Page 1698 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 8 May 2013
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implication within the “give a Gonski” campaign that funding must go only to government schools, led the non-government school sector to become increasingly concerned that they would be cannibalised to pay for it all.
In the absence of any policy direction from Labor, we saw, week after week, media headlines that did little to inform the public and little to allay the fears of parents of students in either government or non-government schools—headlines like “Gillard’s dissembling response undoes much of Gonski’s backbreaking work”, “Sad day for public education”, “States step up funding revolt” and “Funds block: for better or worse anger grows over schools cash review”.
We had list after list of schools that would lose money, assurances from the Prime Minister that no private school would lose money, renewed campaigns about saving public schools and letters about school fees rising and parents demanding to know what it all meant for them. The federal government saw this happening and just let it run. The federal government could have stopped this and shown leadership, but they did not.
Here in the ACT, we had to be satisfied with a minister originally denying he had been given any lists of funding implications for ACT schools. Later we had assurances that ACT officials were attending key briefings and that it had been acknowledged that the ACT had already made significant injections to the education system above the national average.
What it would mean for ACT schools, government and non-government, remained a mystery and did so all through the ACT election campaign. ACT Labor’s education platform said that ACT Labor did not need election policies that tied funding to the electoral cycle. ACT Labor said it was already working with the federal government to transition to a federal needs-based funding system. Now, seven months after that was said, and four months away from a federal election, we still have no detail and no agreement and, instead, frantic COAG discussions about what we must do, collectively as a nation, and what individual states and territories must also agree to.
What do we know and where are we at? We know that the Gonski review was the first major review of school funding since 1973. So by any standard, it was a monumental task. It was, in committee chair David Gonski’s own words, “tasked with developing a funding system for schools that was transparent, fair, financially sustainable and effective in promoting excellent educational outcomes for all Australian students”.
Emma Macdonald, writing in the Canberra Times last year, described the existing system as “a tangled web of financial intrigue involving ancient deals negotiated between the commonwealth, states and territories and underpinned by a dizzying array of financial incentives, anomalies, bribes, threats and add-ons that attached themselves during the political cycle”.
The task of the Gonski committee was never a simple one, and they approached it on the basis of throwing out the existing model and devising a new one that worked effectively and fairly across all schools and for all students. And contrary to what some chose to interpret as the outcome, Gonski wanted all of the nation’s 3.5 million
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