Kirby draws the line on 'stolen' funding

MICHAEL Kirby has characterised the funding governments provide to private schools as money stolen from their public counterparts.

Michael Kirby with students from Fort Worth High School

ONE of the nation's eminent jurists, Michael Kirby, yesterday characterised the funding that governments provide to private schools as money stolen from their public counterparts.

Ahead of a Council of Australian Governments meeting on Friday, which is set to address school funding, the former High Court judge said it was time to recapture the ideals that gave Australia one of the world's first free, compulsory and secular school systems.

The graduate of public schools yesterday was one of three recipients of the Meritorious Service to Public Education Award from the NSW government for his advocacy of public education.

Speaking before the presentation in the hall where in 1947 he sat the IQ test to enter a selective class, Mr Kirby said a serious look at the funding of public education was required, as had been advocated in the Gonski review for the federal government.

"Unfortunately, in providing for private and religious schools, government has stolen from public schools," he told The Australian. "The end result is that instead of the pie being increased for all education, which is basically what the Gonski committee proposes, the pie was cut down to the advantage of private and religious schools, and to the disadvantage of public education.

"That's what we have to correct as a nation. Whether parents send their children to private or religious schools or to public schools, our nation has an interest in excellence in public education because that's where two-thirds of all Australians get their education."

Mr Kirby became emotional relating the experience of watching a concert at Strathfield North Public, his first school, where a Chinese boy who had arrived in Australia 10 days earlier speaking very little English was doing his best to join in the song, I am Australian. "I thought this is really a wonderful thing that our country and in my lifetime has moved from a place which rejected its Aboriginal people, denigrated its women, refused entry to Asian and African people no matter how talented and even if married, and humiliated its gays, and we've made a big difference," he said.

Mr Kirby said public schools provided the meeting place for people from different backgrounds, and had helped foster a more cosmopolitan and multicultural society.

"Children have grown up realising that although there are some differences, which is fine, overwhelmingly we are all the same. I am, you are, we are all Australians," he said.