And ve vill all live in dis freedom and ve vill be happy. or else.
First of all in a free society people get to choose who and what they believe and just how they live as long as they conform to the laws of the land. It certainly isn't up the God haters and non believers to dictate how and where people are educated. Religion is part of culture as much is cooking with peanut oil or olive oil or corn oil. Now if people want to petition the government to stop public funding separate schools that's another matter.
Secondly, I don't know what is taught in a Hindu school nor an Islamic school in Australia but, having been educated almost exclusively in Roman Catholic schools I can tell everyone that religion is not a subject I remember. I know I had catechism early days when Nuns and Priest were the teachers but it wasn't anything more than what I got at Sunday Mass. I took the same boring studies my mates in public school had.
Some differences I do remember is that the text books were different for maths and sciences and the literature and language studies were more in the classical vein. That and we had to sit up straight, mind our P's & Q's, dress properly, and speak respectfully to the teachers.
Oh ya. And punishment for being disrespectful was corporal and immediate. My mates didn't get any of that. They could wear their farm clothes to work. I had white shirt, grey trousers, black oxfords, a blue blazer and my school tie. The horrors of private school.

What Simon says and doesn’t say

Simon says, ‘In my real world guise I have just finished a radio interview looking at the deceitful and dishonet [sic] AEU campaign over funding of schools, so I thiought [sic] a few facts might be helpful.’ Isn’t it marvelous – in the ‘real world’ a ‘few facts’ can explain everything to those of us who don’t live there?

Simon didn’t think to tell us that his ‘few facts’ were lifted from a Howard Government propaganda sheet titled ‘School Funding – the Facts’.

Simon doesn’t tell us that the current funding arrangements are - in historical terms - a recent development; nor does he tell us why governments came to fund private schools in the first place given that the Constitution gave no role in education to the Commonwealth. The norm for the majority of Australia’s history has been that governments stayed well away from funding religious schools – and if people wanted something other than a State education for their children, they fully paid for it. This history is another ‘real world’ – a cocktail of special pleading, powerful lobbying and political opportunism.

In Simon’s ‘real world’, funding is loaded against the private schools: ‘state schools enrol 68% of students and receive 75% of total public funding for schools…’ Not so long ago State schools received 100% of the total funding for schools. The dramatic increase in funding of private schools has come at a cost – the diversion of funds that would otherwise have been available to improve State schools.

Simon’s crude accounting concedes nothing to parents’ relative ability to contribute to schooling costs – and ultimately to parents’ capacity to make a choice. He disingenuously remarks that ‘The Australian Government funds non-government schools according to a formula which measures the socio-economic status of the communities they serve.’

Everyone who understands the Government’s (SES) postcode funding method knows it is a dubious and highly unreliable method of identifying students’ needs.

To be continued

Part 2

Why doesn’t the Howard Government take into account the size of a school’s fees or a school’s existing asset base? Because, Simon says, ‘such an approach would penalise parents for spending their own money on their child’s education.’ Meanwhile, who cares if poor parents are penalised?

Simon's an old line: ‘If all the students who currently attend Catholic and Independent schools enrolled in state schools, then taxpayers would need to contribute an additional $3 to $4 billion a year’ is a mischievous tactic intended to threaten and intimidate. Can’t you imagine hordes of Scotch and King’s students clamouring at the doors of Collingwood and Footscray schools, just to prove the point?

Simon even gives us the poor-kids-go-to-private-schools-too line. ‘…2001 Census data shows that one in five students from families earning less than $20,800 per year attend Catholic or Independent schools.’ Self-reporting income levels, mind - and a canny aggregation of all private schools as if you find a poor student in every five in each school.

The wealthy pay accountants to see that their income looks like the battlers. And where’s the private school statistic equivalent to Simon’s claim about students from families earning more than $104,000 per year? Let's take $200,000 as a base line.

What Simon won’t reveal is that State schools enrol around 80% of students from the lowest SES decile. And that hundreds of under-resourced and poorly-serviced State schools are located in rural and isolated areas; the only time private school kids visit these areas is when they visit their schools’ country camps.

Simon won’t tell you that under Howard government administration, Sydney’s elite private schools have been receiving more money than they were actually entitled to. Nor will he tell you that despite massive injections of public funding, fees at elite schools have increased by as much as 53.4% in the past four years. The extra funding was supposed to make private schools more accessible to low income families but “The reality is that the massive increases in funding have had the opposite effect.” (Sydney Morning Herald 11 Sept 2006)

What Simon also failed to mention Frankgoi, was that although under the Constitution the Federal Government are not responsible for funding to schools, they are responsible for funding to public universities.

He failed to mention that the Federal Government have contributed more funding towards private schools, for which they are NOT constiutionally bound to fund, than to public universities, in which they ARE constitutionally bound to fund.

Go Liz, go FrankGo.
Those are the facts.
The SES formula, as i have explained elsewhere, doesn't measure the incomes of the families of the kids that go to private schools, it measures the incomes of their neighbours. This leads to situations where the kids of wealthy landowners in rural areas, say, are treated as if they came from an indigenous family. The extra money they attract then goes to the schools those wealthy kids attend, schools that can charge as much as $15 -20,000 p.a in upfront fees after tax, simply because they live in a census code designated disadvantaged. The really disadvantaged kids go to the local public school that often as not gets no extra funding, and then, worse, gets slagged off for "failing" by the very same government that created this appalling system, and by the wealthy families who so unjustly benefit from it.
Worse, there is now a no loser clause, so that such schools can never lose funding no matter what sort of kids now attend, and the neglected public school with ever increasing concentrations of disadvantage and all the problems that brings, continues to slip behind. This is not Christian, it is just wrong.

The Australian Education Union is again campaigning to challenge the constitutionality of the Commonwealth government grants to non-government (that is,private) schools.

There is something noble about those who advocate lost causes. Provided, of course, there is a recognition that the cause is in fact lost. What's more, the AEU national President will be encouraged by the vociferous response by some teacher members, many paradoxically (35%-45%) of whom send their children to private schools!!

It is not clear how many of those vociferously responding teachers have read the decisions of the High Court judges when the issue of state aid or government funding to non-government schools was last adjudicated. On February 2, 1981 - by a majority of six to one - the High Court held that the Commonwealth government can provide financial assistance to non-government schools. There is little reason to believe the present High Court would come to the view that section 116 of the constitution (which forbids the Commonwealth from legislating with respect to religion) prevents the granting of Commonwealth funds to independent schools, religious and non-religious alike.

What's at issue is that the growth in public enrolment in private schools has been considerable. There has been an increase of 15.5 per cent in non-government school enrolments since 1996. The comparable figure for government schools is 1.5 per cent. Clearly there is a growing demand for non-government schools - and politicians of both the right and left feel an obligation to respond to the aspirations of a significant part of the electorate, an electorate which ranges across all seats and lifestyles.

It is true that some schools, such as The Kings School in western Sydney, seem to be over-generously treated by the funding system introduced by the Howard Government. But it is also true that some of the wealthiest Australians, living in the best-endowed suburbs, send their children to good government schools for virtually no cost at all. In any event, the demand for non-government schools is greatest from suburban and regional-based Australians who are prepared to pay moderate prices for a service they value.