Page 1697 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 8 May 2013
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(a) release the details of the funding offer or offers provided to ACT schools;
(b) advise the Assembly what financial and any other implications acceptance of the offer will have for all schools in the ACT;
(c) table the financial modeling that was required to determine the ACT Government’s position, including the cost implications for the ACT Government in the forward years;
(d) outline where the funding across the forward estimates will come from;
(e) give a guarantee that indexation is included in any forward estimates, so that no school in the ACT, government or non-government, will lose a dollar in real terms as a result of these reforms; and
(f) ensure that the ACT is not disadvantaged, comparative to other States.
Funding for schools in Australia has been a complex and at times illogical exercise going back over decades. From the original need for non-government schools to be provided some federal funds so that they could continue to exist, it has become a vexed and passionately argued issue developing like Topsy and creating more social divide than sound policy.
Since 2007 and, indeed, even before they won government, the federal Labor Party have been promising to change school funding and deliver a new system that was transparent and equitable. But like so much of what Labor talks about, the execution is never quite what it seems and the promises never quite reflect the reality. And so it is with the Gonski school reforms.
There has been much hype around what is simply referred to as the Gonski review and report, and there has been some frankly ignorant commentary from groups like the Australian Education Union, federally and in the ACT, with their mischievous and potentially misleading “give a Gonski” campaign.
We have had years of federal Labor government promises. We then had a committee that sat for two years, commissioned several major research papers and finally delivered its report to government in December 2011. And then what? Nothing, or at least not much. We had an official government response in February 2012 which gave every indication they planned to just park it. In fact there was a refusal by both the Prime Minister and the education minister at the time to commit to any of the $5 billion required.
For the past year, there has been little of substance from the federal government, and in the public domain, in the absence of any real debate, we have had the campaign whipped up by unions urging everyone to “give a Gonski”. The campaign was no replacement for sound argument, with states urged to just sign up, irrespective of funding implications and without any real understanding of what it included and what it involved. The lack of commentary and explanation from the government, and the
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