The no-new-spending Gonski
By Lyle Dunne
In election campaigns, as in war, truth is an early casualty. Some truths are inconvenient; many are just too complicated to live.
At first glance it seems surprising that Tony Abbott would agree to match the government’s spending commitments on the Gonski scheme: why is he offering to spend this money, when at least some of his state colleagues are not agreeing to accept it? But in fact there are two main reasons — both connected with the truth-as-casualty point.
Inordinate complexity
The first is that the issue is simply too complex. It’s likely that Liberal strategists have decided that it was generally a positive for the government, and if they hadn’t been able to gain traction attacking it before now they would be even less likely to succeed in the hothouse environment of an election campaign – where the attention span of the public and media for policy issues is even more goldfish-like than usual, and debate is conducted in five-second grabs.
Accordingly, the only rational strategy is to take it out of play by offering to match the ALP’s spending.
This would be irresponsible, but for the second reason: there is in fact no new spending commitment to match.
There have been claims of $16.2b or $15b of additional funding over six years, but the reality is that, apart from the extra $5b the states have to put in (or would, had they all signed), there is simply no extra money.
A few quick calculations of the Commonwealth’s specific spending commitments under the published agreements with those states who have signed show that annual Commonwealth spending in six years time under the new scheme won’t reach the amounts they were committed to spend in four years time under the old scheme (as reflected in the previous budget).
So is it all a baldfaced lie?
Not quite. It seems that when Labor describes the Commonwealth’s contribution over six years as “$10b more”, they don’t mean “$10b more than we would’ve paid you under the old scheme”, they mean “$10b more than we’ll pay you if you don’t sign”.
The commitment thus amounts to saying “sign up, or we’ll cut school funding by another $10b”.
I’ll leave it up to readers to decide whether this is enough of a figleaf to claim that the statements are technically defensible in some sense – but it’s certainly not the “plain meaning” of the words “more” or “extra” here.
Oh, and another thing: to get a difference of $10b between what states get if they (all) sign and what they get if they (all) don’t, you have to make some pretty heroic assumptions about indexation. This is not a subtle difference between optimistic and pessimistic scenarios: you have to assume that states who don’t sign will get zero indexation.
But under the Gonski legislation (rammed through Parliament at the 11th hour), payments for non-government schools must be indexed at between 3% and 4.7%. (Rudd is behaving as though non-government schools are parties to negotiations in the same way as states, but in reality the legislation locks in most aspects of their payments; only marginal issues like assessments of socio-economic status are up for grabs.)
“If you don’t understand it, don’t vote for it”
So to achieve zero indexation overall, payments to government schools would have to fall by an equivalent amount every year.
And since the Commonwealth (unlike States) pays considerably more to non-government than government schools, we’d be talking about an annual cut of around 8 – 10%, over six years, for government schools in states who don’t sign.
To be clear, this is not what I’m saying Labor would do if states don’t sign; this is what they’re assuming they would do.
Again, I’ll leave it up to readers to decide how realistic this is. But you see why I say the issues are too complex to debate in an election campaign.
The Gonski scheme is in fact a strong argument against overly-complex policy. As Keating said of the (much simpler) GST, “If you don’t understand it, don’t vote for it”.
The scheme was already overcomplicated before Rudd got hold of it. It’s likely that there is now no- one in government, certainly no-one in the recently-replaced Prime Minister’s, Treasurer’s or Education Minister’s offices, who now completely understands it.
Star Wars reform
Shorten and Rudd have been focused on re-configuring it and selling it rather than understanding it. Further, it seems the process of Cabinet Government has reverted to the “Kevin 24÷7” variant, with centralised decision making, arbitrary focus shifts, snap judgments, and no time for proper analysis, costing or briefing. Rudd may say or even believe that he’s changed, but this will inevitably be overridden by the sense of urgency, and the feeling that only he can cut through the Gordian knot and bring about an agreement – in between stopping the boats, fixing the Carbon Tax, and creating a new relationship with Indonesia. We’d love to do Cabinet Submissions, consultation, Co-ordination Comments — but there’s just no time!
Of course, from the perspective of pure cynical political pragmatism, it didn’t matter to its architects in the Gillard government if Gonski wouldn’t work: like Reagan’s Star Wars system, it only had to look like it might. As long as it held together until the election – in the limited sense of at least looking like a serious attempt at reform of school funding – then it would have served its damage-limitation aim. And if it fell over after the election, creating problems for the Abbott government, with the “reforms”, levels of investment or performance improvements proving unachievable, so much the better.
The irony, though, is that if by some miracle Rudd managed to win the election, he might well be hoist by his own petard in trying to implement this scheme.
It’s been observed that Rudd is great at campaigning but terrible at administration. This time, unlike in 2007, he has to do both at once. It will be a close-run thing to see whether he manages to hold together longer than the Better Schools plan.