Recent Observations

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are Australia’s most disadvantaged group of people. Like every other indigenous community colonised by European nations between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, they suffered enormous physical and mental traumas when the invaders stole their land, undermined their cultural traditions, and robbed them of their political autonomy. The consequences of the trauma have been with us since the 1788, when Britain established a penal colony at Sydney Cove.

The Closing the Gap initiative began in 2005 when Tom Calma, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, put forward a plan to address Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health inequality. Tom’s plan included two strategic goals. The first was to secure equality between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians with respect to ‘health infrastructure and universal access to primary health care.’ It was given a 10-year timeframe. The second goal was to secure equality between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians with respect to life expectancy. This aim was given a 25-year timeframe.

Tom went on to make three interesting observations. First, he reminded readers that it was ‘not credible to suggest that one of the wealthiest nations in the world cannot solve a health crisis affecting less than 3% of its citizens.’ Second, he believed that the inequality in the health status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples was ‘linked to systemic discrimination’ which meant they ‘have not had the same opportunity to be as healthy as non-Indigenous people. Finally, Tom recommended that a “Whole of Government’ approach be adopted when dealing with indigenous health issues, with special attention given to shared responsibility agreements, regional participation agreements, and bilateral agreements between the Commonwealth and states and territories.

Tom’s initiatives led to the Australian Council of Australian Governments (COAG) – comprising the federal government and state and territory governments – giving approval to the National Indigenous Reform Agreement (NIRA) of 2008, which set out six ‘Closing the Gap’ targets: They were to:

1. close the life expectancy gap within a generation,

2. halve the gap in mortality rates for Indigenous children under five within a decade,

3. ensure access to early childhood education for all Indigenous four-year-olds in remote communities within five years,

4. halve the gap in reading, writing and numeracy achievements for children within a decade,

5. halve the gap for Indigenous students in year 12 attainment rates by 2020. and

6. halve the gap in employment outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians within a decade.

Progress was slow for the following seven years, with the 2015 Closing the Gap Report providing mixed results. A small amount of progress was made on closing the gap in life expectancy within a generation, while there was a significant fall in the mortality rates gap for indigenous children under five years of age. There was also good news on the secondary education front, with an increase in the percentage of indigenous Australians aged 20-24 who had attained a Year 12 or equivalent qualification. But these heartening results were countered by the lack of any improvement in reading and numeracy rates amongst Indigenous children and adolescents.

By 2020 progress had ground to a halt. It was agreed to introduce a new and expanded agreement between the Coalition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peak Organisations, and the federal and state governments, with the aim of securing increased collaboration in the planning and implementation of relevant policies. And, interestingly, data sharing was given a high priority.

Paragraphs six and seven of the Agreement’s preamble said it all. In short, the 2020 Agreement stems from the belief that ‘when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) people have a genuine say in the design and delivery of services that affect them, better life outcomes are achieved. Moreover, there needed to be ‘an unprecedented shift in the way governments work’, by encompassing shared decision-making on the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programs to improve life outcomes for ATSI people.

The 2020 National Agreement on Closing the Gap was also full of action plans. It had 19 national socio-economic targets across 17 socio-economic outcome areas that impacted on life outcomes for ATSI people. The targets were constructed to monitor progress across each of the outcome areas. It was an impressive document.

This year (2024) began with a flurry of activity, but the news was not all good. The federal government’s Closing the Gap report for 2023 was released, with the results of the Productivity Commission’s Closing the Gap ‘report card’ for 2023 adding a lot of detail. This ‘Compilation Report’ began positively by noting that that 11 out of 19 socio-economic outcomes for ATSI people were improving. Overall, their lives from womb to grave were healthier, but still well below that of non-indigenous people. Educational outcomes were also improving, although they were also below expectations. The was an improvement in housing availability, and it was mainly good news on the economic front, where ATSI peoples were more gainfully employed than ever before. 

But most disappointingly, outcomes were ‘way off the mark’ for five crucially important areas, which were (1) children’s early development, (2) rates of children in out-of-home care, (3) representation in the child protection system (4) adult imprisonment, and (5) suicide. Men were especially troubled when it came to making sense of their post-colonial world and conforming to the white man’s rules, and things appeared to be getting worse.

So, it was no surprise to find that the Productivity Commission had, in 2020, been invited to find out what was going on, and why the quality of life for ATSI people was still, on average crushingly below the quality of life for non-indigenous Australians. Coincidently, its report, which went under the name of Review of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, was also released in early 2024. The report was compiled and edited by Commissioner Romlie Mokak and Commissioner Natalie Siegel-Brown.

The PC report was an impressive piece of work, but its relentlessly down-beat analysis made for depressing reading. The tone was set in the Foreword, when Romlie and Natalie got to the heart of the matter. First, they reckoned that the gap was ‘not a natural phenomenon.’ It was, in their view, a direct result of the ways in which governments had ‘used their power over many decades’, which had stemmed from a ‘disregard for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s knowledges and solutions’. And second, they argued that government decision-makers had to accept the fact that ‘they do not know what is best for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.’ Strong words indeed!

Romlie and Natalie expanded on these points in the Executive Summary when commenting on what ATSI people had to say during the Commission’s investigations. They summed it up as follows. The ‘persistent barriers’ to progressing… reforms … was the ‘lack of power sharing needed for joint decision-making, and the failure of governments to acknowledge and act on the reality that ATSI people know what is best for their communities.’ Romlie and Natalie went on to say that ‘unless governments address the power imbalance in their systems, policies and ways of working, the [Closing the gap] Agreement risks becoming another broken promise’ to ATSI people. It all suggested that governments were often problem-makers more than they were problem-solvers. 

Romlie and Natalie spent the next 90 pages explaining how governments would not only have to re-organise themselves to accommodate the lived experience and accumulated wisdom of ATSI people, but also share in the design, implementation, and evaluation of all future policy initiatives. According to Romlie and Natalie it was not a big ask, and success would be guaranteed if governments displayed greater cultural sensitivity, engaged in more power sharing arrangements, listened more closely to indigenous voices, and give the locals greater decision-making autonomy and financial independence. It all sounded OK to me, but I got the feeling that it had all been said before.  It was also a bit too technocratic for my liking and assumed that radical structural change would sort out the problems. If only! But then again, there is nothing to lose and something big to gain. 

A few core sources are listed below:

Social Justice Commissioner (2005). Report of the Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner to the Attorney-General as required by section 46C (1)(a) Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission Act 1986, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.

Prime Minister’s Report (2015). Closing the Gap, Australian Government. 

Commonwealth of Australia (2024). Closing the Gap: Commonwealth 2023 Annual Report & Commonwealth 2024 Implementation Plan, Australian Government.

Productivity Commission (2024). Review of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, Study report, volume 1, Australian Government.

Bob Stewart.

18 February 2024.

Religion, and especially Christianity, has a long and influential history in Australia. The entrenchment of the Christian faith in the cultural fabric of Australia was superbly documented by Meredith Lake, in her recently published (2018) book The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History (NewSouth Publishing). In Chapter 11 Meredith reminded readers that Christianity’s holy book, The Bible, was a source of comfort and inspiration for not only convicts and early settlers, but also, as time went on, Aboriginals, our First Nation people. 

Over recent years, though, Australia’s people of faith were put under the hammer, so to speak, and forced to defend their religious belief system at every turn. What is more, they no longer had the moral and political clout they wielded for the first 200 years of European settlement. For the first 60 years after Federation, less than 2% of all Australians reported they had no religious belief system. However, from the 1970s Christianity lost its spiritual hold over many Australians, and by 1981 11% of Australians said they had no religion. Twenty years later, with the onset of the new millennium, it was 16%. By 2016 the ‘no religion’ cohort increased to 30%, and recent figures suggest it is nearly 40%. It won’t be long before people of faith will be in minority.

At the same time, many members of Federal parliament were, and still are, practicing Christians. They were concerned that although Australia had a strong Christian tradition, its values were being eroded at every ideological turn.  So, together with Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and other religious groups, they became influential lobbyists for the protection of religious beliefs and practices. 

The ideological fault lines between people of faith and non-believers were exposed in the lead-up to the same-sex marriage plebiscite in 2017. There were many heated debates, with Christian lobby groups complaining that their opposition to the proposed legalisation of same sex marriage was belittled at every turn. They also claimed that their opponents had slandered them by calling them homophobes and misogynists. They felt that their right to promote their religious convictions were being undermined by a hostile army of leftist bullies, hard-line feminists, male-hating lesbians, and intolerant gays.

When same-sex marriage was legalised, and put to bed, so to speak, conservative religious groups wanted to know where they stood when citing passages from the Bible that might offend non-heterosexual members of society. They wanted clarification on the scope and extent of their religious freedoms, and in late 2017 the Australian Government obliged by inviting former Liberal MP Phillip Ruddock, to undertake a review. The review found Australia did not have a religious freedom problem, but did, nevertheless, recommend new legislative protections against religious discrimination. In December 2018, the Morrison (Liberal/National Party) government promised a Religious Discrimination Act. Attorney-General Christian Porter released a draft religious discrimination bill in late 2019 and a second version in early 2020. Both were roundly criticised. Human rights groups argued that the bill would weaken other human rights protections and create a licence to discriminate, while conservative groups complained it did not give adequate protections to people of faith.

A third version was released in 2021, with the Australian Government signalling its intention to introduce legislation that would protect Australians from discrimination based on religious belief or activity – just as they were protected from discrimination based on age, sex, race and disability. This would involve making it unlawful to discriminate against a person based on their faith in their personal and professional working lives or access to education. 

The Religious Discrimination Bill 2021 had many interesting features, and some of them are listed below: 

Objects of the Act: 

They included... 

* To recognise the freedom of all people to have or adopt a religion or belief of their choice, and the freedom to manifest this religion.

* To eliminate, so far as is possible, discrimination against persons on the ground of religious belief or activity in a range of areas of public life.

* To ensure, as far as practicable, that everyone has the same rights to equality before the law, regardless of religious belief or activity.

* To ensure that people can, consistent with Australia’s obligations with respect to freedom of religion and freedom of expression, and subject to specified limits, make statements of belief.

Unlawful discrimination:

Two key statements applied here...

* This Act makes it unlawful to discriminate against a person on the ground of religious belief or activity in a range of areas of public life, including work, education, access to premises, and the provision of goods, services, and accommodation.

* Discrimination is also unlawful if it occurs because of the person’s association with someone else who holds or engages in a religious belief or activity, regardless of whether or not they themselves hold or engage in a religious belief or activity.

Lawful discrimination: 

The following principles applied...

* Conduct by religious bodies that at first glance appears to be discriminatory may be protected.

*  In other words, certain statements of belief will NOT constitute discrimination for the purposes of the specified legislation.

*These statements of belief must be religious beliefs that the person genuinely considers to be in accordance with the doctrines, tenets, or teachings of that religion.

Protected discrimination cases:

The following cases and situations were considered for inclusion in the draft 2021 bill.

* Healthcare providers can refuse to provide treatment if the treatment contravenes a core religiously inspired ‘statement of belief’. 

* It will be unlawful for employers to have codes of conduct that limit a person’s ability to make statements of belief.

* It is not discrimination for a religious hospital, aged care facility, accommodation provider, or disability service provider to seek to preserve a religious ethos amongst its staff by making faith-based decisions in relation to employment.

* Educational institutions will not contravene state or territory anti-discrimination law if they give preference, in good faith, to persons who hold or engage in particular religious beliefs or activities. * * * * But, in the above situation exemption wills be conditional on having a publicly available policy in relation to conduct in the context of employment.

* Qualifying bodies - including medical associations - that licence professions and occupations will be banned from setting professional conduct rules that prohibit making statements of belief, unless compliance with the rule is an essential requirement of the profession, trade, or occupation.

* It is not religious discrimination for organisations and related ‘bodies’ such as religious schools, hospitals, or aged care facilities to seek to preserve a “religious ethos” among staff by making faith-based decisions in relation to employment.

* As such, a Catholic hospital will be able to have a Catholics-only hiring policy. But religious bodies must have publicly available policies to activate this rule.

· A moderately expressed religious view that does not incite hatred or violence does not constitute “vilification”. It is consequently permissible to make a statement in good faith, by written or spoken words or other communication if the person “genuinely considers to be in accordance with the doctrines, tenets, or teachings of that religion.”

Non-protected discrimination cases and situations.

But there was one significant constraint on speaking one's religious mind....

* A 'statement of belief' would NOT be protected if it is malicious, if a reasonable person would consider the statement would threaten, intimidate, harass, or vilify a person or group, or if the statement would promote or encourage the commission of an offence punishable by at least two years’ imprisonment.

The 2023 initiative. 

The 2021 bill went nowhere, but in 2023 the Australian Law Reform Commission released a consultation paper that had a fresh draft, and which laid the ground for a new bill to be introduced, but this time under a Federal Labor Government. The Consultation Paper sets out a mix of “general propositions” and “technical proposals that would deliver the following outcomes:

* Discrimination against students on the grounds of sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or relationship status, or pregnancy in schools and other religious educational institutions will be unlawful.

* Teachers and other school staff will be protected from discrimination on the grounds of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or relationship status, or pregnancy.

* Religious schools will be allowed to maintain their religious character by permitting them to give preference to prospective staff on religious grounds where the teaching, observance, or practice of religion is a part of their role (and it is not discriminatory on other grounds); and require all staff to respect the educational institution’s religious ethos.

What now?

It will be interesting to see how things pan out over the remainder of 2024. There is not likely to be any dispute over the right of people to practice their religion so long as their conduct does not seriously harm others. It seems reasonable to provide ‘people of faith’ with a protective shield behind which they can safely undertake their spiritual journey, and freely proclaim their 'statements of belief'.

Trouble will arise, though, when it comes to securing agreement on the circumstance under which apparently ‘discriminatory conduct’ will be enabled.  Some religious bodies believe that their compliance to the sacred texts embedded in a Holy-Book should ‘trump’ human-made, secular, law that has no endorsement from a higher being. This is where things will get ugly.                                                                                                                                                                         

Bob Stewart

10 March 2024.

State aid to non-government schools has been a vexing political issue in Australia for the last 50 years or so. It all began in 1964 when the Robert Menzies led Liberal and Country Party (LCP) federal government introduced the States Grants (Science Laboratories and Technical Training) Act. Around $10 million in capital grants was handed over to mainly Christian-Catholic primary schools suffering severe financial strains. These strains resulted from a fall in the numbers joining religious orders, which in turn created not only a staffing crisis, but also a massive squeeze on operating expenses. Up to then Catholic schools had the luxury of accessing a ‘low cost’ permanent labour force of priests, brothers, and nuns. 

The other point to note about the Catholic primary school system was that it enrolled students from poor families while also providing welfare support. The State Grants scheme was an astute political initiative since it kept many Catholic ‘parish’ schools afloat, while giving Catholic voters a good reason to re-elect the Menzies government.  

In 1965 the proportion of school students attending non-government schools was just under 24 per cent, with Catholic schools accounting for more than three quarters of the 24%. There were just under 2.4 million student attending schools across the nation with 1.8 million (76%) in government (that is, public) schools, 460,000 (20%) in Christian-Catholic schools, and 100,000 (4%) in Christian-non-Catholic schools. The private/public ratio was thus about 1:3. So, for every ‘one student’ in non-government schools there were three in government schools. 

Federal government funding of schools surged in the 1970s, but surprisingly private schools appeared to benefit more than public schools. From 1976 to 1982 recurrent grants to private schools increased by 87% while recurrent grants to public schools fell by 24%. This trend continued for the next twenty years, where grants to non-government schools increase at twice the rate of public schools.  It was obvious that school enrolments were following the money trail. Of the 3.3 million students enrolled in primary and secondary schools in 2003, 2.3 million (68% of the total number), were enrolled in government / public schools. This was well down on the 1979 figure of 78%. 

A lot of citizens felt uncomfortable about the idea of governments funding non-government schools, and especially those sponsored by religious organisations, and being already quite wealthy. In the early 1970s this groundswell of opposition to ‘state aid’ was mobilised to mount a legal challenge against the distribution of government money to religious-based educational bodies. A civil society group calling itself the Australian Council for the Defence of Government Schools (colloquially known as the DOGS), argued that state funded education should be free, universal, and secular, and took the matter to the High Court.

After several legal delays, proceeding commenced in 1979. The basis of the challenge was section 116 of the Australian Constitution which said that the Commonwealth "shall not make any law for establishing any religion". It was argued that these words implicitly called for the separation of church from state, which was a bit like the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the United States. Having noted that the First amendment had been used to halt financial aid to denominational schools in some American states, the DOGS anticipated something similar happening in Australia. 

Unfortunately for the DOGS, in early 1981 the High Court ruled against their challenge and signalled its support for state aid legislation. Six of the seven High Court judges ruled that funding for religious schools was valid because it was for educational purposes, and not for "establishing a religion". So, the High Court was not worried about the probability that a pile of taxpayer’s money might be used to promulgate a swag of religious beliefs as well as upgrading science classrooms. 

The DOGS had clearly lost the ‘separation of church from state’ battle. Nor could they convince ‘people of influence’ that when it came to education, governments had a responsibility for enhancing student capabilities through a free, secular, and universal system of school education. And neither could they convince people that a monopoly provider was the most efficient and equitable way of making it happen. 

State aid proponents had relentlessly advocated for ‘choice’, which assumed that being able to choose an educational experience that contained a religious studies component would not only enhance parent and student satisfaction, but also make the education sector more competitive, and thus incentivise schools to enhance the quality of their educational offerings. In their minds it was entirely appropriate – indeed, beneficial all round - for government to fund private schools embedded with a religious ethos. And the idea that only a monopolistic government-run school system could be comprehensively fair and inclusive went down like a lead balloon with private school’s true believers. 

Anyway, state aid to church schools continued without too many hitches into the new millennium.

 A major review of federal government school funding was undertaken in 2011 (The Gonski Report), and it identified several problems, the main one being a costing formula that underestimated the resources required to deliver quality secular education in government school settings. The questions of fairness and inequality took centre stage, but not much changed over the following decade when it came to the educational funding arrangements of Australia’s national government.

And this is where a 2023 study conducted for the Australian Education Union (AEU) has a lot of interesting things to say. It was written by Adam Rorris and released in early 2024 under the title of How School Funding Fails Public Schools.' It found that despite the introduction of a needs-based funding arrangement in early 2013 - where a ‘schooling resource standard’ (SRS) was used to provide minimum funding benchmarks for all schools- the funding disparities between private and public schools, especially when it came to ‘capital stocks’, had got worse, not better.

For example, the AEU study found that:

* Five elite private schools in New South Wales and Victoria spent more on new facilities in 2021 than half of the nation's public schools. 

* Five of the wealthiest private schools spent around $176 million in 2021, compared to a spend of $174 million across just under 3,4000 public schools. 

* Cranbrook, one of Sydney’s best-known private schools, spent $63 million on new buildings in one year, which was the same as the “entire [public schools] capital works spend in Victoria and Tasmania combined”. 

* Only 1.3 per cent of public schools were fully funded compared to 98 per cent of private schools – and this inequity contributed to an “unacceptable $30 billion divide in spending on new and upgraded schools.”

But these attention-seeking grabs were just the tip of the school grants iceberg. Recent Productivity Commission data from its 4 February 2024 Report on Government Services showed that the federal government funding arrangement for schools (which included both recurrent and capital) had widened the resource gap between the private and public sectors. Between 2012-13 and 2021-22 public school funding per student increased by 20% in real terms. Over the same time private school per student funding had increased by 37%.

Productivity Commission figures also revealed that federal government grants accounted for around 61% of non‑government school funding in 2022. This was a staggeringly high figure by any measure and demonstrated the growing dependency many private schools (mainly Catholic parish ones) had on government money to sustain their operations. Unlike independent faith-based schools, where annual enrolment fees are charged, around 80% of the running costs of government schools are directly funded by state governments. The federal government fills anywhere between 15% and 18% of the gap. 

The scale of the support Australia’s national government gives private schools is difficult to understand in the light of their inherent financial advantages. These days the wealth differentials are close to obscene with many private schools bosting beautifully manicured playing fields, state of the art science laboratories, fully wired modular classrooms, extensive rowing programs, beach fronted bush retreats, numerous fine art, music, and theatre production facilities, small class sizes, and fully professional counselling and welfare services. Private school fees range from significant ($25,000 a year) to stratospheric ($45,000 a year), which means that most Australian families would have trouble paying for a spot. On the other hand, many public schools are still using prefabricated spaces with 1960s teaching technologies to match, and bitumen playing areas-adding the finishing touch.

And the inequity is compounded by the fact that most lower income families send their children to public schools and a few Catholic parish schools. And what is more, public schools educate most students with higher needs including those from disadvantaged backgrounds, rural and remote areas, students with a disability and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. But despite these challenges, private schools have fewer students per teacher than public schools

With these funding anomalies in place, it is not surprising to find that 64% of Australia’s 4 million primary and secondary students are still attending government schools, although there has been a gradual decline over recent times. Around 20% attend Catholic schools, with the remaining 16% attending non-Catholic independent schools. This delivers a private – public ratio of around 1:2.3. But it also means that nearly two thirds of our student population are enrolled in government schools deprived of funds that have been allocated to mostly well-off private schools. It does not make sense, but it confirms, once again, that the world is not a fair place. 

The following publication provide all the material you need to set the context for the above observations. 

Michael Hogan (1978). The Catholic campaign for state aid: a study of a pressure group campaign in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, 1950-1972, Catholic Theological Faculty – Sydney.

Ian Wilkinson and others (2007). A History of State Aid to Non-government Schools in Australia, Commonwealth Government Department of Education, Science and Training. 

For all the details of the 1981 High Court ruling go to:

Attorney-General (Vic); Ex Rel Black v Commonwealth ("DOGS case") [1981] HCA 2; (1981) 146 CLR 559 (2 February 1981) (austlii.edu.au)

And for a great overview of all things religious, see:  

‘Religiosity in Australia’ Series | Rationalist Society of Australia   

Bob Stewart

24 March 2024. 

In February 2023 the Australian government Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, invited the Productivity Commission (PC) to examine the ways in which the philanthropic, not-for-profit and business sectors can be encouraged to increase their ‘charitable giving’ to good and deserving causes. Treasurer Chalmers was keen to secure advice on how opportunities could be opened-up and obstacles removed for a diversity of channelling arrangements including workplace giving, bequests, private foundations, in-kind donations, and volunteering. And, finally, Treasurer Chalmers  asked PC to examine the tax expenditure framework that applied to charities, with a focus on not only the efficacy of the deductible gift recipient (DGR) framework, but also its fairness. This seemed very sensible, and in May 2024 a final report was released.

PC began its report by acknowledging that philanthropy contributed to a better society “by providing money, time, skills, assets or lending a voice to people and communities” who would otherwise have lower quality outcomes or limited access to goods and services.  PC went on to note that just over $13 billion was donated to Australian charities in 2021, with six million people volunteering their services in support of others. 

PC also found that government was a key player in the philanthropy space for two reasons. First, in 2021 Australian, state, territory and local governments provided $97 billion in direct funding to charities through grants and contracts. This accounted for about 50% of the total revenue for charities. Second, government provided both businesses and ordinary citizens with incentives to increase their levels of charitable giving. These incentives were embedded in what was known as the deductible gift recipient (DGR) framework.

Under DGR arrangements, people who gave more than $2 to an entity with DGR status could claim a 100% tax deduction for their donation. Moreover, the amount an entity or person could claim as a deduction was uncapped. It was limited only by a ‘willingness and capacity to give'.  PC went on to argue that as a matter of principle, the idea that government should support charitable-giving made sense, since the activity had ‘net community-wide benefits [that would] otherwise be undersupplied’. 

But PC also argued that the current DGR arrangements were no longer fit for purpose.  For instance, the current DGR system did not cover all charitable organisations. While public benevolent institutions, health promotion charities, animal welfare agencies, environmental groups and cultural activities were included, many advocacy groups and volunteer associations were not. At the same time, PC believed that some entities should no longer be given DGR status because of the distortions, biases, and inequities they had created. They included activities for advancing religion, programs for advancing industry, aged care, early childhood education, and other education activities.

Interestingly, PC highlighted two activities that would no longer be given DGR status, which were school building funds and the provision of religious and ethics education in government schools. PC was concerned that a tax-relief incentive when donating to school building funds was problematic for three reasons. 

First, while the generation of additional school building funds had clearly resulted in an increased provision of school-based infrastructure, the benefits were narrowly distributed. Donations had been channelled overwhelmingly to a coterie of wealthy independent schools, with 80% of school donations going to the top 20% of schools. Second, subsidising donations by giving donors a tax break was not necessarily the most efficient instrument for delivering more school infrastructure. PC offered several options including project-based competitive government grants, block-style capital funding using a needs-based approach, and matched grants involving a balance of government funding and philanthropic donations.  Third, there was evidence showing that donations were frequently converted into private benefits for donors. This resulted from an increase in school revenue, which in turn enabled school authorities to redirect funds previously earmarked to campus infrastructure into the subsidisation of student enrolment fees.

PC concluded that the inclusion of building funds in the DGR model had imposed a heavy burden on Australia’s taxpayers. But even more worryingly, the benefits were massively skewed in favour of school communities where average annual earnings of parents of students were among the highest in the nation. The inequity was compounded by parents who double -dipped into the benefit-bowl. Not only did they secure new state-of-the-art infrastructure, but they also benefited from relatively lower fees.  It was a classic case of ordinary taxpayers paying for the wealthy to accumulate even more assets.

PC reckoned that whatever way you looked at it, the current DGR program had both heightened taxpayer inequity, and accentuated educational disadvantage across the nation. In short, while “adequate infrastructure” was an important part of delivering education outcomes”, and there was a clear case for government support, “providing such support through DGR status for school building funds [was] NOT the most effective or efficient mechanism.”

PC understood how controversial its recommendation would be, and to minimise the political fallout it loosened its recommendation by calling for a five-year transition period before schools were stripped of their DGR status. But this did nothing to placate Catholic and private school lobby groups, who were outraged. Jacinta Collins, the National Catholic Education executive director argued that the PC recommendations were a “direct attack on school and faith communities and fail[ed] to acknowledge the enormous contribution of faith groups to the social fabric of Australia.”

The ‘storms of protest’ from independent schools was all too much for the Albanese government, which quickly ruled out the PC plans, with Andrew Leigh, the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury, confirming that “the recommended changes to tax settings for donations to school building funds [were] not being considered.’’  In defending the decision, Andrew asserted that “a world-class education system [was] essential to tackling inequality, driving economic growth and supporting well-paid, secure jobs.’’

Andrew’s comments were unfathomable given his frequent public claims that policymaking will only be effective if it is rational, secular, and based in evidence. Andrew was also instrumental in establishing the Australian Evaluation Centre (AEC) whose job was to “integrate high-quality evaluation into all aspects of program and policy development and to produce rigorous, evidence-based assessments of complex policy issues.” It was a pity Andrew failed to follow the AEC’s guiding principles when considering the PC’s recommendation.  

The Australian government’s ‘cave in’ showed that the Christian / independent school lobby group was alive and well in 2024, with self-interest once again over-riding equality and social justice.     

Bob Stewart

6 August 2024.

Vacant space.

Vacant space.