‘Don’t Give a Gonski’: Can Social Issues Assist with Economic Reform?

Many politically-engaged people are wont to say “I hate the culture war stuff, but even I reckon that Safe Schools is crazy!”

This is to say that these people see themselves as economically dry, but as socially progressive — and tolerant of LGTBI issues including gay marriage.

Most social ‘Wets’ — from the Prime Minister and the Federal Minister for Education down — have not come out strongly and publically opposed Safe Schools, even though the program’s dubious anti-bullying rationale and highly-ideological bendy gender agenda have been exposed.

Wets are afraid of being branded (in the infamous words of the Leader of the Opposition) — as a bigot, and being associated with the so-called ‘Christian’ or ‘Hard Right’ social conservatives that have spoken out against Safe Schools.

The fact is that the Left is fighting the culture war hard. The strategy is to wedge the Right by employing the politics of social embarrassment to achieve one tactical victory at a time; in this case further entrenching political control over as important a cultural institution as education.

Yet public education — along with the public health and welfare systems — is one of the chief drivers of debt and deficit, and a major battleground in the struggle to achieve smaller government.

This is particularly the case when the unaffordable Gonski school funding promises are an election issue.

The difficulty for the centre-right is always to neutralise the motherhood notion that higher spending will lead to better outcomes, even though the confidence placed in education bureaucracies to produce better results is unwarranted.

A good slogan — dare I say it — that might serve to make this point may be to say: “No! I don’t give a Gonski… not when education departments throw away taxpayer’s money on Safe Schools.”

To combine social issues with an economic reform agenda would hardly be unprecedented.

We should remember John Howard’s defence of his government’s choice-based school funding policy. Howard argued that many Australian families preferred non-government to government schools because of the values imparted by the respective systems.

This is claim is even easier to make today when public educationists have subverted the Jesuit credo. As political commentator Terry Barnes has put it, the bendy-genderist want us to give them the seven-year old boy, so they can show us the woman.