New South Wales public schools are sitting on $1.49 billion in unspent money a budget estimates hearing has revealed.

The money is split between money raised by community organisations and government funding.

New South Wales Greens MP David Shoebridge said there had been rumours swirling that schools were sitting on this money due to restrictive policy.

“I’d heard rumours in 2019 that there was this vast amount of money sitting in local schools accounts which hadn’t been spent, because of particularly broken policy called ‘local schools, local decisions’,” he told Jim Wilson on 2GB Drive.

‘Local schools, local decisions’ is a policy that gives schools a greater say in how to spend funds.

“I chased the figures at the end of 2019, and I was expecting a couple of hundred million or something, which I thought would be a big figure … I finally forced the government to release the figures through powers of the upper house and it was $1.5 billion,” he said.

“I thought [that’s] unbelievable.”

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