In an enormous attack on public education, the state Labor government in Victoria has secretly slashed more than $2.4 billion in promised school funding over the next six years.

The cuts also impact federal funding arrangements, which are matched to the state allocation. That brings the total withdrawal of desperately needed school funding to $3 billion. Underscoring its hostility and contempt for school educators and workers, as well as the working class more broadly, the government attempted to keep its cuts secret.

A behind closed doors meeting of the government’s Budget and Finance Committee—comprising the premier, treasurer, and three senior ministers including the education minister—met in March 2024 and decided to postpone pledged school funding by three years, from 2028 to 2031. This decision was never publicly disclosed, and the “savings” were concealed within last year’s budget documents. The real situation only emerged last month after reporters with the Age newspaper accessed confidential cabinet documents.

The $3 billion funding cut underscores the fraud that is the federal Labor government’s so-called Better and Fairer Schools Agreement (BFSA). 

Less than a year after the secret austerity measure was decided, the Victorian and federal governments signed BFSA, amid great fanfare. This involved the federal government pledging to increase its share of school funding, calculated through the opaque “Gonski” School Resource Standard (SRS), from 20 percent to 25 percent. The Victorian government had previously pledged, in 2019, to increase its share of SRS funding from 70 to 75 percent.

The BFSA was described as an “historic agreement that will put all public schools in Victoria on a path to full and fair funding,” in a joint media release issued in mid-January this year by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, federal education minister Jason Clare, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan, and state education minister and Deputy Premier Ben Carroll. Albanese also added: “This gives certainty to parents and teachers, while setting our children up for the future.”

All of this has been exposed as a litany of flat out lies. The state government’s move to postpone its funding increases until 2031 also triggers the postponement of the federal government financing—and it remains to be seen whether the funding is ever delivered.

The BFSA was always a fraud. The World Socialist Web Site has previously noted that the nominal spending increase was just $16 billion, divided between the states and territories over a decade. This represents a drop in the bucket compared to what systematically underfunded public schools require.

“Moreover,” the WSWS explained, “it is highly unlikely that the pledged funding will eventuate. The [Albanese] Labor government has deliberately backloaded the vast majority of the additional spending into the 2030s. Of the vaunted $16.5 billion spending pledge, just $400 million, or 2.4 percent of the total, will eventuate in the next four years.”

The Victorian government’s austerity cuts have immediately confirmed this prediction. 

Meanwhile, while funding is frozen, the other highly regressive aspects of the BFSA will be implemented. As federal education minister Jason Clare has repeatedly insisted, there is no “blank cheque” with promised funding, and the new agreement entails new standardised testing for children and greater “accountability” for teachers, adding to already overbearing workloads.

Other states will undoubtedly follow Victoria in implementing education cuts in the guise of “postponing” the implementation of the BFSA. Victoria is only the sharpest expression at the state level of a broader economic crisis, with tax breaks for corporations and the ultra-wealthy as well as ramped up military spending fuelling debt and deficits.

Victoria currently has the highest debt, with a projected record of $194 billion within three years. The state Labor government is imposing widespread cuts to services, including thousands of public service job cuts, heeding the demands of the international credit rating agencies and big business.

The public education system will be plunged further into crisis. The government has previously postponed or cancelled multiple school infrastructure upgrades. Victoria’s schools are already the lowest funded in Australia, and the state’s teachers the lowest paid. 

Meanwhile, as throughout the country, private schools, including the most elite that charge as much as $50,000 in annual tuition, continue to rake in enormous public funding and construct lavish facilities for their privileged students.

The situation that has emerged is the direct responsibility not only of successive state and federal governments, Labor and Liberal, but also the Australian Education Union (AEU) and its state affiliates. The AEU in Victoria has issued several statements opposing the $2.4 billion funding cut, and has planned a series of demonstrations outside government members parliamentary offices, beginning this Thursday with deputy premier and education minister Ben Carroll. This show of opposition is a complete fraud. 

The AEU has campaigned on behalf of the Labor Party at every state and federal election in the last period. In every state and territory, the union apparatus has delivered regressive enterprise agreements covering teachers and school workers. In Victoria, since 2014 when the state Labor government was installed, the AEU has ensured there has not been a single day of strike or industrial action affecting schools.

The last agreement in Victoria was rammed through by the AEU bureaucracy, through a series of anti-democratic measures including censorship in the face of massive opposition to the enormous real wage cut, with nominal teacher salaries rising by less than 2 percent a year. Workloads continue to worsen every year, with continuous increases in administrative and data-related impositions.

The AEU’s so-called campaign against the Labor government’s cuts is directed towards smothering the widespread anger among teaching staff and channelling it into toothless appeals to the government and the parliament. The union is urging school workers to write to their local parliamentarian and plead for a reversal in policy, thereby promoting the most futile course of action imaginable. 

The AEU has also expressed support for the Greens’ demands for a parliamentary inquiry. The Greens in the state parliament’s upper house have moved that the Legislative Council Legal and Social Issues Committee “consider the impact of the delay of Gonski funding for Victorian students, teachers and schools, with the inquiry set to report by April 2026.”

In other words, a powerless parliamentary committee will spend the best part of a year preparing a report that will do nothing as the state government proceeds with its anti-working class austerity agenda. AEU Victoria president Justin Mullaly said he “welcomed” the inquiry as “an important step” that “would assist in ensuring Victoria’s public school students and staff received the funding they need.”

Teachers, school staff, and working class families seeking to fight the cuts cannot do so through the AEU, the Greens, nor the fake left organisations who claim the union can be “democratised” and the union bureaucracy pressured into taking militant action against the government. What is required is the formation of rank and file committees in every school, unifying staff, students, and communities, in an independent political and industrial struggle against the state and federal Labor governments. The fight to overturn the $3 billion funding cut must be taken forward as part of a broader struggle for a properly funded public school system, within which teachers and school staff enjoy decent wages and conditions. 

The Committee for Public Education (CFPE) has advanced demands that include the following, as the starting point for the widest discussion among teachers and school workers:

• An immediate 40 percent pay increase with salaries indexed against inflation, and automatic cost-of-living adjustments.
• Maximum class sizes of 15-20. End administrative burdens so teachers can focus on teaching.
• A minimum of 8 hours weekly during school hours for planning, assessment and collaboration.
• Abolish NAPLAN and other regressive standardised testing measures that legitimise funding cuts for “underperforming” schools.
• End the authoritarian imposition of mandatory teaching methods—teachers must have the democratic right to collectively decide on curriculum implementation. 
• Hire thousands of teachers and support staff to end punishing workloads. At least one ES member must be employed full-time per class.
• Fully funded support services for all students, including those with diverse needs. Employ psychologists in every school.
• Initiate a high-quality school construction program in working-class communities. No public funds for elite private schools; invest billions in public education for a free, first-class education for all.

We pledge every assistance to educators seeking to establish and build rank-and-file committees in your schools and encourage you to contact the CFPE to discuss this perspective.

Contact the CFPE:
Email: cfpe.aus@gmail.com
Facebook: facebook.com/commforpubliceducation
Twitter: CFPE_Australia
Facebook: facebook.com/groups/opposeaeusellout