AUSTRALIAN COUNCIL FOR THE
DEFENCE OF GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS
PRESS RELEASE 380
6 MAY 2010
CATHOLIC EDUCATION SECTOR
NEVER SATISFIED:
The Catholic Education sector are programmed to be never
satisfied. Jewel Topsfield, the
Education Editor of The Age, May 5 p.
6 reports that
Catholic schools are
angry they received no new funding in the budget, despite educating almost a
quarter of
So, they attempt
to play the usual State Aid auction, Stephen Elder, the director of Catholic
Education claimed that the budget had failed to increase state government
funding for Catholic schools to 25 % of the cost of education in a government
school- as promised by the opposition.
DOGS have
news for Mr. Elder. The growth in the sectarian education sector is passing to
the more aggressive evangelical and fringe religious groups and there is a
slow, angry reaction amongst those who believed that
The simplistic
misuse of financial statistics by advocates of sectarian schooling no longer
holds water. Even Ms Gillard admits that the funding situation is Byzantine in
its complexity. She notes the criticism that any percentage of the cost of
education in a government school as a base for State Aid funding means that
every win for public education at budget time flows to non-government schools
and public education can never make up ground. (Speech to Sydney Institute April 15, 2010) Anyone perusing the
increasingly rubbery Victorian budget figures can deduce that the government
deals with the uneconomic and expensive areas of education and incremental
costs are never accounted for when the Catholic sector gets its hands into the
public treasury.
Much
ground has been lost to public education in the last 40 years as public funds
have been siphoned off to new ‘needy’ sectarian schools which duplicate public
provision. The SES funding model introduced by the Howard government is
generally admitted by educational economists, to have had a particularly
deleterious effect on public education. Even Gillard admits that many
critics have attacked the Rudd
government’s policy decision to continue the current funding arrangements and
criticized its distributional effects.
The
advertisement of funding being finally channeled into run down public education
facilities at both the State and federal level indicates an awareness in the
Labor Party that their taken-for-granted public school vote is looking
elsewhere for political representation.
The
following cartoon was commissioned by the DOGS when the public coffers were being
opened to the sectarian school sector by McMahon and Whitlam in the 1972
election. It has proved prophetic.
DEFEND PUBLIC EDUCATION AND STOP STATE AID TO PRIVATE RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS.
Listen to the DOGS program
3CR, 855 on the A.M. dial
12 Noon Saturdays