thinks4self

You conveniently neglect to mention government funding of state schools through state government (ultimately from commonwealth govt).

Total govt funding for state school students is about $11900/student
Total govt funding for private school students is about $8400/student

I assume a small part of education funding goes to the respective state education bureaucracies and not directly to schools so I suppose you could argue that the $11900 slightly overstates the amount actually reaching the student in the state sector.

Govt funding per student is essentially similar for state and private students,slightly higher for state school students. That seems fair to me.
Private schools do, or at least some of them do,have very good facilities. You say that is unfair and that just sounds like sour grapes to me. Parents who send their children to private schools(and at the risk of repeating myself they are NOT just the wealthy people)do so precisely because their is a simple mechanism for contributing financially to give the school extra resources.
The implicit logic behind your argument is that parents should be discouraged or even prohibited from contributing to their childrens education and you have not provided even the simplest of justifications for this proposition.
Another of your false assumptions is that people who send their children to private schools are wealthy. Either you are ill-informed on the subject or just plain deceitful. Many families make great sacrifices to send their children to private schools BECAUSE they believe in the importance and value of education and they dont have confidence in the state school system. The net result of their willingness to send their children to private schools is that the govt saves money, the total community spend on education is increased and teachers are not faced with a monopoly employer(state education department)and have far more career choices than they would otherwise. That is good for society which ever way you look at it.

Howard, for all his faults, is actually facilitating a mechanism that is significantly increasing total community spending on education.

Now... convince me that your whinging is not just sour grapes!

Waterboy I cannot believe that there are still people in Australia that think like you. This is the typical pseudo conservative claptrap that allows governments like the one we have now to run down Australia's once great public education system the system that defined our country and will make us less competitive with the rest of the world in the future. It's the kind of logic that has allowed this government to squander the riches generated by a once in a lifetime resources boom and leave us as a nation with little prospect of being competitive when the boom ends. Not one cent of public money should be spent on a private system until every public school has the resources that private schools use as marketing tools. We have the cash to do it if our politicians had the will.

And while I'm at it these "Blue Receivers" like Waterboy, when attempting to defend the private rip-off of our education system just will not admit that the vast majority of families cannot afford to send their children to private schools even if they believed in the exclusivity and nation dividing nature of the systems. The Americans have 90% of kids in the public system and real private schools are independent of government control and funding. Other countries cannot believe the sheer waste of duplicating education systems using public money.
The higher the income the more likely the child is to attend private school and the private schools use their overly generous government subsidies to position themselves in the market for the students from more socio economically privileged families rather than reduce their fees and open their halls to all comers.
The immoral nature of a system that takes government money yet restricts the vast majority of the population from partaking of the fruit, is conveniently omitted by the likes of the Waterboys of the world.
The use of terms like “ill informed”,” conveniently neglect” and “sour grapes” highlight a plethora of pathetically unconvincing arguments, just listen to our equally unconvincing politicians. The Waterboys of the world need exposing for what they are, the vanguard of the me, myself and I brave new world of 21st century Australia

Thinks4self,

ABout one third of Australians send their children to private schools and you are trying to tell us that they are all remarkably wealthy and privileged. Would that this country was so fortunate to have so much wealth at its disposal. Your deceitful use of statistics and eristic manner of debate, so typical of the devout ideologue, is utterly unconvincing. It is simple logic and a sound ethical principle that the government should contribute equally to the education of each and every child in this country. You have yet to produce any convincing counter to this argument. Furthermore,if a parent elects to make a further contribution to their child's education by making donations or paying fees that hardly seems immoral.
I have yet to see the government school that refused to accept donations of money, labour or kind to enhance their facilities by building a hall, a swimming pool or whatever. By your logic government schools should not accept such patronage. I have been heavily involved in the P&C movement, having chaired the P&C at two different state schools and been involved in a number of major infrastructure projects funded by the P&C. The idea that parents should be prohibited from such enterprises is patently absurd.
If you can think 4 yourself you might try to work through the full implications of your absurd ideology

Greed is alive and good in private school land
Ever heard of needs based funding or doesn't that enter into the them and us philosophy of the likes of Waterboy as for "deceitful use of statistics and eristic manner of debate, so typical of the devout ideologue" You can't handle the truth.

Thinks4self,

As long you keep making wild assumptions like:

'All people who send their children to private schools are wealthy, privileged and greedy.',
and;
'Everyone who disagrees with me must send their children to a private school... and are therefore wealthy, privileged and greedy.'

your arguments will convince no-one.

As for 'needs based funding'... no-one will have any argument against the government providing additional funding to children with genuine learning difficulties or whose physical circumstances lead to a need for special resources to facilitate their education. The vast majority of students, private or public, do not have 'special' needs.
Children do not automatically have special needs just because they attend a state school. It is particularly silly to attempt to apply the needs based argument to all state schools and their students. State schools do not have a monopoly on 'special needs' children... many of them attend private schools.

If you had been reading my posts more carefully you might have noticed that I dont believe private schools offer better education and my children attended state schools. You only have to read the HSC results each year to see that public school students achieve excellent results and that it is the 'selective' schools (private and public) that APPEAR to perform better than average. Private education merely offers educational choices that the state system cannot or will not provide.

In order to be seen to be just a government MUST start from a position of equal treatment for all then adjust this according to GENUINE needs. Parents, however, have different ethical obligations and MUST act as protectors and champions for their own children. So it makes perfectly good sense for the government to contribute to every child's education and for parents to contribute to their own child's education over and above the goverment's contribution.

The reason I say that your argument is ideological is that it is essentially an argument based on an imputed class system (that does not really exist anyway) and is not actually rational or ethical in any sense.