The Labor party has drifted away from its principles when it comes to funding public education, one of the nation’s defining democratic institutions.
There was a time when a Labor government would have regarded the sustained underfunding of public schools as inconsistent with its own identity. Today it has become politically manageable.
The ongoing debate over extending the Choice and Affordability Fund beyond 2029 shows that further support for the private sector remains conceivable, even while public schools still wait for resources already promised to them. For decades the debate has centred on funding formulas, sector agreements and competing claims over fairness. Those discussions matter and the evidence is now overwhelming: public schools have waited years for the funding they were promised, while many non-government schools have already reached, or exceeded, their agreed Schooling Resource Standard.
The evidence is no longer the issue. The politics is.
How is it that governments appear now to pay remarkably little political price for neglecting public education? How has this become politically acceptable?
Political parties rarely fear a political price unless they first recognise that their actions have drifted from their own values. In individuals we might describe that as healthy shame: the capacity to recognise that our behaviour no longer reflects the principles by which we wish to live, and the willingness to correct it. Political movements need that capacity as well.
Institutions rarely abandon their purpose overnight. More often, they adjust incrementally to changing environments until positions that would once have seemed inconsistent with their identity come to be accepted as entirely normal.
Political parties, like all enduring institutions, survive by adapting, which is not the same as progress. Healthy adaptation creates what might be called adaptive stability: the capacity to respond to a changing environment, while preserving the principles that define an organisation’s identity.
Children in chaotic or unsafe environments often develop behaviours such as hypervigilance, withdrawal or distrust that help them survive circumstances they did not choose and could not control. Those behaviours are adaptive at the time, even when they later become barriers to learning and connection. Political institutions face a related, though not identical, challenge: they too adapt to survive. But the comparison has a limit that matters more than the parallel itself. A child’s survival response is involuntary. A party’s adaptation is chosen; it can be reconsidered. Labor retains precisely the capacity a child does not yet have: to recognise drift and correct it. That capacity is what healthy political shame protects.
Over the past four decades, Labor has adapted to an Australia reshaped by market economics, consumer choice and electoral pragmatism. Much of that adaptation was understandable, in some respects unavoidable. The important question is therefore not whether Labor adapted – every successful political party must – but whether those adaptations preserved one of its defining convictions: that strong public institutions remain the primary means through which opportunity is created and shared.
The consequences of this political adaptation extended well beyond Parliament. Over time, they reshaped the nature of public education itself. As increasing numbers of socially and economically advantaged families exercised greater educational choice, public schools did not simply lose enrolments. They increasingly became the universal provider for students with the most complex educational, social, behavioural and emotional needs.
This process of residualisation is usually discussed in terms of funding or socio-economic disadvantage. Both matter but tell only part of the story. Residualisation has not simply redistributed resources. It has redistributed responsibility. Public schools have increasingly become responsible for educating the students who require the greatest levels of support, while remaining committed to educating every child regardless of circumstance. They have accepted responsibilities that no other sector is expected to carry to the same extent.
That transformation has fundamentally changed the work of teachers. In many public schools, teaching now demands far more than delivering curriculum. Teachers are increasingly required to maintain safety, support emotional regulation, respond to behavioural crises and rebuild the conditions in which learning can occur. These responsibilities are not distractions from education; they are often the necessary precondition for it. Every hour spent restoring a classroom to a condition where learning becomes possible is an hour unavailable for extending learning itself.
This is not an argument against inclusion, nor a criticism of the students who require additional support. It is an acknowledgement that educating students with increasingly complex needs requires greater expertise, time and resources.
While the educational responsibilities of public schools have steadily expanded, the political urgency attached to supporting them has steadily diminished. That is the paradox at the centre of Australian education: the schools carrying the greatest public responsibility have gradually become those with the weakest political constituency.
As many of the Australians with the greatest political influence became less dependent on public education, they also became less exposed to its daily realities. The gap was no longer simply between sectors. It became a gap between lived experience and political perception. Debates about school funding became increasingly detached from the conditions they were meant to improve, treated as an accounting exercise rather than a measure of a society’s willingness to equip its schools for the responsibilities it had asked them to carry.
The solution cannot be found in another funding agreement, review or election commitment alone. The challenge is political not administrative.
Healthy systems remain stable because they can recognise when they have drifted from their purpose and adjust accordingly. Political parties are no different: their long-term strength depends not on winning elections alone, but on preserving the values that explain why they seek office.
For Labor, that means rediscovering why public education became central to its identity. Public schools have never been simply another government service. They are one of Australia’s defining democratic institutions, creating opportunity, strengthening communities and binding together a society that might otherwise become increasingly divided. Repair begins when governments once again regard neglecting public education as inconsistent with the kind of nation they wish to build.
The question facing Labor is therefore larger than school funding. Has the party merely adapted to a changing political environment, or has it drifted too far from one of the institutions that once defined its purpose?
Healthy political shame is not an admission of failure. It is the willingness to recognise that drift, and the determination to correct it. When political shame disappears, political price soon follows.
John Frew worked in public education, including as foundation principal at a secondary school for students with Conduct Disorder and Oppositional Disturbance. John has authored numerous books the latest being ‘Neuroscience and Teaching Very Difficult Kids’. Since retiring, he has continued to comment on social issues.