Why Can't They Just Fund Public Schools? (And Why Fund Private Schools?) [S3-01]

Show Notes

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Music: “Insurrection”
Written by Pierre Chrétien
Performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra
Courtesy of Do Right Music Inc.

Transcript

link to podcast

26 August 2026

Glenn
Welcome to another episode of Why Can’t They Just, a podcast about politics, policy and getting stuff done. I’m Glenn Davidson and I’m a member of the Labor Party.

Janaline
I’m Janaline Oh, I’m also a member of the Labor Party. I’m a former diplomat and a climate, environment and anti-racism activist.

Luke
I’m Luke Robertson, I’m also a member of the Labor Party, and I’m a conservation biology and environmental policy student.

Yassine
I’m Yassine Andrews, I’m a Year 11 student and I’m also a part of the Labor Party.

Glenn
Now this episode marks the first in Season 3 of Why Can’t They Just, and we are welcoming Yassine to the team as a co-host. Listeners may recognise that she came on the last episode of Season 2, on social media and Gen Z, as a guest. She liked it so much, she’s agreed to stay. So welcome Yassine.

Janaline
Before we start, I would like to acknowledge that we are all recording this on the unceded lands of First Nations people in Australia. Recognising that sovereignty was never ceded, we pay our respects to their Elders, past and present, and extend those respects to any First Nations listeners that we have today.

Glenn
Today we’re talking about school funding, and some of the policy challenges the government is addressing in this area. Now Australian schools all receive government funding, both state and Commonwealth, but they are not all government schools. There’s a mix of government primary and secondary schools, which educate the majority of students, including the majority of disadvantaged students, particularly in remote and regional areas. There are the Catholic schools, who are the largest non-government sector, who receive government funding and also charge fees, and then there are the independent schools, which is a diverse group that includes the elite grammar schools, faith-based schools, Montessori and Steiner schools, and community schools. Now some of those schools charge modest fees, while others charge very high fees and have considerable resources.

The debate is not whether non-government schools should receive government funding: they have been getting it for decades. The debate is really about how much funding should go to each of the sectors and individual schools within them, and to what extent funding should be targeted towards student disadvantage.

Janaline, Australia has spent many years discussing funding arrangements, with some arguing that schools serving the greatest concentration of disadvantage do not receive sufficient resources, while funding for private schools, which sits at around 7 per cent of GDP, remains comparatively generous by international standards: for example, the OECD average is only about 0.3 per cent of GDP. Why is this such a contentious and apparently unsolvable problem in Australia, and why are we out of step with comparable countries?

Janaline
Thanks Glenn. Ok, I’m going to take issue with the idea that we shouldn’t question whether there should be government funding for non-government schools. I think we should absolutely ask the question of why the government is funding non-government schools. Because in a lot of countries, governments do not fund non-government schools. Now, I get in Australia, they have been funding them for decades, since the 1960s, but I don’t think we should just take that as a given.

So let’s go back to first principles about who funds education, who funds what kind of education and what is the distribution. And I think, if you look at the way in which most countries operate, most countries will either not fund non-government schools: they only fund public schools, and if people choose to send their children to non-government schools, they basically pay fees, and the non-government schools will raise funds. Many of them are church-run so they will get subsidies from their religious organisations. The other way in which governments operates is that they do fund non-government schools, but they put a cap on what those non-government schools can then charge in fees.

Why does this make a difference? Because it means that you don’t get this massive inequality in school resourcing as we have in Australia. So, as you say, some non-government schools don’t charge very high fees: they charge a little bit to supplement what they get from the government. Some schools charge astronomical fees. There are a couple of schools in Canberra that charge upwards of $20,000 a year. So I think, in Australia, it was not always this unequal. Like even when governments started funding non-government schools, and it started with sort of subsidising school libraries and school buildings in the 1970s and into the 1980s.

I think the big inequity in school funding really came in the 1990s, when the Howard government based non-government school funding on what they called socio-economic status - not of the population of the school, as in the families that sent their kids to those schools, but based on the neighbourhood in which the school was physically located. And what that meant was that a very significant number of pretty wealthy schools with pretty wealthy parent populations were in quite modest neighbourhoods but, because of the neighbourhood they were in, they got pretty significant increases in their funding. So what the Howard government did was guarantee a base level of funding - of federal funding - for non-government schools. Public schools are generally funded by the states. Most public school funding comes from the states, which makes perfect sense: the states also run those schools. But because the Commonwealth has greater funding resources, the Commonwealth’s guarantee of funding for private schools has essentially underpins a lot of the growing inequality that we see in the sectors.

Now why is this important? It’s important because it has seen a massive exodus from the public school system into the private school system because of a perception that public schools are under-funded and under-performing, and parents will basically scrimp and save and make whatever sacrifices they need to make for their children’s education and that, for a lot of families, means making that effort to put them in private schools. And of course what this does is, it further depletes the amount of money that is available in public schools; it means that private schools, which get to select their students, tend to get the brighter kids and the better-off kids who are going to be better performing, and so the statistics of, you know, school attainment from standardised testing, things like NAPLAN, shows that private schools are better performing, and then it starts again. Because parents will look at those results and say ‘oh, but the public school in my area is not doing very well, but the private school is doing really well so let’s do what we can to get our kid into the private school’.

And we’ve ended up with a situation where, uniquely, well certainly amongst developed countries, Australia has almost 40 per cent of its students educated in the private system. The OECD average is something less than 10 per cent. And it is the accumulation of the way in which schools are funded that I think has contributed to this outcome.

Glenn
Yeah, so what you’re saying is our unique political system has resulted in a school system that is out of step with what’s going on elsewhere in the world, and it’s sort of moving in a direction that is not necessarily in the best interests of either the students or the broader economy.

Now Janaline, you spoke about the impact of the Howard Liberal government back in the 1990s. But let’s have a look at what was done by the Gillard Labor government in the 2010s. One of the initiatives of that government was the review of funding for schooling by the businessman David Gonski. That review was driven by concerns that the funding system had become overly complex, that there were discrepancies between the states and school sectors, so there was an equity issue, that student outcomes were increasingly linked to family background rather than ability and opportunity. Educational disadvantage was not being adequately addressed and Australian performance was declining in international standards. That’s quite a shopping list of issues with our education system.

The Gonski review found an incoherent system resulting from years of historical deals and political compromises, student need varied between schools and that schools serving disadvantaged communities needed more resources than those serving advantaged communities. Who would have thought that would have been a thing? Rather than equal funding, what was proposed was needs-based funding. The review recommended the creation of the schooling resource standard. This initiative shifted the debate from sector-based funding towards educational need.

Now Luke, I think you’ve got some particular views on this. Do you want to run through how you see this school funding model now?

Luke
Yeah, I’ll just give a bit of a background as to how it worked. So as you said, school funding in Australia revolves around the federally mandated model, the Schools Resource Standard. So it’s basically a formula that calculates how much a school needs based on three main things: how many students they have; how easily the local community can afford to pay fees; and then everything on top of that, needs-based funding which includes things like whether the school is in a remote area, there are students with disabilities, English proficiency, or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids, and a few others. But the system by which these schools get funding is split, so public schools get about 80 per cent of their money from the state, whereas independent schools get about 80 per cent of theirs from the federal government. This is the controversial bit of the Schools Resource Standard, where there’s a safety net that guarantees private schools 20 per cent funding. So that means for, you know, a wealthy private school with 2000 students, they’ll automatically get $3.6 million in government money each year, which is about $18,000 per student, regardless of whether the school community can afford to pay fees and contribute that money themselves.

As a result, there’s a big gap between what the federal government can contribute and the state government can contribute. So because of this structure, 98 per cent of private schools get all of the funding they need, or, in some cases, even more, but for public schools, only about 1.3 per cent actually receive their full funding, with the vast majority falling about 4 per cent short, with the states not kicking in the full amount. And there’s a loophole currently where they’re about - where they’re allowed to write off about 4 per cent of their total funding for other expenses: they can say things like school buses, repairing dilapidated buildings. And that money never actually makes its way to the students.

So in most places, like New South Wales, the state pools federal and state money to hand out to schools and then gives it on. But one of the problems with that is that the funding is tied directly to the headcount, so if a public school loses students, they lose money and less money means they have to cut subjects and shrink the curriculum, which ultimately hurts the students left behind and creates a bit of a feedback cycle that’s pushing people into the independent sector.

Glenn
Yeah, thanks Luke, that’s a lot of good factual basis there. So Yassine, there’s a lot of facts and figures about dollars. What’s the impact from your perspective for students in schools, of those funding deals and arrangements and changes?

Yassine
Dr Susan Close, who was the South Australian education minister, gave a speech recently and she said that the education system, like the current one where public schools aren’t getting enough investment from the government, teaches some students that the government will invest in them and others that they’ll tolerate their exclusion. And I just found this so accurate, because I have friends in both private and public schools, and it’s so clear that there’s such a huge gap between the two, and like, those in public schools know how bad their school is, and it’s like just a common thing that’s talked about, because, you know, I go to public school as well so I’m very, like, I’m surrounded by that environment. And it’s, like, full of people who act out in classes and are not able to be controlled, and the buildings are falling apart, and there aren’t enough teachers.

And in my high school, which was public, there would often be so many leaks in the roof, and gigantic holes as well, like, about the size of a bucket, would fall off the roof - the ceiling actually, inside - and just wouldn’t get fixed, for, like, months. And then in my French classroom as well, there were leaks everywhere and there would - like every time it rained, you would get rained on, pretty much. So that’s just kind of an example of how public schools aren’t getting funded, I guess.

Even if this doesn’t directly equate to the students relating this to the government’s downfall, it does, at least on some level, make them grow up with a bit of resentment towards the government.

Janaline
I think that’s a really interesting observation, and Susan Close when she gave that lecture was talking about the way in which funding for public schools in particular, or the inequities in government funding were actually leading people to disengage from the political system and turn towards more radical alternatives to the major parties. So she was couching it in terms of kind of a political implication of this, but one of her key points, as Yassine points out, is that the problem is some kids are brought up in an environment where they have holes in their roofs, and they have leaky classrooms, and they have terrible school toilets, and not enough teachers. And meanwhile, kids in private schools have orchestra lifts, and heated indoor swimming pools.

So I thought it was an interesting argument. But I think that what this actually comes down to, when you talk about those difficult political deals: the genius of the Howard government’s approach to private schools, under the guise of ‘school choice’, was actually to, firstly, deprive parents of school choice, because a lot of families actually feel they don’t have the choice to send their kids to the local public school because they feel it is so bad. It will compromise their child’s education. That is not choice. There are parents who would love to send their kids to a local public school that was actually functioning, and working, and would deliver good outcomes. So firstly depriving people of choice under the guise of giving them choice. But secondly, in baking in these inequalities, that funding system has now created a massive political cohort of parents who will resist any kind of reduction in federal subsidies for private education.

And this is what happened to the Gillard government: they got completely mugged by the political reality that a large number of voters send their kids to independent schools, and would be very very strongly opposed to changing a funding model that looked like it was going to disadvantage them. Even though the vast majority of those parents don’t send their kids to the kinds of schools that might have had to give up some of their subsidy. So there was a massive campaign around the time of the Gonski report and it resulted in Julia Gillard, as education minister and then subsequently as Prime Minister, promising that no school would be worse off.

Now think about the implications of this: you have got some private schools who are charging tens of thousands of dollars in fees to parents who can amply afford that, who are also getting over-subsidised by the federal government, who are now told they will not have any of their federal money go backwards in order to fund the less advantaged schools. And that includes less advantaged private schools. It includes less advantaged Catholic schools, or, you know, some of those community-based schools. So basically what the government committed to, and I think this was a terrible mistake, was that the only way in which those other schools would get properly funded would be to have a very significant increase in the education budget. So then it stopped being a distribution issue within the education sector, and it actually became an issue of budget priorities and budget allocations.

And remember what happened around 2010. We were just in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis. So budgets everywhere, all around the world, are getting cut. There is massive pressure on the public purse. And we are telling the parents of students in very very wealthy schools who are amply able to pay their own school fees - and do they really need a million dollar orchestra lift? - that they’re not going to lose any funding. And meanwhile kids in disadvantaged schools, in those small community schools as well as in the public system, are being told ‘sorry, no money, what can we do?’

So it’s not surprising to me that we end up with this massive inequality. And we do have a big political problem. And I understand that you can’t just change it overnight. This is something that is going to require a concerted long term effort. But it needs the effort, and I don’t see any kind of appetite in the current government, in the current Labor Party, much less the Liberal or National Parties, to actually deal with this issue of inequity in school funding.

Yassine
And also, you talked about how you don’t really get a choice when choosing - like, people aren’t really getting a choice anymore of whether to send their children to public or private schools, and I think that’s pretty accurate as well because, especially when I was transitioning from high school to college, a lot of my friends and their parents would be talking about, like, what schools to send them to, and whether to go to public or private schools. And most parents I think wanted to send their kids to private schools, and were sort of scared of the public system. And for those who could afford it, most of them did.

Glenn
Yeah, so it’s pretty clear that this is a situation that’s getting worse, not better, and the situation that Yassine’s describing is for a school in Canberra, which could hardly be described as a disadvantaged area. And the Canberra education system is often promoted as being one of the best in the country. And yet there are still these issues that result from an absence of capital funding.

And far be it from me to defend the most wealthy private schools, Janaline, but we should be clear in the interests of fairness and balance to recognise that those million dollar orchestra lifts are not being funded by the taxpayer, they’re being - that sort of capital expenditure is being funded by donors to the school and so on, but they can do that because they don’t have to pick up the costs associated with the recurrent funding that’s coming through, as Luke mentioned, that amount per student that they’re getting regardless

Janaline
I am going to slightly push back on that. The taxpayer is contributing to those orchestra lifts because those donations are fully tax deductible. And one of the things that I think this Labor government has tried to open a conversation on the tax deductibility of those donations, because of an understanding that it is actually contributing to inequity. And I would also add that some of those orchestra lifts and I’m talking - full disclosure here, I went to a private school in Melbourne. I went to a pretty posh private school in Melbourne. I was a scholarship kid, which is how my parents could afford that. And my alma mater is one of those schools that installed an orchestra lift during COVID, using in part their COVID payments. So I do challenge the idea that these luxuries are not being funded by the taxpayer. They are at very least being heavily subsidised by the taxpayer, either through tax deductibility of donations, or through, as you say, the fungibility of the funds because they don’t have to pay as much for the recurrent expenses so they can afford to make these investments.

Glenn
Yes and that whole COVID cash cow is an issue on its own for non-government schools, because there was no drop off in business for schools during that period and no drop off in funding sources, and yet they still were eligible for those Morrison government handouts which were just absolutely outrageous.

Now, given our past conversation, it’s pretty clear that schools do not exist in a social and policy vacuum. They’re influenced by and are a product of the broader society in which they exist. While money is an enabler for schooling and education, other elements are also important. Things like teacher quality, curriculum, evidence-based instruction, attendance and school leadership also play critical roles.

The changing demographic in schools is seeing an increased concentration of students from disadvantaged backgrounds or higher support needs in public schools, as students from wealthier families shift to private schools, as Janaline’s mentioned earlier. Keeping the brightest and best teachers in these environments, in public schools, is also challenging.

So Janaline, how does the government address these broader social and demographic issues to build social cohesion, fairness and opportunity for the present and future generation of students? What’s really at stake here?

Janaline
Yeah, I’ve got to say, this is a thing that troubles me a lot. Because one of the consequences of this flight to private schools is that you are getting more and more fragmentation of different communities into actually different schools. Now I was at primary school in the 1970s, when there weren’t that many private school choices and everybody went to school together. Now Australia in the 1970s was not Australia now, but I think one of the issues now is that you’re getting more and more segregation of students. So the Jewish kids go to Jewish school. Increasing numbers of Muslim kids are going to Muslim schools. Other faiths are sending their kids to their schools. Now I don’t have a problem with people wanting their children to have a faith-based education, I just want to be very clear about that. But a lot of those people are sending those kids to those schools, not because they particularly want a faith-based education but because they are concerned that if they send them to the public school, they will either get bullied for their faith, or that they will not have a good education because the public school is not good and there are terrible toilets and there are holes in the wall and they’ll get rained on.

Then you end up with less social cohesion because there is less mixing and there is less mutual understanding. I mean, one of the fantastic things about Yassine’s schooling, I have to say, is the diversity of the friends that she has made through being part of a public school. And a lot of those friendships were made in primary school and subsequently many of those friends, as she’s indicated, have then opted to go to private school. I think it’s actually a shame that those families have felt the need to do that, because, you know, we opted to send her to public school.

And you know, one of the other things that Susan Close in her speech quoted was a study from the US in the 1960s, which found that children from what we might call a high education attainment background going to any school would pretty much come out with a similar result. The type of school, the other students, whether they were advantaged, disadvantaged or not, would not make a big difference to that child’s results. By contrast, children from a low education attainment background, so what we might call educationally disadvantaged kids, just by being in a classroom with those high attainment kids, could gain up to two years of schooling within the course of their primary school career.

So think about that: having a mixture of kids from different backgrounds in the school doesn’t disadvantage the high-achieving kids; but it has a huge benefit for the less advantaged kids. Think about that across a society. Think about what we are doing to our society. And you can see this in the results, right? Our PISA scores, this is the international school attainment standard that’s run by the OECD. It tests 15 year olds. Australia has been falling in its PISA attainment for the past twenty years. So we’re spending more and more on private schooling for our kids, we’re getting a more and more unequal school system, and our test scores are falling. So surely on the basis of that evidence, you would have to be thinking pretty seriously about what fundamental changes might be needed in your school funding system to deliver better results.

Glenn
So Luke, that’s a pretty sobering message, but it’s nowhere more acute than in regional and remote areas. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Luke
Yeah, so data shows that students in regional and remote areas are not achieving at the same level as their metropolitan peers. According to the Commonwealth Department of Education, the average 15 year old in remote Australia is one and a half years behind their metropolitan counterparts. Those results are particularly represented in STEM subjects, where remote students perform - quote - ‘significantly below - end quote - the national average in maths. But in New South Wales, there’s a really creative way to help some of those kids and get them high quality education from really far away.

There’s a virtual selective school called Aurora College, which is a public school that was established in 2015, it serves kids from Year 5 to Year 12. It’s a digital synchronous learning model, where kids at this school complete some of their subjects at their public school in person, things like PE, HSI, creative and performing arts subjects, but complete other subjects on line in real time with dedicated teachers for things like maths, English and science. In Year 12, the school isn’t selective, so regional and remote students can study a range of subjects that aren’t available in their home school. Because of this, it’s one of the most improved schools in terms of HSC results. It’s consistently growing year on year at faster rates than even some of the best performing schools in New South Wales. It’s able to provide resources to those students that keep them engaged in unique ways, and also give them a massive leg-up into the tertiary system should students choose to do so. It also has a program with dedicated spots to support high potential and gifted First Nations young people achieve their potential whilst also maintaining their connection to country.

But this model is being expanded right across the state to help kids, regional or not, by broadening the curriculum they can access in stage 6, so that’s Year 11 and 12. Basically they’re working out how to allow really important subjects to be taught through this model, so that at schools where, say, biology might not be available, a student in stage 6 still gets the option to learn it, no matter what. And so that’ll start, I think, next year, where it’ll be offering the first eleven subjects, including advanced English and maths, physics, chemistry and economics, as well as extension subjects in English, maths, science and history.

Glenn
Thanks Luke, so that’s good to see that there are some initiatives there to try and address this, but there’s still those underlying problems. And it really seems that the government’s trying to solve at least three problems all at once in this area, including trying to reduce inequality, improve academic performance and address teacher shortages. Each one of those is challenging on its own and requires long term commitment. Janaline, can we do it?

Janaline
Yeah, look it is, as I said, a pretty wicked problem. I think that sounds like an amazing program, Luke. I guess I have two niggling concerns about it, as a more generalised model. It sounds like it’s doing amazing things and absolutely that’s the kind of thing that governments should be looking at. I’m very uncomfortable with selective public schools. And the reason is exactly that thing about, for your brightest students, whatever school they’re in, they’re probably going to do ok. For your disadvantaged kids, being with those bright students can make a massive difference to their learning and to their educational achievement. So one of the issues also with private schools is that they get to choose their students as well. One of the reasons that they have such great academic results is because they get to choose the students that are going to produce those high academic results. I am not trying to shame parents who make those choices. Every parent, I know this, is going to make the choice that they feel is best for their child.

I also think it doesn’t resolve the bigger issue of having well functioning and well funded public schools. And just things like the infrastructure needs of public schools. I mean, we’ve talked about leaky classrooms and terrible toilets. They are a material problem for learning. Because it is very hard to learn if you’re distracted by physical discomfort. I think that is an urgent issue that really needs to be fixed.

In terms of attracting teachers, we’re going to do another episode on the school experience, but I think one of the things that the government could do, and this is linked to resourcing, is to look at resourcing teachers not to have to do so much admin. Which might mean changing the way in which they do reporting; it may mean making available resources to employ people who are specifically trained to deal with behavioural issues in the classroom, so a kind of social worker type role. So that teachers have resources that they can call on, so that you don’t end up with five per cent of the kids basically making learning impossible for the other 95 per cent of the kids. If we can go some way to dealing with those issues, then I think we might find teacher retention to be better. Because teachers actually want to teach, they don’t want to be ticking boxes for some educational bureaucracy.

Luke
Can I just say a couple of things to that? The thing you just described about social workers being in schools to help with kids who might have behavioural issues. I don’t know what it’s like in the rest of the country, but we have those in New South Wales - SLSOs, school learning and support officers. They’re at every school, and they do work.

Also with the selective model, in Year 6 I was asked by my public school to go into the selective class and I objected on moral grounds.

Janaline
That’s why we love you, Luke.

Luke
But in the regions it’s really different, right? Like, these schools where selective kids are being drawn from are not the same schools like in New South Wales, James Ruse, it is the most well-off public school in the state. The student population where this selective school gets their population from is not the same as a sort of selective public school where everybody sort of moves to the area to put their kid in. The whole point is to allow kids who are in their schools, which often as you rightly point out are deeply underfunded, with staff shortages, things like infrastructure. It allows them to get the high quality education that allows them to go into the tertiary sector if they want to without having the school draw from their own budget to pay for that.

Janaline
Yeah, yeah. Don’t get me wrong, Luke, I was definitely not suggesting that that school that you describe was not a huge benefit and a great model to consider. I guess, in my ideal universe, something like that model could be expanded to other students as well. I mean I get the point of being selective in a kind of initial phase, where you want to make sure it’s going to work and so you choose the students that are most likely to benefit from it. I don’t have an issue with that. But I think in my ideal universe, we would actually have the potential to provide subjects to students in remote areas where the school just doesn’t have the population to justify having a teacher for that subject. That would be great.

Luke
Well it does. It does in stage 6, like it’s for everyone, no matter what. Like if you want to learn a subject, and your school doesn’t have it, you can take it there, even if you aren’t in a selective stream. And that’s the same thing that going to every school in New South Wales, so if I was at Bankstown High School, and I wanted to do advanced maths and they didn’t offer it, I could do it, even if I hadn’t been in selective education at any point in my life.

Janaline
Yeah, yeah, I’m not saying it’s a bad model. I guess I’m making a more general point about discomfort with selectivity in the education system. I think, for the school that you describe, I’m not saying this is not a good model. I’m saying it is a good model, right?

Luke
No, no, I agree, selective education can segregate the community within the city.

Glenn
All right, it seems that organisational structures matter, resources matter, and having resources that are well targeted can certainly have an impact, particularly in regional and remote areas, but there’s not enough of it and it’s not distributed equitably, and it doesn’t necessarily generate the sort of social and community outcomes that at least some of us are looking for.

All right, we’ve ranged across a fairly broad area there, to do with funding, resources, social impact and a range of other things: the personal experience of someone who’s still in the school system as to what it’s all like, and, as Janaline foreshadowed, we’ve got another episode coming where we’ll talk about the actual school experience now, from a student perspective in particular and a parent perspective. But that’s for another day.

Our time’s coming to an end, so do we have any final comments? We’ll start with you, Yassine.

Yassine
I just want to say that I didn’t know that governments funded private schools. I was under the impression that only public schools were funded by the government and private schools had to get by by themselves. Clearly it’s not working very well, and there’s a big gap between public and private schools and their education resources, I guess.

Glenn
Thank you, Yassine. And from you, Luke?

Luke
Yeah, I think it’s quite revealing, the impact that this is having on so many students, with public school enrolments falling and the fact that so many families feel that they have to put their kids in private schools, and are spending so much money, is really representative of the problem. I hope that this Gonski funding that is, I think, five years down the track, really does make a difference, because it really is creating a very segregated Australia.

Glenn
And Janaline.

Janaline
One of the things that we didn’t actually touch on was the recent agreement that the Commonwealth has made with the states for fully funding public schools, where the Commonwealth has offered to kick in a bit of extra money on the condition that the states also come to the party with a bit of extra money: I think the idea was, with the roughly 10 per cent gap in school funding across the country, they would kind of split the difference. The final state, which was Queensland, came across the line recently and the new Premier of Victoria has now committed to fully funding Victoria’s share of the public school system.

So I’m hopeful that that will start to make an impact. As I said, the reality of the political situation and the way in which school choice has become school not-choice and therefore created a very very large cohort of voters who send their kids to private schools; I’m hoping that that will start to change when public schools do get adequate funding, and when state governments do start to deliver the kinds of improvements that are needed to public school resourcing, to create a situation where they become a viable choice for most parents.

And, I have to say, I feel we are very lucky in the ACT, because we do have good public schools. By and large, the primary school system in the ACT and the college system in the ACT are fantastic. They are really really high quality, and most people send their kids to public schools at those levels. There is a gap at the high school system, so years 7 to 10, in the ACT and I think that does need to be addressed. But I guess I’d like to have hope that fully funding public schools will help to create that choice for more families, and as more families go back into the public school system and see it as a viable choice, we will also see a bigger cohort of advocates for public education that hopefully will keep pressure on governments to maintain that resourcing level and to maintain those quality standards.

Glenn
That was another episode of Why Can’t They Just? The piece that we use for our theme music for this podcast is a piece called Insurrection by Pierre Chrétien, performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra, courtesy of Do Right Music Inc.

Janaline
You can also hear us on Canberra community radio, 2XX FM 98.3 on Tuesdays between 6 and 7, or via 2XXfm.org.au. If you like our work, consider supporting us on Patreon, via our website whycanttheyjust.com.au.

Glenn
I’m Glenn Davidson.

Luke
I’m Luke Robertson.

Yassine
I’m Yassine Andrews.

Janaline
I’m Janaline Oh, and this is Why Can’t They Just?