Christopher Pyne staged a dramatic intervention in the politics of Australian education this week. Using the platform of the Blue Room in Canberra’s parliament house, he announced that he intends to abandon any commitment to implementing the school funding agreements formalised by the Labor federal government between April and July 2013. In the week that Pyne sat down for his first meeting with state education ministers, this was big news.
Pyne had clearly made a decision to go early, and go hard, in attacking a model of school funding that he has opposed at every step of its development. His confidence in doing so, despite the blatant breaking of public promises made during the 2013 election campaign, suggests that he believes he can disregard those commitments and win a political fight to change course.
Public backing of Pyne by the prime minister, Tony Abbott, implies that this position is shared across the government.
But Pyne has miscalculated.
The fact that he has gone wrong so early, and so spectacularly, reveals some important things about his priorities and his understanding of politics. In order to make them clear, we need to clarify some features of the Gonski funding reforms and the nature of Australian education, which Pyne has deliberately put into contest.
First, the budget "black hole". As the Gillard government negotiated with states, territories and non-government school authorities during 2013, it put agreements in place one by one, starting with New South Wales.
The federal budget fell in May, while these negotiations were still ongoing. The government decided to make provision for further agreements before the election campaign without disclosing the amounts available because they were still the focus of intense negotiation with Victoria, the Northern Territory and others. Not every agreement was struck, and in its final economic update before the election campaign, treasurer Chris Bowen announced that $1.2bn, which had been placed in the contingency reserve for negotiating reasons and was uncommitted, would now be returned to the bottom line.
This $1.2bn has nothing to do with the $2.8bn reported in the May budget as the additional spending committed by the Gillard government to schools to pay for the funding agreements that it had already struck. In turn, that $2.8bn was simply a funding estimate, using Treasury accounting, of the additional federal funding being committed over four years, the standard period for Budget Estimates.
The actual dollar amounts being committed over six years in the funding agreements were far greater, and represented a better deal for schools than they could ever have imagined under the previous system. The federal government was increasing its share of this funding, as a deliberate objective, in order to work towards higher student achievement – especially among those facing socioeconomic disadvantage.
By claiming a “unity ticket” with Labor over their four year commitment of $2.8bn, Abbott and Pyne were already misleading the public to believe that they were matching the formal agreements that had been struck.
This week they have gone further, by ripping up even that commitment, and seeking to blame the change on an unrelated decision about $1.2bn, and then apparently on the "confusion" of journalists in reporting their earlier commitments.
The fact that Pyne is prepared to proffer such a blatant untruth about this detail should give some clues as to what he says about the rest of the Gonski model.
Forum
Pages: 
