Labor-like budget ticks all the boxes for Turnbull

For students of the politics of economics – my special subject – this clothes-pinching budget has been a feast. Oh no, it's "Labor-lite". Shocking!

Actually, it's a budget that ticks all the boxes for Malcolm Turnbull and, by extension, his parliamentary followers – something their silent acquiescence suggests they realise.

You don't need brains to see a Labor-lite budget. What's harder is to see that it's not as out of character as some suppose.

True, the song Turnbull and Scott Morrison are singing now is very different to the one they sang in last year's budget.

But the beginning of wisdom is to see that, these days, what each side of politics offers is an ever-changing mixture of ideology and pragmatism.

The bedrock is pragmatism: what must I say or do to win the next election? Pragmatism rules because of the way politics has been professionalised, becoming a career ladder you climb from newly graduated ministerial staffer to (you hope) prime minister.

But ideology has its uses. Mainly, to gratify the prejudices of the party base and enhance your supporters' loyalty to the tribe. It gives then a warm feeling. It also helps to jolly along union or business donors.

Then there's the third, usually unmentioned factor: Consistency, no need for.

When you're constantly changing the mix, increasing or decreasing the pragmatism component, you can't be too worried about getting caught changing your story from what you said before.

Since the responsibilities of office change little from year to year – similarly, the advice of the econocrats – the two sides' rhetoric while in government is more similar than when they're in opposition. Everyone changes their tune when they come to power.

As for the boxes this year's budget ticks for Turnbull, the first is it shows him taking firm steps to get the trajectories of budget spending and taxing heading in a better direction, giving the budget substance at a time when its forecasts and projections would soon be exposed as optimistic, even fiddled.

It shows Turnbull having the sense to cast off the wishful ideology foisted on him by the economically uninterested Tony Abbott (egged on by the Business Council's lesser geniuses, to whom he foolishly outsourced the commission of audit) that, despite eight income tax cuts in a row, only cuts in spending were needed to get the budget shooting back to surplus.

By doing so, Turnbull was accepting the budgeteers' orthodoxy that budget repair always involves tax increases as well as spending cuts, and joining ranks of all previous successful Liberal prime ministers, starting with John Howard and his goods and services tax.

Nor is Turnbull the first PM to succeed partly by pinching the best of their opponents' policies.

Second box: it shows Turnbull coping with the bills left by Labor – the National Disability Insurance Scheme, schools funding and (eternally) Medicare – in ways that are politically shrewd and not terribly distorting economically.

Solving the NDIS cost problem by linking it to a barely perceptible increase in the Medicare levy in two years' time. Switching to a cheaper version of Gonski-style needs-based school funding. Imposing a new $1.5-billion-a-year indirect tax on the hated big banks – for whom he's been leaking votes by running cover against a royal commission – to help reduce the structural budget deficit.

Third box: this budget neutralises two of the greatest areas of voters' concern, where Labor is permanently perceived by them to have the comparative advantage: health and education.

And this at a time when, largely thanks to factors beyond their control, we're not travelling too well in the areas permanently perceived by punters to be the Libs' comparative advantage: managing the budget and managing the economy.

Fourth box: this budget takes a Liberal party drifting ever-further to the hard right, and yanks it back to the sensible centre, where elections are won.

Fifth box: this budget shows Turnbull as leader rather than follower of his ever-more reality-detached backbench.

It at last gives voters a glimpse of the fair-dinkum Malcolm – the one saying what we all know he really believes – and whom many people whose vote is up for grabs were hoping and expecting to be led by after the unlamented demise of Abbott.

Last box: Turnbull's return to the centre has at last wrong-footed the formerly sure-footed Bill Shorten, exposing his pretence of putting the public interest ahead of partisan advantage – if we can't have our version of needs-based school funding, let's block the Libs' version – and prompting him to shift to left of centre, with his plans to increase taxes on high income-earners.

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How needs-based school funding would work

In education economics, the hot question is whether Malcolm Turnbull's Gonski 2.0 plan for school funding yields a better and more cost-effective combination of fairness and economic efficiency than Labor's Gonski 1.

Since both sides of politics seek to sanctify their funding approach by labelling it with the sacred name of David Gonski, the businessman who chaired the 2011 government inquiry into school funding, remember both sides' plans fall well short of what he recommended.

He started by recognising that, at least since the Whitlam days, government funding of the nation's schools had no rational basis.

Funds came from both federal and state governments, and were spent on three differing sectors – government, Catholic "systemic" and independent schools.

This meant funding differed by state, and by sectarian status. Politicians on both sides and at both levels did special deals aimed at currying favour with Catholic voters. Many governments favoured non-government over government schools, in the name of giving parents greater "choice" (provided they could afford private school fees).

In other English-speaking countries, religious schools get no special treatment. If they want government funding, they play by government rules. If that's not acceptable, they can do their own thing without government funding.

Gonski's key proposal was to allocate government funding on the sole basis of the needs of particular students, doing so in a way that was "sector blind".

An independent "national schools resourcing body" should be established to set a needs-based "school resourcing standard" for each of Australia's 9500 schools.

The standard would start with a uniform basic amount per student, to which loadings would be added to cover their students' disadvantage in the categories of low socioeconomic status, English language proficiency, school size and location, and indigeneity.

In this way, the allocation of funds would be determined from the bottom up, not from the top down in negotiations with states and sectors.

Julia Gillard required Gonski to reallocate funding in a way that ensured "no school would lose a dollar". This necessitated him proposing that total spending be increased, creating the impression he thought schools needed a lot more spent on them.

The Gillard government rejected the proposal for an independent body to oversee the reallocation and came up with its own figures for the school resourcing standard.

Labor also stuck with the top-down approach, going around the states and sectors trying to persuade them to sign up before the 2013 election.

As a result, some states and sectors did much better deals than others, which they now resent Turnbull trying to unwind.

Labor's reallocation was to be phased in over six years, with much of the cost delayed until the last two calendar years, 2018 and 2019.

Tony Abbott claimed to have accepted the plan's first four years, but reneged immediately after the election, saying the states could spend their grants however they chose.

In the 2014 budget Abbott announced that, after 2017, funding for schools would simply be indexed to consumer prices, yielding a huge saving to the budget. But he couldn't persuade the Senate to amend the act implementing Labor's funding plan.

Just before last year's election, Turnbull agreed to funding increases for 2018, 2019 and 2020 that were more generous than Abbott had wanted but less that Labor's plan.

And now, Education Minister Simon Birmingham surprised everyone by unveiling the Coalition government's own version of needs-based funding, dubbed Gonski 2.0.

It involves adjusting all schools' federal funding at different rates over 10 years so that, by 2027, all of Labor's disparities and anomalies would be removed, leaving all government schools (which are mainly funded by the states) getting 20 per cent of their school resourcing standard – up from an average of 17 per cent at present.

All private schools (whose government funding comes mainly from the feds) would be getting 80 per cent of their school resourcing standard, up from an average of 77 per cent at present.

Total federal funding of schools would grow from $17.5 billion this year to $30.6 billion in 2027, an increase of $2.2 billion over already-planned spending over the first four years, rising to an extra $18.6 billion over the 10 years.

You see from this that Gonski 2.0 would take a lot longer than Gonski 1 to reach full needs-based funding. Like Labor's six-year plan, the Coalition's 10-year plan is heavily "back-end loaded".

Of course, on Labor's calculations, a hypothetical continuation of its scheme would cost $22 billion on top of the extra the Coalition plans to spend.

Much of Labor's extra spending above the Coalition comes from its built-in higher rate of annual increase in funding, relative to the Coalition's assumed average indexation rate of 3.3 per cent a year.

Some of Labor's extra would go on higher grant increases for already overfunded private schools, and some on bigger pay rises for teachers.

Unlike Labor, the Coalition would make small cuts in grants to 24 highly overfunded private schools, while another 350-odd somewhat overfunded private schools would get smaller increases until, in 2027, every school's federal funding was aligned with its own needs-based school resourcing standard.

A big weakness in Gonski 2.0 is the way it gets federal funding sorted but ignores the eight states and territories' role in achieving needs-based funding overall. The states would merely be required to maintain the real value of their funding per student, allocated however they chose.

A weakness both schemes share is that though state-based school systems (including government systems) will receive grants based on the individual needs of each of their schools, they will be left to determine the basis on which it's actually allocated to particular schools.

My conclusion is that the opportunity Gonski 2.0 presents to have both sides politics accept and entrench needs-based federal funding, and an end to sectarian deals, should be grabbed with both hands.

There's nothing to stop Labor, or anyone else, coming along later and fixing its weaknesses.

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