Labor’s budget reality bites as industrial peace with teachers ends

March 25, 2026 — 5:00am

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In a speech to a business forum in October, Deputy Premier and Education Minister Ben Carroll declared that “our teachers deserve nationally competitive wages – a proper pay rise”.

The reference to the national situation is telling. When Victorian schoolchildren came out top in last year’s NAPLAN test results, Carroll pointed to his government’s push for explicit learning but also said “the credit goes mostly to our hardworking teachers”.

Yet when it comes to reward for effort, those teachers have found that the state is bringing up the rear. Victoria is bottom of the class in funding of state schools, and public school teachers in Victoria are currently the lowest paid in the country.

The starting salary for a graduate teacher in Victoria is about $78,000. In NSW it’s more than $87,000 and in the Northern Territory it’s more than $92,000.

The Australian Education Union, stung by its members’ reaction to the 2022 pay deal, is asking for a 35 per cent rise over the next four years. With teachers and principals having voted to strike if necessary, the union swiftly rejected the government’s March 16 offer of 17 per cent plus 1.5 per cent “overtime allowance” across the same period. That would put some of our teachers on par with their NSW counterparts but would still see graduates trail their interstate colleagues by several thousand dollars a year.

The log of claims set out by the union’s Victorian branch isn’t just about pay but also conditions within state schools. As The Age has reported, it is two years since the Allan government’s budget and finance committee quietly shelved the commitment to provide 75 per cent of the national Schooling Resource Standard by 2028, pushing that objective back to 2031 and effectively creating a $2.4 billion shortfall in state school funding in the meantime.

At the front of yesterday’s march to state parliament (below) were striking staff from Boronia Heights Primary School, where Premier Jacinta Allan, Carroll and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had a photo-op in January 2025 to announce heads of agreement on schools funding. A full agreement there has yet to be reached.

It is against this backdrop that the state government’s approach to talks with teachers – and the premier’s call on Monday for them to return to the negotiating table – should be judged. On Tuesday Carroll told reporters that meetings with the union had been fast-tracked.

The union’s Victorian branch president, Justin Mullaly, said: “We’ve been negotiating for a new agreement for teachers, education support staff and principals for nine months … We’ve been seeking funding for schools for a lot longer than that, and the government hasn’t delivered on either front.”

Parents warned of more disruption after thousands of striking teachers sweep through CBD

The government’s ballooning debt and its commitment to infrastructure spending are obvious constraints on any offer it makes to the profession, which hasn’t opted for strike action since Labor came into office in Victoria in 2014 with a promise to make education its top priority. This breakdown is, to a significant extent, the consequence of choices the government has made.

But from the reaction of parents, their teaching colleagues in the Catholic sector and even the head of the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Sally Curtain, who recognised “teachers’ concerns … around staff shortages and workload pressures”, there is equally obvious public sympathy for the strikers.

Carroll did his best to chime in on Tuesday, telling the marching teachers that “I hear you, I understand you and I thank you for every day pouring yourself into our most vital resource, our schoolchildren”.

It was a stated determination to improve the setting in which they learn that helped Labor under Daniel Andrews to win office. If hard choices have to be made about vital resources now, with another election on the way, voters up and down the state are likely to point to their children and say “put the money there”.

Come Wednesday, teachers and their principals will be back in the classroom. However, there are threats of more school disruptions in coming months. The Age hopes that the Allan government can work out a way of honouring their commitment that gives them and those joining the profession hope for the future.

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