Judas put 30 pieces in his pocket — Coalition’s treachery earns it zero

Judas got 30 pieces of silver for his treachery, but the Turnbull government seems to have got no reward for Gonski 2.0.

The Coalition, after arguing for many years that more spending was not necessary to improve Australia’s schools, did a spectacular backflip and pushed a package through the Senate for a funding increase of more than 75% between now and 2027.

The scene of the bill passing parliament at 2:08am Friday morning — betraying taxpayers with an extra $23.5 billion slug — echoed a pre-dawn Last Supper: the disagreements, the denials, the switching of sides.

Such largesse from a Coalition government should have satisfied even the wildest dreams of the most extreme educational progressives.

Nevertheless, education unions and the Labor opposition are not applauding the backdown.

They’re still vehemently opposed to Gonski 2.0, carrying on about ‘cuts’, and have said they will continue to do so all the way up until the next election. So much for ending the school funding wars.

And while the politics of Gonski 2.0 have been chaotic, the policy itself has serious flaws that are detrimental for both Australian students and fiscal responsibility.

It also represents a retrograde and catastrophic attack on federalism, with the revised package — added to gain the crossbench support — mandating that states and territories meet a certain proportion of the federal government’s funding target.

This means New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, and the Northern Territory all have to significantly increase their real per-student funding between 2019 and 2023 in order to receive the extra federal money.

This is unreasonable in a federalist system. Gonski 2.0 unjustifiably takes away the ability of state and territory governments to adjust their own school budgets in accordance with local needs and financial circumstances.

It is important that states and territories have the option of spending money on schools more effectively, rather than being forced to simply spend more.

The new condition is supposed to prevent states and territories cost-shifting to the federal government, but this argument ignores that state and territory school funding is transparent — so they are already accountable to their own populations. It is not necessary for the federal government to play headmistress.

And the extra state/territory increases will also make the total cost to taxpayers much higher.

Gonski 2.0 has merely trimmed the excessive federal spending (an additional $23.5 billion over the next 10 years instead of the outrageously expensive Gonski 1.0’s $40 billion). But this still means spending significantly more taxpayer money with no evidence that it will improve education outcomes.

Gonski 2.0 also locks in a fundamentally flawed school funding model, inherited from the Gillard government and based in part on the original Gonski report. Continuing with that model, schools receive a base level of per-student funding and then loadings (extra funding) for disadvantaged students — 25% of the total cost of the model.

But following the Gillard government’s opaque negotiations with the sector, the criteria for disadvantage was expanded so much that more than 50% of Australian school students are now considered ‘disadvantaged’ and receive extra funding.

This has no basis in evidence, defies common sense, means school funding doesn’t flow to the schools that need it most, and isn’t financially viable in the long-term. Yet Gonski 2.0 fails to amend this.

Admittedly, we are seeing an end to the inconsistencies and special deals in school funding with independent and Catholic schools. The government should be commended for finally moving towards a nationally consistent allocation of federal government funding for non-government schools.

So where to from here for Gonski 2.0? The second review — to be completed under David Gonski by the end of this year — is limited and will look only at how schools should spend the money, rather than how much they should spend.

The first job of the new independent school resourcing body (another concession by the government to get its bill through the senate) should be to conduct a review of the whole school funding model.

Likewise, a much-needed review has been announced into the current flawed school socio-economic status score calculation method, which has been at the centre of the dispute between the government and the Catholic school system. But this review should be much broader, and consider in particular tightening the criteria for disadvantaged students, in order to reduce the unjustifiably high school funding benchmark.

Without such a review — which should have been done years ago —the government is stuck with a deeply flawed model for the foreseeable future. That is bad news for both students and taxpayers.

Blaise Joseph is an Education Policy Analyst at The Centre for Independent Studies and author of The Fantasy of Gonski Funding: The ongoing battle over school spending.