The Gonski Review of Funding for Schooling in Australia was considered by nonpartisan experts to be the most comprehensive review of education in the past 30 years. It took 20 months to complete, it runs for 300 pages and it attracted 7,000 submissions, yet… if someone wants to read the review online now that it has become a household name again, it cannot be found. A government spokesperson told Fairfax Media early this week that the Department of Education was “in the process of updating its website after the machinery of government changes” and that because of the split of the department and the number of documents involved in a new uploading, “it is simply too early to say when the Review of Funding for Schooling will be back online”.
Education funding, one of the great tools of restricting social inequality, is back on the agenda in Australia, and the Abbott government is playing ideological and communication games with it.
Public, union and political pressure, including pressure from Coalition state governments, has forced Prime Minister Tony Abbott to back flip and to change his position a number of times in the last few days. However, Labor’s initial funding plan under the Gonski reform was not restored, as we are led to believe, as a result of the most recent Abbott U turn.
As the Australian Education Union points out, there is still no national agreement on Gonski. The five already signed Gonski agreements each run for six years not for four, as the government is stating publicly, and Labor’s commitment was for 10 billion dollars over a period of six years, with most of the money scheduled to flow in the last two years of the agreements.
Initially, Minister of Education Christopher Pyne announced that the Labor funding model will remain in place for only one year. On Monday, half an hour before question time in federal parliament, and as a result of the backlash, PM Tony Abbott said that the government will be committing over the next four years 2.8 billion dollars. Half of that spending money is to go to the states of Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, the regions of Australia that refused to sign an agreement with the previous Labor federal government. This funding does not require the states to match the federal money with state money, as was the case with the states that signed an agreement before the election.
In a country where 35 per cent of its schooling population attends a private school, one of the highest and most unequal figures in the wealthy western world, the Abbott government is choosing to play ideological and socially divisive games with future generations.
The Gonski proposal was aiming to fund schools based on the educational needs of each student enrolled, yet the Abbott government is engaging in a hide and seek game with its own citizens and supporters by substantially cutting the amount of money to be spend on education as well as shortening by a third the period of time of ensured federal funding.
Pro-government media and commentators are pushing for a closure of this issue now and are constantly talking about the completion of a four-year school funding deal between the commonwealth and the states in order to “draw to a close the divisive and largely puerile education funding debate”, as The Australian put it in an editorial. This, however, is not the case. This is only the aim of the Abbott government ideologues, those people who are trying daily to discredit in the eyes of the community alternative political perspectives and alternative media outlets and voices.
If it was not mostly for the ABC, the Fairfax Media and The Guardian, media outlets that aired the concerns of others, including conservative state governments, if it was not for these media organisations which are constantly on the receiving end of News Limited, the partial restoration of the Gonski reform was not going to take place.