The low-fee private schools were conned by thee Howard government. By agreeing to the SES model with funding guaranteed, they set themselves up for 12 years of criticism by the public education lobby. Are they dumb enough to let this happen again? It looks like it.

The SES model also broke the nexus between funding and fees. There was no longer any incentive for a school to keep its fees low, as the fees charged had no effect on the level of taxpayer support.

The Gonski panel wants to keep the SES model and then use a smaller number of neighbours, which makes as much sense as charging patients a particular fee in hospital according to how well of their neighbours are. In the long run, it wants government support to be based on the income of each parent whose child is at a private school. This, of course, will never happen, but if it did, it immediately changes the principle under which education is funded everywhere. It becomes inevitable that public school parents start to pay fees based on their income. The income tax system is meant to redistribute income and then everyone, poor or rich gets access to public services. If ‘capacity to pay’ becomes the principle for private school funding, it will become the principle for public school funding.

The Gonksi model is guaranteed to socially stratify our schools because it says the more you earn the less your child gets. Thus, the wealthy, the upper middle, the middle middle, the lower middle and the poor all have to concentrate in their own schools because the funding system segregates them. A school that wants to take both middle class and poor students will not be able to because the presence of middle class students will cut its government funding and thus push its fees up and thus drive out the poor, who will end up at the public school. There is no better way to create public school ghettos than this Gonksi proposal.