Birmingham’s bungle stretches friendship with Turnbull

Malcolm Turnbull must accept his Education Minister has engineered an incompetent political and policy strategy on schools funding.

Simon Birmingham’s response to the Chaney review yesterday was to suggest there was little of significance in the report, which involved only technical changes to “one element of the formula’’.

Ignore the rhetoric. The changes are profound and will affect hundreds of thousands of children and parents. Maybe more.

The Chaney review confirms that Birmingham not only got it wrong but that every warning he ignored from the Catholic sector was driven by ignorance, malice, incompetence or stubbornness.

Birmingham’s strategy has been to pretend that the Catholic sector’s claims were wrong or meaningless.

He has vilified the head of Catholic education in Victoria, Stephen Elder, for having the temerity to point out the inequities in the funding model.

If it weren’t for Elder’s resilience, this issue would have been buried by the government, profiting from the church’s generally weakened state.

Instead, the Chaney review reads like a Catholic press release, pointing out problems with existing socio-economic status scores, which are biased against Catholic families. Indeed, they are biased against low-fee-paying independent schools as well. Lots of them.

But it was only Elder who banged away daily on the mistakes made by Birmingham.

Never forget that Elder and his chief number cruncher warned the government weeks before Gonski 2.0 was delivered that its socio-economic status formula was a dog. Birmingham’s office knew it was and, presumably, so did the most senior bureaucrats around him.

Yet he forged on, his closest political supporters backed him and they now all look stupid.

Alarmingly for the Prime Minister, this is far from over.

Birmingham, a rolled gold backer of Turnbull, has received the rolled gold backing of the Prime Minister in return.

But for how long?