Culture

Junk Explained: What’s Malcolm Turnbull Doing To Public Education Funding?

Remember Gonski? It's gone-ski.

by Alex McKinnon  31 March 2016

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Earlier today, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull outlined some pretty big changes to the way we fund public schools. Speaking to ABC radio this morning, he announced plans to withdraw federal funding for public schools across the country, as part of a move towards giving state governments responsibility for raising and spending their own education budgets.

That’s a huge deal — it effectively spells the end of the Gillard-era Gonski reforms, which have dominated public debate for years and looked to be the biggest overhaul to education policy in decades. Almost $4.5 billion in federal funds directly went to public schools in 2012/13, and handing that money and decision-making power to the states would reverse years of attempts to make education policy more consistent across the country.

Turnbull and Education Minister Simon Birmingham have said state governments would “do a better job managing those schools themselves,” given that they run public schools already. But federal Labor, teaching unions and state education ministers have already come out in force to condemn the idea, saying it amounts to a “betrayal” of public schoolkids and their parents and an abandonment of public education.

So what does it all mean?

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Do You Like Tax? I Hope You Like Tax

The announcement comes as an extension of Turnbull’s plan, revealed yesterday, to let individual states directly set and collect their own income taxes. At the moment, states don’t have many ways to raise money themselves — state money largely comes from the GST, which is collected by the Commonwealth and handed out in a yearly bunfight of which state is more deserving. Turnbull’s rationale is that if the states can raise money on their own to pay for the things they run — schools, hospitals, public transport, police — they’ll be more responsible with their funds and won’t come running to the government for more money every time they need something.

On the face of it, that seems like a pretty reasonable idea; states raising and spending their own money rather than begging the feds for cash sounds like a more common-sense way to do things. But it’s already proving a little dicey — Liberal and Labor Premiers in Tasmania, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia have quickly come out in opposition, raising concerns that state-by-state income taxes could privilege the larger, richer parts of Australia over everyone else.

Economists have pointed out that under Turnbull’s plan, smaller, economically vulnerable states and territories like Tasmania, South Australia and the NT might not be able to raise the money to pay for everything they need. It’s fairly simple maths: Tasmania’s 517,000 people are far less able to pay for essential services on their own than NSW’s 7.5 million people are. Either those states jack up income taxes to milk as much money as possible out of their small tax base, which disadvantages their taxpayers relative to everyone else, or they start cutting wherever they can, which does exactly the same thing.

That aside, it could also make living, working, paying tax and moving between states bloody confusing.

So if decentralising income tax is so potentially hairy, why’s the government planning to do it to schools as well? And didn’t we have a comprehensive, well thought-out public education funding policy ready to go a few years ago?

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Goodbye Gonski: The End Of Needs-Based Education Funding

Malcolm’s new public education plan effectively puts the final nail in the coffin of the Gonski reforms, the sweeping changes to schools funding brought in by the Gillard government in 2013. Gonski, which enjoys widespread support from teachers unions, state governments of all stripes and the public, aimed to fundamentally reshape how we fund our schools in a number of ways, all of which are now seemingly in danger.

The most important reform Gonski shot for was rolling out nationwide needs-based funding, which is pretty much what it says on the tin. Disadvantaged public schools in need of extra cash to help their students would get priority, and less taxpayer money would flow to wealthy private schools like the prestigious Scots College in Sydney, which made a profit of $3.5 million in 2015 after receiving a whopping $6.3 million in state and federal funding the previous year.

It also aimed to get every school in Australia working off the same page, imposing a national curriculum and eliminating the serious discrepancies in public school funding between different states. That way a kid in Victoria wouldn’t be disadvantaged relative to a kid in the ACT, where public schools receive substantially more funding per student. Gonski’s been on the chopping block since late 2013, when the Coalition abandoned its support for the reforms right after they were elected before backpedalling to stave off public anger.

Since then, the Coalition have only committed to funding Gonski for the first four years of its implementation — the all-important fifth and sixth years, when funding would be dramatically ramped up under the original plan, have been up in the air ever since. Campaigners, unions and even state Liberal and National parties have been pressuring the feds to fund those fifth and sixth years for a long time — as late as yesterday, Turnbull was being greeted by Gonski-keen protesters on his public outings. 

But today, Gonski finally bit the dust. Leaked documents ahead of Turnbull’s COAG meeting with the Premiers and Chief Ministers on Friday confirmed that the federal government won’t be offering the states any Gonski funding in 2018 or 2019, the crucial fifth and sixth years of the program.

All this comes in spite of the fact that, by all accounts, Gonski is working — public schools in Sydney’s south-west have been able to hire translators to help kids who have difficulty speaking English, while schools with large Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander student bodies have seen marked improvements in learning outcomes after introducing personalised learning plans and cultural programs. NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli has said that Gonski “has been absolutely phenomenal for regional NSW,” a region that historically lags behind the cities in education outcomes.

The Commonwealth’s new plan to abandon public school funding entirely is likely to undo a lot of that good work, potentially exacerbating the educational inequities between states, regions and postcodes Gonski aimed to tackle in the first place. Former NSW Department of Education head Ken Boston, one of Gonski’s chief architects, said the idea of public schools being exclusively funded by the states “should be ruled out completely” when it was first floated in a green paper back in June, describing it as “completely foreign to the Gonski formula” of needs-based funding.

In fact, that same discussion paper found pretty serious problems with Turnbull’s plan even then, warning that it could “lead to very different funding models being applied across the States and Territories and between the government and non-government sectors, leading to differences in the level of public funding for schools with similar population characteristics.

“This is likely to give rise to concerns about fairness, as well as introduce perverse incentives for governments to shift costs within the system.” That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement for Malcolm’s big new education idea.

Notably, Turnbull clarified today that the federal government would still provide funding to private schools under the new plan. Private schools already get a pretty sweet deal; state and federal government funding per private schoolkid is set to outstrip the public-school equivalent by 2020, and the Commonwealth directs far more money to non-government schools than it does to public ones. If critics’ fears are right, all the work to reduce educational inequality that Gonski represented is going to go to waste.