Among the many lessons from the federal election, the most important may be the wisdom and instincts of those Australians who go about their lives, raising their families without fanfare, only to roar into public consciousness when they cast their votes.
The Conservative Party pointed to this when it highlighted the disengagement, with ordinary Australians, of the Labor Party.
An opinion piece by Dallas McInerney in The Australian has a few surprises:
“Public debate can too easily be dominated by loud voices peddling grievous sentiment via hyped-up Twitter accounts, overlooking the challenges and aspirations of many everyday people.
This was apparent in the final days of the campaign when a series of stories appeared in sections of the media targeting non-government schools, in particular their funding and their faith-based mission.
Pushed by the public teacher unions and self-appointed public education advocates, funding data was misrepresented to suggest Australia’s Catholic (and other non-government) schools were funded at the expense of state schools. In fact, public funding per student for government schools has increased every year since it was extended to non-government schools.
Thankfully, both major political parties have already moved beyond this argument. On this issue, the Coalition and Labor, which won 75 per cent of the primary vote between them, are on a unity ticket.
Australians value school choice and are more comfortable with current education policy settings than anxious interest groups and fretful panellists on ABC TV’s The Drum would have you believe.
The current policy settlement had its origins in 1962, when government inspectors demanded Our Lady of Mercy Primary School in the NSW country town of Goulburn upgrade its students’ toilets to comply with government requirements.
The local Catholic community did not have the money, and this crisis became an opportunity to make a point about government imposing costly rules but providing no funding. The community decided to close all Catholic schools in the Goulburn diocese.
The next week, about 2000 Catholic school students tried to squeeze into 640 available government school places.
The government could have left the students stranded unless it paid for the upgrade. Recognising a modest amount of funding would resolve the stand-off, the government found the money.
Often referred to as the Goulburn Schools Strike, the incident showed the benefits of providing financial support for non-government schools.
Government funding ensures a non-state education option is affordable to most families. Removing it from Catholic and other non-government schools would give parents little choice but to shift their children en masse to government schools, putting taxpayers on the hook for the entire cost of their education.
The Goulburn strike catalysed 60 years of bipartisan policy: financial support for non-government schools, in recognition that everyone wins when governments support affordable school choice.
In NSW, for example, governments fund almost the entire cost of a public education, an average of $13,374 per student in 2017, while the state’s Catholic school students receive about $2000 less.
Catholic school families, which already contribute to public education through their taxes, cover the additional costs through school fees that would otherwise be borne by government. Every student attending a Catholic school represents a net saving for government.
More than five decades on, do the lessons of Goulburn still hold?
Unequivocally, yes.
Independent modelling by professional services firm EY released today shows that if all 250,000 NSW Catholic school students had moved to government schools in 2018, the net additional operating cost for both federal and state levels of government would have been almost half a billion dollars for that year alone.
EY’s modelling, detailed in a report by Catholic Schools NSW, The Case for Catholic Schools Volume 1, shows that over the five years from 2018 to 2022, savings to government are estimated to reach $2.56 billion.
From 2014 to 2017, these savings amounted to $1.46bn.
The big winners under current funding arrangements are state and territory governments, which bear most of the cost for government schools.
The commonwealth is the main funder of non-government schools, so any move in enrolments from non-government schools to state schools means that costs shift to the states, presenting a serious challenge to their budgets.
If 250,000 NSW Catholic school students were enrolled in NSW state schools in 2018, the NSW government would have been forced to spend an additional $1.7bn in recurrent education funding.
Typically, 90 per cent of capital funding for NSW Catholic schools comes from parents and school communities.
EY identified that if the government had to build the facilities for all students currently in NSW Catholic schools, it would need $7.91bn in additional capital expenditure. This reflects the investment of generations of Catholic school communities in building Catholic schools, relieving governments of that obligation.
The genius of Australian school funding policy is that it gives low-income families choices for their children’s education, thanks largely to the national network of low-fee Catholic parish schools.
In doing so, Australia has avoided the worst aspects of postcode determinism for our students.
It’s difficult to argue with a funding mix that relieves pressure on government budgets, supports school choice, especially for those of modest means, and educates one in three students.”
Dallas McInerney is chief executive of Catholic Schools NSW, which represents the interests of the state’s 598 Catholic schools, their students and families.
