Education Minister Christopher Pyne. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
I get that Christopher Pyne likes private schools. But what I don't get (or didn't get until this week) is that he could possibly want to take money away from poor schools to give to richer ones. I couldn't understand how anyone would want to do that.
Of course, Pyne says that's not what he wants to do. As Australia's new education minister he merely wants ''a new model that is national, that is fair to everyone and that is needs-based''.
But note his use of the word ''new''.
The Gonski panel spent two years examining everything about the funding of Australian schools and built a new model from the ground up. It's so new, it's not due to start until next year.
Every student would attract a base amount of funding, the amount needed to provide a good education. It would follow them from school to school. The panel suggested about $8000 a primary student, around $10,500 a secondary student.
Students at government schools would receive the full amount. Students at private schools would receive a scaled-down amount, depending on the school's ability to charge fees.
On top of the base funding would be extra loadings for measures of disadvantage, such as the number of disabled students in the school, the number of them from low socioeconomic backgrounds, the number of indigenous students, the number from non-English speaking backgrounds and so on.
The loadings would be paid in full to all schools, public and private. So generous would they be that some private schools serving heavily disadvantaged students would have all of their costs met by the public.
What on earth is there not to like about such a scheme?
Why in heavens does Pyne want to go back to the drawing board?
He isn't saying, but on Tuesday he dropped a hint. He said the scheme introduced by the Howard government a decade ago was ''a good starting point for a school-funding model'', a comment he spent the rest of the week backing away from.
It is a scheme that saw funding for the wealthiest schools increase at a far faster rate than funding for the poorest ones.
At its heart were two tricks: it no longer took account of a school's ability to raise its own income, so it blindly piled public money into exquisitely appointed private schools in way that hadn't happened before.
And it doled out the money on the basis of a con. Funds were allocated in accordance with the ''socioeconomic status'' of the postcode in which each student lived - not on the basis of each student's actual socioeconomic status, but on the basis of the status of those who lived in the same postcode, most of whom would never go near the school and couldn't afford it.
It meant good schools in poor areas cleaned up, even though they didn't take poor students. It meant schools taking in boarders from poor rural areas cleaned up, when the boarders themselves came from Australia's richest families.
This is the system Pyne said directed funds ''to the schools that were most in need''. This is the system he said was ''a good starting point for a school-funding model''. It's the system Gonski found ''lacks coherence''.
So why would someone like Pyne yearn for it? I didn't have a clue, until I found myself listening to Lars Osberg, a Canadian economist who specialises in the widening income gap between the rich and the poor. He has been travelling around Australia delivering a talk titled What's so bad about more inequality? Osberg says while some inequality mightn't be so bad, a self-perpetuating process is under way that is continually widening the gap, with private schools an important part of the machine.
When incomes were more equal, he said, it didn't much matter whether their children went to a public or a private school. Their success in life would be pretty much the same.
But as the gap widens, affluent families find ''the greater is the gap between their own incomes and those of the masses, the further there is to fall in the next generation''.
It becomes ''ever more important'' for them to give their own children every possible advantage.
''More inequality of incomes thus implies more incentives for upper-income families to reduce their support for public expenditure on the human capital of all children'' - to reduce support for public education.
It calls to mind images of well-heeled passengers clambering onto rescue boats throwing the less well-heeled off. It isn't nice, but it would be rational if you knew only some could survive. And I sincerely hope it is not what's driving Christopher Pyne.