When Henry Parkes made his statement, the tax rates, tax breaks and comparative adjusted for inflation thresholds, were very different!
So also were the treatment of private schools? It was argued that private schools should be self suffient, with little public money; given, public schooling was open and available to all!
Over very recent times, we have seen funds that should be exclusively reserved for the needy, reallocated to the greedy, as welfare for the rich.
As a young man earning above an average income, I paid up to 68 cents in the dollar; and, the Yanks paid up to 91 cents.
The highest rate today is significantly lower and around 95% of corporate Australia are now head-quartered offshore. The tax they used to pay is now replaced by the revenue surety of the cascading GST. The point being, that our richest citizens and or corporations, are no longer shouldering a fair share, but have in effect, asked our grannies and the most vulnerable to shoulder a disproportional and patently unfair share of the common tax burden.
Welfare for the rich and better off, [like negative gearing,] is simply no longer possible; given the sheer size of the structural deficit.
Means testing of all public service provision must now become standard practise, least we become just like parts of Europe, where so much of their current problems had their beginning or source in tax evasion or avoidance, which as an almost standard practise, is only ever available to the already better off.
If all incomes had been indexed for inflation from the very get go, many of our lowest income earners, or around 40% of the population, would simply pay no tax whatsoever, let alone school fees! Rhrosty.

An article that makes me want to vomit!

The communist author identifies correctly that schools serve neither the children nor their parents, but rather the state machinery, an effective brain-washing mechanism to turn our own children into obedient subjects/workers for the "public good" (eg. the good of the vain-intellectual-artistic-nogooder-bureaucrat-communist rulers) and for that purpose she hails them being compulsory.

<<We are not a bunch of individuals connected to each other only through the market>>

Indeed, we are a bunch of individuals connected to a bunch of robots that leach upon us, who have no idea what "individual" means. Indeed we are connected not by the market, but by the ropes on our necks to those we never asked to have anything to do with.

Away with the garbage of nationhood!

Poor old Gerard.

The Sydney Institute he represents has only 2 employees - he and his wife. Not exactly a vast forum of independent thinkers.

The Board of Directors and the Institute's financial sponsors represent some very conservative corporations indeed, with a definite agenda, and I evaluate everything he says with that in mind.

Also, it's interesting that only one member of the Shadow Cabinet went to a Public High School.

The government should introduce a "voucher system" where every student is awarded an identical sum for each year of their education.
If parents choose to use private schools, they can then pay the entire difference themselves.

<<The government should introduce a "voucher system" where every student is awarded an identical sum for each year of their education.
If parents choose to use private schools, they can then pay the entire difference themselves.>>

I second Rache's motion!

Australia has one of the lowest funding of public schools per capita in the OECD. This is largely because Aus has the highest proportion of privately educated pupils. Thus the funding per pupil is better than presented.

Secondly, as the independent schools get less government funding per pupil than public schools, the funding available per public school pupil is increased. As the independent schools (even those with similar funding to public schools) generally get better results, the funding of independent schools has been a tremendous success.