These arguments have been presented many times before and refuted many times before.

Australia is a secular society. If parents want to send their children to a religious school, whether Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish or Muslim, that's fine, but why should the taxpayer fund them?

The argument that private schools save the taxpayer money is also unsound. Public schools still have to fund the very large fixed costs (buildings, furniture, equipment, minimum teaching staffing, admin staff etc). Those fixed costs don't suddenly go down when a student switches from public to private school.

Public schools also do all the 'heavy lifting'. i.e. it's the public schools that service the most underprivileged and 'difficult' students, the ones who are most costly to educate. Private schools tend to 'cherry pick', and to service the most privileged, easy to educate sector of the community.

Finally, there is no evidence that private schools provide a better education than public schools. Parents tend to choose private schools because of fear, or a desire for their children to mix with children of a specific profile. To paraphrase Tony Abbott, it's a 'lifestyle choice', so why should the taxpayer fund it?

Exactly snibbo!
Rhrosty.

Students at non government schools may do better in year twelve, but do they also have a higher percentage of students who complete their chosen university courses? That is an area which more accurately defines success.
Could you answer this question please Kevin.

David

James Merlino did not “equivocate on the question of whether Victoria should fully implement the … Gonski school funding model”. In accordance with standard practice for generations, he refused to answer budgetary questions in the lead up to the budget, which will be delivered in two months and will include the four years of forward estimates, taking us into the fifth year of Gonski, so we will all be able to judge then.

Nor was the Gonski school funding model “Rudd/Gillard inspired”. The Gonski school funding model is an amended version of the Howard government’s socio-economic status funding model, renamed “capacity to contribute” and applied to all schools, including those currently protected from it by being left on Labor’s old and genuinely needs-based educational resources index model. That the Gonski panel endorsed the Howard funding model was a consequence of the public education lobby’s failure to propose any sort of funding model at all in any of its submissions to the review, the public education lobby being too busy driving non-government school parents into the arms of the Coalition, to the detriment of all schools - not that you will read any of this in the daily media.

Mr Merlino was “correct to acknowledge the right Catholic and independent schools have to receive government funding”, but in all the Greens-inspired hoo-ha over the Victorian legislation, the gullible media, the same one that falsely claims Gonski is “sector-blind” and that pretends the SES model is dead, overlooked the facts: the Victorian Financial Assistance Model is more needs-based than the Gonski model because it uses each school’s actual resources, not the income and education of the students’ neighbours, to determine the level of support each school attracts.

Given the almost universal failure of the commentariat to report truthfully on education, the area I know, I trust nothing it says in areas I do not know about.

few seem to acknowledge with the massive increases in funding of the public education system and much higher teacher wages over the last 20 years that the standards have dropped. Maybe we should spend another 50 million on another report making excuses for lack of discipline and poor teaching standards and the lack of males in the system. The envy of the success of private schools using a lot less of tax payers money is very evident.

Runner,

It seems you are another victim of the gullible media and its propensity to repeat rubbish rather than question it: “few seem to acknowledge … the massive increases in funding of the public education system and much higher teacher wages over the last 20 years” because none of it is true. Education spending has just kept up with economic and population growth. Teacher salaries are dramatically worse than they were, not 20 years ago, but 40 years ago.

The National Reports on Schooling in Australia show that government spending per student in Australia was $8,115 in 1999-2000 ($11,731 in 2012 dollars) and $13,544 in 2008-09 ($14,637 in 2012 dollars). That is a real increase of only 24.7 per cent, about half the oft-exaggerated 44 per cent that came from the Grattan Institute’s report.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports a real increase in per capita GDP over the ten years from 1998-99 to 2008-09 of 24.4 per cent. The relevance of this is that the salaries of teachers have to keep up to some extent with the general living standards of the population as a whole. Does anyone really think we would attract able people to teaching and retain them if that 24.7 per cent increase in education spending had not occurred and, as a consequence, the top Victorian teacher salary was now only $70,449 and the beginning salary was now only $46,184?