Left-wing governments used to lose power by politicising hitherto dormant areas of public life; now that there are no left-wing governments that process has become the hallmark of the right. It has been one of the Howard government’s achievements to return the issue of school funding so decisively to the centre of public debate that concerned citizens have placed newspaper ads denouncing the injustice of the new arrangements. The bulk of the attention has focussed on the extra money that will go to the category one, elite private schools, who will get millions more to pour into sports complexes, music centres, ski-lodge campuses and the like — unless the government accepts the ALP’s amendments, which they won’t.
Yet the big private schools are not the principal target of the government’s largesse. The turn towards funding based around socioeconomic strata is aimed at the myriad of small, often fundamentalist religious, private schools springing up across lower-middle income suburbs, and the people who will form their clientele. As a world of stratified, full and long-term employment recedes ever further into the distance the scramble for private education spreads much wider than the small subgroup who once made a class transition. It becomes a formation in its own right, those determined to give their children the chance to become information age human capital.
Such schools can’t compete with the laptops and baccalaureate exams offered by the big schools. Instead they offer a certain type of individuation, one based on discipline and focus and the haunting fear of parents that government schools are ‘out of control’ — that their children will never acquire the selfhood necessary to surviving and prospering within a globalised world. Doubtless David Kemp has championed these moves because of a genuine belief in choice. With equal certainty we can say that the policy wouldn’t have gone anywhere had it not had an important strategic dimension. It’s an attempt to carve out the nascent ‘aspirational class’ — the bulk of whom are swinging voters — and draw their loyalties more closely to the Liberal Party. It has no interest in increasing funding to the likes of Geelong Grammar whatsoever, but the resulting furore provides a welcome cover for the main game.
