Abstract
This chapter investigates the Grattan Institute’s influence on the federal government’s school funding reforms and asserts that the institute was a central actor in the debate and—at a minimum—legitimated the government’s proposals in the public sphere. Grattan’s stature as a credible interlocutor on education issues, and its scholars’ ability to conduct and promote sophisticated and accessible analysis provided much-needed intellectual ballast to the government’s (ultimately enacted) proposals.
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Notes
- 1.
Historically, the Australian Liberal Party has philosophically favoured a competitive non-government school sector. The Australian Labor Party has instead favoured the government school system. See Taylor (2018, pp. xxiii–xxvi) for the ideological rationale behind these inclinations.
- 2.
Grattan had maintained a ‘School Education Program’ since 2009.
- 3.
This chapter is informed by eleven semi-structured interviews and primary and secondary document analysis.
- 4.
This complexity is necessarily under-explored in this chapter. It is beyond scope to explain all of the important concepts relevant to school funding, such as the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS), the socio-economic status (SES) system, the ‘capacity-to-contribute’ concept, and the system-weighted average method. See Harrington (2013, 2017b) and Expert Panel (2011) for extensive explanations of these concepts.
- 5.
According to the Australian Education Amendment Act (2017), the Commonwealth government must provide 20% of government school funding and 80% of non-government school funding (Commonwealth of Australia, 2017, p. 7). This level of funding is calculated off a pre-determined Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) amount (see Harrington, 2017b).
- 6.
The Liberal Party Prime Minister John Howard presided from March 1996 until December 2007.
- 7.
The Liberal Party Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull presided from September 2015 until August 2018.
- 8.
The last comprehensive review of Australian school funding was published in 1973 (Karmel, 1973).
- 9.
On education policy, the ALP were the preferred party by a margin of eighteen points in both the 2013 and 2016 federal elections according to the Australian Election Study (Cameron & McAllister, 2019, p. 35).
- 10.
The 2016 federal election was held on July 2. Malcolm Turnbull, who ousted Prime Minister Tony Abbott in a leadership spill on September 14, 2015, was elected as Australia’s new Prime Minister.
- 11.
Jennifer Hewett used this headline in the Australian Financial Review on May 2, 2017.
- 12.
The entity list in Table 10.1 is non-exhaustive. However, these entities are mostly peak bodies of other representative organisations.
- 13.
Prasser served in Birmingham’s office from September 2013 until August 2018 (Prasser, 2021).
- 14.
The Coalition won thirty of the seventy-six Senate seats in the 2016 federal election (Gobbett, 2016).
- 15.
Those who voted in favour of the legislation were Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (four votes), Nick Xenophon Team (three votes), Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party (one vote), Family First Party (one vote), and Jacqui Lambie Network (one vote) (Goss & Sonnemann, 2017d). The Greens voted as a block against the proposals.
- 16.
The ‘strike’ at six Goulburn Catholic schools over a lack of government support for critical infrastructure forced 2,000 students to enrol in government schools, heaping an insufferable burden on the state school system (Warhurst, 2012).
- 17.
All three minor party Senators from the Nick Xenophon Team, the sole Senator from Family First, and Sarah Hanson-Young from the Greens were all based in South Australia (Gobbett, 2016).
- 18.
The financial resources of the AEU are considerable. The AEU Federal Office, plus the two largest state offices (NSW and Victoria), had a combined Total Equity position of $76 million and Total Revenues of approximately $71 million as at June 30, 2017. The Grattan Institute had a Total Equity position of approximately $37 million and Total Revenues of approximately $6 million at this date (see, AEU, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c; Grattan, 2017). This study was unable to determine the financial circumstances of the NCEC.
- 19.
Of the other stakeholders favouring the reforms, the Independent Schools Council of Australia (ISCA) reported a Total Equity position of approximately $2.5 million and Total Revenues of $2.6 million for the period ended December 31, 2017. ACSSO reported a Total Equity position of approximately $0.3 million and Total Revenues of $0.6 million as at June 30, 2017. Christian Schools Australia (CSA) reported a Total Equity position of approximately $2.0 million and Total Revenues of $3.5 million for the period ended December 31, 2017 (ACSSO, 2017; CSA, 2017; ISCA, 2017).
- 20.
It is noteworthy that the AEU’s Correna Haythorpe and an anonymous interviewee from Catholic Education state that they rejected the Gonski 2.0 proposals for very different reasons. Haythorpe states that there was an ‘awareness of each other’s views’, and Catholic Education asserts there were ‘informal conversations’, but both stop short of suggesting anything more organised (interviews with Anonymous Interviewee G, 2021; Haythorpe, 2021).
- 21.
Other organisations in this chapter were referenced less than ten times, except the Centre for Independent Studies which was referenced thirty-three times (although most relate to a separate issue).
- 22.
This study does not ignore the CIS and Mitchell Institute. Both produce penetrating research on school education and have done so for a lengthy period. But interviewees identified neither as a consequential actor in this particular debate.
- 23.
The Australian Education Act 2013 set the Schooling Resource Standard target indexation rate at 3.6%. Grattan advocated for a reduction in this target rate to 2.5% to align with actual wage growth (Goss & Sonnemann, 2016, pp. 4, 21–26).
- 24.
- 25.
Haythorpe refers to the two minor party crossbenchers Nick Xenophon and Jacqui Lambie. Both voted in favour of the reforms.
- 26.
These ‘settled understandings’ concord with Baumgartner and Jones’ (2009) idea of policy stasis, and any disruption of this equilibrium can result in large-scale policy change (as per Grattan’s proposals).
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Hagland, T. (2023). Grattan Institute: School Funding Reforms. In: Think Tanks in Australia. Interest Groups, Advocacy and Democracy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27044-4_10
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