument to me this morning?
PM: No it doesn't, because if you look around at the countries in our region - I'm actually staring at a map of the world in my office right now-
HOST: Are you, I'm watching the golf!
PM: Are you? Right, well if you look at Korea, if you look at Singapore, if you look what they're doing in China they are putting in more resources because they understand that the strength of your economy in the future depends on how good education is in classrooms.
Now the point I think behind your caller's intervention, and it's a good one, is it can't just be about money, it has to be about the best ways of working in classrooms to get the maximum results.
I agree with that, this is not just about putting money in.
It's money to drive change, money to drive improvement.
I want every child to get a great education.
We shouldn't rest as a nation until every child gets a great education, but we didn't just work this out in the federal bureaucracy.
What we did is we created My School, so we knew exactly what was going on in schools.
We created national partnership schools where we demonstrated that if you brought some more money to bear combined with new ways of working, kids got a better education.
Now I want to make sure that that happens in every school, not just today but for all the decades to come.
HOST: I'll speak to you again Prime Minister, thank you.
PM: Thanks Steve.