Turnbull feels his way in shadow cast by Gillard

On the Gonski wash-up, the policy is complex but the politics are ­elemental: the Turnbull government has gone from facing a guaranteed defeat on schools funding to having a fighting chance on this issue at the next election.

Much of the commentary from politicians on Gonski has been worthless. The Abbott government never had a schools policy; it had a fiscal savings policy that applied to schools. At last year’s poll, Liberal MPs were left naked in the field on schools policy, lambs to the slaughter against Labor.

Education Minister Simon Birmingham had a wicked inheritance. That’s not polemic; it’s political fact. In deciding to ­embrace the pure form of the Gonski model, Birmingham was trying to reconcile a series of near ­impossible contradictions.

First, he had to reduce significantly the ludicrous funding pledges authorised and legislated by the Gillard government in 2013, pledges Shorten Labor has­ ­embraced for electoral gain — a fiscal millstone to burden any ­future Shorten government.

Second, Birmingham had to devise a new Liberal Party schools policy since the 2014 budget policy — as it applied to schools — was never implementable. It consti­tuted a $30 billion cut over the ­medium term by saying, from 2018, school funding would be based on CPI adjustments, a way to kill Gonski. This stance was ­unacceptable to parliament, resisted by the public, repudiated by the different school sectors and did not constitute a policy anyway since it failed to address every issue from the needs philosophy to the different deals cut by Julia Gillard with different systems and states.

Third, Birmingham’s new policy had to pass the Senate. That ­demanded design coherence, extra funding and broadbased ­appeal to have any chance — otherwise the entire mission was futile. What did that involve? It meant shifting to the centre, ­accepting much of the Labor policy framework and winning some pro-Gonski stakeholders.

It is not hard to attack the flaws in the Turnbull-Birmingham deal legislated last week. No critic, however, has produced an alternative better able to meet the essential tests: liberate the government from its 2014 dead-end, ­secure parliamentary approval and give MPs something to ­defend. Tony Abbott has emerged as a critic of the Gonski package, but this is Abbott as an outsider looking to campaign, as distinct from Malcolm Turnbull as PM who needs a policy that works.

Has the government spent too much? Yes, of course. That is a no-brainer given the budget deficit and debt problem. The final package is a huge 10-year, $23.47bn ­increase on where the government was previously. Over the decade it is an increase in federal funding of schools by a mammoth 75 per cent, not the action of a country worried about its finances.

Some Liberals and conservative commentators attack the government for spending too much yet refuse to confront the logic of their position — a lower spending policy would have been doomed in the parliament, meaning the Liberals would go to a second election without a viable, legislated schools policy. How clever would that be?

It would be tantamount to ­refusing to govern and, as far as many Liberal MPs are concerned, would be an act of political suicide. How many times do we have to state the obvious? The Senate will not vote spending restraint; it will not vote entitlement reduc­tion; it refuses to confront the nation’s ­financial position; on social policy, it will only vote significant funding increases.

The Gonski package proves what we know. It is madness that Turnbull had to shell out another $5bn to get the policy through the Senate. It is the latest price of our institutional dysfunction. The ­options for Turnbull are grim: to accommodate a centre-left Senate, defy the Senate by running up unpopular double-dissolution bills that would not be accepted by the public at an election, or go on “strike”, inviting public ridicule.

Birmingham’s achievement is significant. He has trimmed funds to better-off independent schools, cleaned up the mess from Gillard’s special deals and got the Liberal Party to commit to a ­method of needs-based funding. The negative is the Catholic sector is relatively disadvantaged (because its special deals are ­unwound), declares a breach of trust with the government and warns that its model of low-fee schools is at risk. This schism with the Catholics is a material threat to the government.

Across the forward estimates (2018-21), the average annual funding increase per student is 6.4 per cent for government schools, 4.9 per cent for the independents and 3.8 per cent for the Catholics. This reflects the ­essence of the Gonski reforms: by expanding the overall cake it is a means to achieve a proportionate redistribution from private to government schools, a long-pursued Labor and trade union objective. This is why the progressives are so passionate: it is a historical shift in policy and politics.

Birmingham misjudged the Catholic reaction. He has a year to repair the damage before the election. That won’t be easy but it is ­imperative. The notion of a Catholic campaign against the government would reveal the pivotal Liberal departure from the party of John Howard. Birmingham has agreed to a review of the socio-economic status formula that has the Catholics so upset and specifies that the different school sectors must agree on and own the changes.

Our politics is dominated by the Gillard legacy. The 2013 final Gillard budget authorised both the Gonski agenda and the National Disability Insurance Scheme, loading the budget with huge spending beyond the forward estimates justified by the grand Labor fantasy that spending would be ­restrained to 2 per cent real on an annual basis until the budget surplus hit 1 per cent of GDP.

Gillard’s tactic did not save her government. But it doomed the ­incoming Liberal government to the financial nightmare of implementing the Labor policies — since the Liberals have been ­unable to extricate themselves from the NDIS or the Gonski model. These are now Liberal policies and that won’t change. It is a historical victory for Gillard.

Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek have declined to take the victory and seek instead to renew the political war over schools policy. Essentially, they stand by the Gillard funding, which means Labor pledges an additional $17bn over the decade, an almost ­ludicrous amount. The pledge is unqualified. It will need to be ­financed by higher taxes or a higher deficit or both when Labor reveals its full policy next election.

Labor’s stance testifies to the power of progressive ideology and union self-interest driving its schools policy. It is symptomatic that the single most powerful force in this conflict is going to be the Australian Education Union representing teachers, which has spent about $20 million in its pro-Gonski campaigns around the past two federal elections. This is only likely to intensify.

It is alarming and cannot be in the interest of parents and students that the AEU can exert such a sway over schools policy in Australia. Grattan Institute expert Peter Goss said even for those who believed in the full Gonski, Labor’s huge funding pledge “makes no sense” and would have little impact on student outcomes.

The debate shows that schools policy remains dominated by money, not classroom performance. The Gonski saga exposes the bizarre and counter-productive nature of our public policy — in this case Turnbull has marched a long way into Labor’s framework, only to meet even fiercer resistance. If you want to grasp why public trust is collapsing in our politics then Gonski 2.0 is a classic study.