At the top of the list of reforms, legislating a new school funding system was especially daunting. The career of one recent Labor leader—Mark Latham—had been seriously damaged when he promised to change the funding formula. Even though the policy was reasonable, an over-the-top scare campaign by the Catholic and independent schools sector, arguing that Labor had a ‘hit list’ of schools whose funding would be slashed, succeeded in belting Latham out of the park. The sector was well cashed up and had proved to be a formidable adversary, and some current ministers, like Jenny Macklin, the shadow education minister at the time, were still wearing the scars.
My old mate, the knockabout troubadour Billy Bragg, who’d thought a lot about politics and history, once remarked that music doesn’t change the world, education does. There was certainly no arguing its importance, and a moment’s reflection brought it home. After all, where would I have ended up had it not been for the education I’d received at school, and then at university, courtesy of the Whitlam government? I was ready for the second leg.
It’s a mistake to think of human progress as one straight line of continual improvement. It is possible for countries to go backwards, and the history of school funding in Australia confirmed this unpleasant fact.
How was it that in a markedly secular society, the non-government school sector, much of which was operated by Anglican and Catholic churches and more recently Islamic and fundamentalist Christian organisations, had flourished while the government sector, especially secondary schools, floundered?
Part of the answer lay in the way schools were funded. A New South Wales parliamentary committee looking into education recommended as early as 1884 that ‘one uniform system be established for the whole of the colony and that an adherence to that system be made an indispensable condition under which, and how, it [a uniform system] could be granted’.
Despite this, the churches had insisted on establishing their own schools, which, in time, were supported by both sides of politics, with a great deal of soul searching by Labor when Gough Whitlam first advocated state aid for non-government schools in the late 1960s. While the states had primary responsibility for providing school education, the private-school sector, particularly the many Catholic parish schools, was a powerful force and came to find a friendly ear in Canberra—none more so than that of the previous Howard government, which skewed the budget to ensure a privileged funding position was maintained. This, among other things, kept perpetuating privilege.
In the Whitlam era, government schools received 70 per cent of Commonwealth funding and private schools received just less than 30 per cent, an amount roughly equivalent to enrolment proportions. Both the Hawke and Keating governments had ensured a greater proportion of funding went to government schools. By the end of John Howard’s term, however, the ratio had been reversed. Now government schools were receiving about 31 per cent of Commonwealth funding, while private schools had 69 per cent, despite public schools having around two-thirds of the enrolments.
To my way of thinking, private schools are simply part of a plural education system, and shouldn’t be discriminated against. Unlike John Howard, I’d been to a church-run school, and at different times my daughters had attended independent schools, but I never considered that these schools should be generously supported by the government.
Labor policy affirmed the right of parents to choose this kind of education for their children while aiming for a new funding system that would remedy the large equity gap which had opened up across the Australian education landscape. This gap, which saw kids from low socioeconomic backgrounds, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, being as many as three years behind their peers from more affluent suburbs, was confirmed in an extensive report on school funding by an eminent panel drawn from both sides of the politics and education fence, and chaired by Sydney businessman David Gonski. Commissioned when Labor came to power in 2007, the report was released as we began our second term in 2010. The problem was clear: children from disadvantaged backgrounds were concentrated in an underfunded public system, while wealthy independent schools were bastions of privilege. As a result we were falling behind in education performance. The report recommended a new, needs-based school funding model so that extra funds could be applied to narrowing this gap. The Gonski report provided the impetus and the template for this long overdue change, and was ultimately endorsed by most dispassionate education observers. The notable exception was shadow education minister Christopher Pyne, who dismissed the clearly argued 200-page report only twenty minutes after it was released.
It is an understatement to say that changing the way the Commonwealth funded school education was a complex undertaking. It would take every available hour, and all the skills and resources at our disposal, to see it through to a successful conclusion, but there was no question it was a nation-changing task to get excited about. At the same time, the raft of other big changes—including a new national curriculum and early childhood education standards, which required agreement of the mainly Coalition states—had to be delivered as well.
Naturally, extra funding would be required to support a new model. To allay the fears of private schools and lessen the likelihood of a scare campaign being mounted against any changes, the government had determined that no school would lose money as a result of the changes. This made the development of a nationally consistent funding model painfully difficult, given thousands of schools would have to make the transition to the new system.
To get a new bill through the parliament would involve reaching agreement with the states and between the various parties in the education sector, balancing the interests of government and non-government schools, getting agreement from cabinet for the extra money, all the while working with advisers from the prime minister’s office who had a strong interest in the policy but were often preoccupied with warding off the many gremlins surrounding them after a difficult election.
Once a final model was decided on, the perils of federation were again on full display. Surprisingly only New South Wales (with National Party education minister Adrian Piccoli), South Australia (with Labor’s Jay Wetherill) and Tasmania (with the Greens’ Nick McKim) showed a clear appreciation of the benefits of increased funding and a fairer system. These states didn’t play games or try to obstruct the process.
Western Australia had already shown its stripes by blocking the national curriculum until the eleventh hour, forcing me to engineer a series of last-minute interventions until agreement was reached. But still they remained aloof from the new funding model, confident that overflowing coffers from the mining boom could secure enough resources for education and fixated on resisting imaginary Canberra control of Western Australian schools.
Victoria’s Coalition government had a split personality, wanting to be part of the brave new world they, in part, had already embraced, but caught up in the politics of states versus Canberra and attacking the proposal for political effect.
Under Labor’s Cameron Dick as education minister, Queensland had been positive. Once the Coalition regained power there, education minister John-Paul Langbroek remained supportive, but the gloves soon came off, with incoming premier Campbell Newman declaring the reform was a ‘bucket of vomit’, despite the fact that hundreds of Queensland schools would be better off under the new model. To reinforce his education priorities, in a laughable gesture Newman later banned me from heading across the border to talk about the changes—so much for freedom of speech in Queensland.
The Country Liberal Party in the Northern Territory had turned over three education ministers in less than a year, and, not surprisingly, they were at sea from day one. Queensland and the Northern Territory, as it happened, also had the poorest education records.
As ever, self-interest and greed were on full display, especially in relation to the independent private schools. They played hard and as negotiations became difficult would go around my office and straight to the prime minister’s. I understood
the strategy, as the final sign-off would happen there and I’d done the same thing more than a few times as a conservation activist.
In the background hovered the mitres and robes of a bevy of Catholic bishops who would marshal their troops if they believed the Catholic education system was going to be denied. George Pell, then the Archbishop of Sydney, climate change sceptic and apparently Tony Abbott’s quasi-spiritual and political adviser, could hardly be expected to engage objectively, although we always approached him in good faith.
But it’s harder for any one sector to secure too much advantage if both the prime minister and ministers’ offices hold a consistent position. This wasn’t always the case and in one instance they were inadvertently helped by the prime minister’s adviser, Tom Bentley, who in one of many discussions with the private schools, concerned that local Catholic schools had been advantaged, agreed they would get commensurate increases the model did not provide for, which resulted in a $15 million bonus for them in the ACT.
Julia Gillard was always rock solid on the new funding model reform. It meant a great deal to her and to the government’s legacy. She stuck by the model and by me, even when we were under siege from her department, trying to corral spending and mindful of the competing budget demand of other big-ticket items like the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Other ministers were lukewarm in support, including Jenny Macklin, who’d worked assiduously on the NDIS and was concerned that funds would be diverted away from disability towards schools. Finance minister Penny Wong didn’t appear to care for the reform at all.
I cannot think of any other significant issue, with the exception of climate change, that received as much attention from cabinet as the school funding package. Numerous versions of the cabinet submission from the prime minister and me were pored over and picked apart, sometimes as part of a larger dynamic of interrogation of the prime minister; Wayne Swan, Craig Emerson and Brendan O’Connor—key Gillard allies—assisted in fending off these complaints. The arguments for a new model were strong, it was a landmark Labor reform and, by the time the final submission was due to be agreed, everyone fell into line. (Interestingly, the NDIS, which I strongly supported, was never subject to the same level of scrutiny, nor was it required to provide the same level of detail as the National Plan for School Improvement, as the funding reform was formally titled.)
The biggest danger, other than a change of leader or the government imploding, was a breakout of old-style class warfare (such as had brought Latham’s earlier efforts undone) between the private and public school sectors, with the Australian Education Union (AEU), made up of primary and secondary school teachers, leading the charge.
I was surprised to find that some of my colleagues were more inclined to support the non-government school sector than the AEU. Repairing relations with the union, one of the largest in the country, was an early task. It is to the credit of their senior leadership, especially federal president Angelo Gavrielatos, that the union ended up playing a constructive role, embarking on a nationwide ‘I give a Gonski’ campaign, despite serious opposition from key state branches. This meant eschewing old ideological battles which had put noses out of joint in the past, and facing up to the reality of a diverse school sector in which many parents opted to send their kids to a non-government school in the secondary years. The union could no longer resist sensible reforms, especially in the area of improving teacher quality; they needed to be part of the solution to addressing worsening student performance and not characterise the reform as us versus them.
Gavrielatos, a man who wears his passions on his sleeve, understood this better than most, and he and my chief of staff, Denise Spinks, were in constant contact as the legislation intensified. At the previous election, the teachers had deserted Labor, to the extent that some country polling booths struggled to find volunteers, a role many teachers had previously taken on. Now, along with the primary and secondary school principals’ organisations, teachers became strong allies in the quest for a fairer funding system.
The business community was also in favour, aware of the connection between education and productivity, and mindful that as the mining boom started to taper off, the record high standard of living many Australians took for granted would be under threat unless we stemmed the education decline.
The travel schedule was relentless as I visited school after school, crisscrossing the country to spruik the benefits of better schools.
The contrast between the state of most government schools and high-end private schools was stark. Visiting Abbotsleigh—an all-girls school (which, coincidentally, my mum had attended) on Sydney’s Upper North Shore—was mind-blowing. The neatly manicured gardens were on a par with those at Parliament House, and its new library, which boasted native wood panelling, generous skylights and row upon row of gleaming Macs, was superior to any I had visited.
I didn’t begrudge the school this level of opulence—its fees are stratospheric for starters and much of the student body, encouraged by their parents, was highly motivated to succeed—but it beggared belief that the substantial endowment of many non-government schools should be continually supplemented by Commonwealth funds when teachers in some government schools were dipping into their own pockets to supply pens and stationery to their needy students.
The gap between the education haves and have-nots was now so great that it threatened to spawn a two-tier society. Only a proactive national government could get things in order and close the gap, with a well-thought-out policy backed by a substantial budget, to give all young Australians a decent start in life.
This was the mission we had embarked on, and it consumed us right through three chaotic years of government.
34
JOKER IN THE PACK
I WAS MIDWAY through the term, and entangled in the continuing wrestle with the independent school sector and the states over the fate of the ‘Gonski’ school funding reforms, when life-sized cardboard cut-outs of me started appearing at clubs and hotels—of which there was no shortage—across my electorate. Banners and signs exhorted the public to ‘Tell Peter Garrett!’ what they thought of the government’s ‘un-Australian’ policy of trying to reduce the scale of problem gambling by restricting the use of poker machines. On the basis that just about any publicity is good publicity, I was touched by the efforts of the gambling lobby to remind everyone what their local federal member looked like.
Tim Freedman, of Sydney band the Whitlams, had spotlighted this issue with his song, ‘Blow Up the Pokies’. We were part of a generation of Sydney musicians who’d seen firsthand the impact poker machines had on those who used them and on the hotels that hosted them. The once-vibrant pub scene that nourished so many artists had collapsed, and local watering holes had become soulless, sad gambling dens. The fact is Australians lose more money per person on gambling than any other nation. Problem gamblers were responsible for nearly half of the total amounts lost on poker machines, and the personal fallout, in terms of social, emotional and financial cost to those individuals and their families, was huge.
The campaign against poker-machine reform mounted by the clubs and hotels turned out to have a nasty edge right from the start, when they shot out of the blocks with specially generated polling, always framed to put a positive spin on policies while highlighting the alleged negative consequences of any reforms, which they ‘leaked’ to sympathetic media.
I soon found myself carrying the flag for a battle that most Labor MPs from New South Wales didn’t have the stomach for, and which had come about only because a small number of independent MPs, in particular Andrew Wilkie from Tasmania—whose vote was needed by the minority government if we were to get legislation through parliament—were strongly committed to poker-machine reform.
The measures under consideration were modest enough, including limiting the amount that could be spent on each wager, and introducing what was called pre-commitment technology so players could voluntarily set their spending limit.
Still, ClubsNSW and the Australian Hotel Association, whose members stacked as many machines in their premises as they were allowed, were trenchant in their opposition, as was, albeit in a quieter vein, the NSW Labor government.
Pro-poker-machine letters flooded the local paper, my office was bombarded with emails and indignant phone calls, and talkback radio raged hot. Across Sydney, especially in the western suburbs, the clubs were carpet-bombing electorates. A deputation of club leaders, including Ken Murray, a senior ALP member who was the current president of the Randwick Labor Club, paid me a visit.
My position was simple. I recognised the clubs were an important part of the community, and acknowledged the (modest) support they gave to local community groups and sporting bodies. At the same time, I believed genuine steps to reduce the harm that gambling addictions cause were long overdue. As it happened, the preponderance of clubs and hotels in Kingsford Smith meant the electorate had one of the highest concentrations of poker machines in the state. They were literally everywhere and the social cost was borne by a number of my constituents.
The deputation didn’t see it that way. Murray was a fixer from way back, so it was a case of the old fallback, agreeing to disagree. I would note their objections and relay them to the government but continue to support the reforms. Discussion over, it was time for me to get back to work on education.
But the clubs campaign showed no signs of slowing. They had a big war chest, and had visited the National Rifle Association in the US to learn new campaign techniques from masters of the dark arts. They targeted MPs in marginal seats and had a pervasive media presence. Sydney was so awash with pro-gambling propaganda that I decided to write to every household in the electorate, explaining the proposed changes and pointing out the harm—broken homes, bankruptcies, suicides—caused by addiction to poker machines.
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