High fives all round - Gonski 2.0 passes
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For seven years, ever since the day in 2010 when then education minister Julia Gillard announced businessman David Gonski would lead a review of school funding, the issue has been hugely divisive in Australia politics.
Labor created the Gonski school funding policy, but only partly managed to implement it. The Coalition staunchly opposed it. Catholic and private schools fought about it. Would there ever be an end?
Then, in early May, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his Education Minister Simon Birmingham made a spectacular volte face. They reversed the Coalition's position and said they would implement Gonski. Seven weeks later it is done.
The bill was passed in the Senate by the barest margin early on Friday morning. Labor wouldn't back it, even though it was its baby. After the Greens split and refused to support it, the government got it through backed by 10 crossbench senators. If any one of them had deserted the bill could have been voted down.
![Phew! Got there, Education Minister Simon Birmingham described the extra money found to appease the crossbench as well spent.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170623154147/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/w/w/u/x/t/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1498229779868.jpg)
On Friday morning Turnbull and Birmingham gave a triumphant press conference in Canberra, and they had every reason to crow.
"This is the biggest reform in Commonwealth school funding ever," Turnbull said.
"For the first time that which has always been aspired to but never achieved has been achieved. National, consistent, needs-based funding right across the country."
But the deal came at a cost. The government has already committed $18.6 billion over the next 10 years to bring all schools to the Gonski target level of funding, called the Schooling Resource Standard, or SRS, by 2027.
The SRS is the result of applying a complex formula to each school. It is calculated by multiplying the number of students by the base funding amount allocated for each child ($10,310 annually for each primary school student and $13,559 for each high school student in 2017), and then adding loadings for six types of disadvantage. These are regional or remote location, and having significant numbers of low-socio-economic-status students, students with poor English language, Indigenous students and disabled students. Small schools also attract more funding because they lack economies of scale.
![Labor created the Gonski school funding policy, but only partly managed to implement it. The Coalition staunchly opposed ...](http://web.archive.org./web/20170623154147/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/w/q/w/x/c/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1498212120984.jpg)
To win the crossbench, in the last furious days of negotiating, Birmingham committed another $5 billion to speed the introduction of Gonski so that every school will be within 5 per cent of its SRS in six years (by 2023) instead of the original 10 years.
The only political opposition to the extra spending came from the two independent crossbench senators who did not support the bill, David Leyonhjelm and former Liberal Cory Bernardi, who called the extra spending "completely bonkers and an abrogation of duty".
Bernardi accused other crossbenchers of measuring their success according to how much they could "gouge out of the government" to pursue their agenda.
To win enough votes Birmingham also promised to set up a permanent National School Resourcing Panel to review school funding formulas. And in a move that has enraged some states, state and territory governments will be required to bear their share of the cost of increasing spending on public schools to the SRS level.
!["This is the biggest reform in Commonwealth school funding ever," Malcolm Turnbull said.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170623154147/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/w/x/5/t/2/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1498218410369.jpg)
Canberra (which plays the minor role in public school funding) will pay a 20 per cent share and states and territories will have to pay 75 per cent – to bring every school to at least 95 per cent.
Victoria, which is the lowest among the states in its public school spending, currently reaching only 66 per cent of the SRS, lashed out at the requirement on Friday.
Victorian Education Minister James Merlino said Turnbull was "out of touch".
"The sheer arrogance that Malcolm Turnbull is showing in pushing through this bill without consulting the states is astounding," he said.
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In spite of the $5 billion boost to spending, business groups welcomed the passage of the Gonski bill.
Business Council of Australia CEO Jennifer Westacott said it was "a simpler, fairer and more transparent schools funding model" that would deliver most support to students who really needed it.
"This breakthrough proves that Parliament can get things done if the various players put aside partisanship and support common-sense efforts that put the electorate's interests first," she said.
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry also welcomed it, saying it was now time to focus on improvement of student performance. It also slammed the public school teachers' union for opposing the bill.
"We applaud the government, particularly Education Minister Simon Birmingham, for holding the line on the need for an equitable funding arrangement in the face of a cynical campaign by the Australian Education Union," said the chamber's CEO James Pearson.
The unusual thing about the passage of the Gonski bill is that the Turnbull government managed, from a weak position, to get it through against such strong opposition.
Labor, the party of Gonski, refused to back the bills even though the Coalition's legislation more closely reflected the Gonski needs-based school funding principles than Labor's plan did. The Australian Education Union, which fought for Gonski for years, and ran the highly visible "I Give a Gonski" campaign, was trenchantly opposed.
But, unusually for a major piece of legislation that is highly contested, the government managed to pass it without compromising one of its key principles, which was to remove the special deals and favourable treatment from school funding which had been a feature of the system for decades.
The new legislation will genuinely bring in a consistent school funding system across the nation, and it comes at the expense of those who have been favoured in the past – the Catholic school system and a group of about 350 independent schools.
The winners will be public schools and the majority of independent schools which were previously underfunded when judged by the Gonski distribution formula.
Politically, the most extraordinary thing about the past seven weeks was the split between the Catholic school system and the Coalition, which under former prime minister John Howard would never have countenanced crossing the Catholic Church. But Catholic schools were not able to muster the political influence they had in the past and lost a very bruising, public battle to maintain their funding.
The other significant development was that Birmingham succeeded in winning the backing of the influential Independent Schools Council of Australia (ISCA) – which represents a range of independent schools from high-fee exclusive schools to hundreds of low-fee Christian schools.
Previously the council vigorously defended its privileged schools which enjoyed grandfathering of generous government subsidies. But this time they agreed to cop a funding cut and the beneficiaries were the many low-fee independent schools – the majority of ISCA's membership – which were previously underfunded.
On Friday the Australian Association of Christian Schools, whose membership crosses over with ISCA, praised Birmingham's new "consistent and fair funding arrangement for all [school] sectors" because it was "founded on the basic Christian principle of 'according to need'."
Catholic schools don't agree, with the head of the National Catholic Education Commission, Christian Zahra, complaining on Friday that "educational leaders, schools and families" were locked out of the process.
At his press conference Turnbull said confidently that the school funding wars "should now be over." That remains to be seen.