Abbott: “This isn’t the Government You thought it was…”

The following article is by Tony Shepherd and originally appeared at the Adelaide Advertiser…

 

Gonski was no political whimsy. It was the product of years of investigation into how schools are currently funded and how they can best be funded in the future to get better overall outcomes and tackle disadvantage.

An independent panel headed by businessman David Gonski pored over 7000 submissions and talked to experts and eventually came up with a model.

They recommended a core funding amount for every student, topped up with a loading if a student is disadvantaged so the school can invest in extra resources.

The scheme in the end was infested with politics as the states used the Gillard Government’s desperation to sign them up to barter for a better deal, but the theory was sound.

And now the Coalition Government wants to ditch the whole thing and start again.

Hardly anyone supports the move. Schools, who which were each guaranteed a specific amount of cash, want the Gonski reforms. Principals, churches, charities, parents, and a broad range of luminaries have united to call on the Government to keep it.

Gonski panel members are gobsmacked. Premiers from both sides of politics lined up to slam Mr Pyne. But, after having flip-flopped on the issue Mr Pyne has found a sudden firmness of spirit, and so Gonski really will be Gone-ski, as the headline writers love to say, from 2014.

Political lesson: if you’re going to enrage the states, antagonise lobby groups and mess with anything that involves parents and children, do it at the very beginning of an election term and hope for nationwide short-term memory loss.

Mr Pyne and Prime Minister Tony Abbott – who had pledged a “unity ticket” on Gonski with Labor – now argue that promise only applied only to the overall amount of funding, rather than the actual Gonski model.

If that’s true, Australia has just voted in a Government that went to the election without much of an education policy.

If it’s not true then what we have seen is one of the more dastardly examples of weasel words and broken promises.

And we have seen very recently the power of a broken promise to mortally wound a nation’s leader.

Former prime minister Julia Gillard’s broken promise on a carbon tax was a large part of her undoing. It was a large part of Mr Abbott’s success.

It led legions of loudmouthed buffoons to refer to her as Juliar, while others waved signs that referred to the then-PM as “Bob Brown’s Bitch”.

All that blithering incandescent rage was over a bastard compromise that Labor let itself be manoeuvred into.

Meanwhile, the Coalition’s backflip on Gonski is arguably worse.

It’s not a result of Realpolitik but of ideology.

They never really liked Gonski but political expediency made it all too tempting to form that “unity ticket” and now they’re reverting to type.

Mr Pyne’s one advantage as the states, the people and the arguments line up against him is that too many people never really understood what Gonski was anyway, or what it would mean for them.

There was a very good website that had plenty of detailed, specific and useful information about Gonski (also known as the Better Schools Plan once Kevin Rudd reassumed his position and tried to distance the policy from Ms Gillard’s legacy).

However, that website was made “temporarily unavailable” at the start of October and now appears to be permanently unavailable. It redirects to the Education Department homepage.

The plan’s supporters have adopted the tagline “I give a Gonski”, but that does not have the facile catchiness of “Axe the tax” so it’s unlikely that this broken promise will prove a death knell of this Government.

Having said that, this has opened up a front that could fester. So why did they do it?

The impetus, Mr Pyne argues, was that more than a billion dollars was missing from the education budget.

It is true that Labor reabsorbed that money when three states didn’t sign up for it, but that was revealed in August, so the Coalition knew about it before the election.

It may be that the new Government just wants to eradicate anything that came from the old.

That is certainly part of the modus operandi. While the honeymoon may be over, there is enough fondness left, probably, for the Government to keep blaming the former government and get away with it.

How long they’ve got before ­blaming Labor gets tired isn’t clear, but for now Mr Pyne can blame “Saboteur Shorten” and “Shortfall Shorten”.

And he can talk about “Shorten’s Shambles” but he’d better stick to one if he wants to make it stick at all.

It may also be that the Government, which is predominantly white, middle-class, private-school educated men, wants a better deal for independent schools.

That’s certainly the impression some came away with after last week’s meeting between Mr Pyne and the state education ministers.

The funding for independent schools is locked in, for public schools not so much, and the pool of available cash has shrunk – the cupboard is bare, Mr Pyne says.

Mr Pyne is a Saint Ignatius College alumni with a plummy voice whose patch includes leafy suburbs such as Burnside, so it’s not such a great look if he does start trying to yank funding from the poor old public and Catholic schools.

Still, at least he got an excellent education, and hopefully that will help him come up with something better than the Gonski panel’s effort. Time will tell.