Its is just cheaper for the government to continue funding private schools.
The cost to state and federal government to educate a child in the public system ranges between $8000 and $12000 per year depending on where you are.
The combined private school subsidies of around $3000 per child per year therefore save the taxpayer around $5000 to $8000 per child per year. These are the cold hard facts. The balance of the private funding is paid for by parents.
If by taking away private funding more children are forced into the public system the cost to tax payers will sky rocket and the current shortfall in resources will be even worse than it is now. Do public school advocates really think parents will continue to pay their own funds into the public sector schools when they do not have to?
This balance must be carefully maintained. The ideologues must step aside and allow the economic realists manage this one or they will make it worse not better.

Australia should convert its grants to private schools into Hecs-like income contingent loans to parents to pay school fees. This would mean that no parent would be denied the choice of sending their child to a private school while targeting subsidies to parents who need them.

I agree that Australia shouldn't subsidise the private schooling choices of wealthy people. However, it is unrealistic to expect governments to stop their subsidies, for various reasons that shouldn't divert this conversation. Recall the furious backlash against then opposition leader Mark Latham's proposal to cut subsidies for a few of the wealthiest schools.

So a more realistic alternative is needed. Income contingent loans could be designed so that they were revenue neutral for the government and thus did not subsidise private schooling directly. But I'd be willing to concede subsidised income contingent loans for (private) school fees for the considerable increase in equity they would nevertheless achieve.

User wants = user pays. If you want a private education (catholic or otherwise) you have to pay for it. However, if you want a public education, you also have to pay for it. For far too long, private school paying parents (who pay fees AND taxes) have subsidised public school parents so they can have a free education.

It is time people realised if they want a government service (health, transport, amenities, whatever) they are going to have to pay for it. There are some exceptions where "assistance" may need to be provided but it is time for public parents to pay.

What is forever missing from these various debates about how Australian taxpayers' money is to be invested in education, or too often sadly the case merely spent, is motivation and the culture of education in many families that is missing in others.

Regardless of what money is spent by government offering education, for any given person to receive that education they have to work very hard at it in a very competitive environment. It doesn't come for free. All the government does and can ever do is provide the opportunity, hopefully in collaboration with those who do the delivering; they cannot actually do it. Each student must do it themselves, too often alone and in a family environment lacking peer support or interest.

It is no accident that the most successful, persistently high-achieving schools in Australia derived from the Scottish system of education, not the English elitist system presupposing a waste of time and money trying to educate the unwashed masses. That is still part of the residual problem here. In the Scottish system, on the other hand, education is not a privilege, nor even as right per se, but a human necessity alongside food, shelter and healthcare.

For the Chinese likewise, and especially in a culture almost worshiping high scholarship as the foundation of civil society for nigh on 5,000 years now, it cannot possibly come as any surprise that when the first Chinese students began to strut their stuff here in Australia they left the locals initially aghast. The very great benefit for Australia is that a whole new education benchmark was set, with many Australians again not surprisingly, given the new goal to achieve, promptly set about achieving it.

Yet here we find these very people disparaged alongside the few remnant English-style elitists, as if it were all still only a matter of English class struggle, with Labor as the perpetual (oddly dated in my view) champion of those unwashed and neglected masses, those derived underclasses, still earnestly deploying the same dated rhetoric.

State funding of 'private' schools came about for the very good reason that the families who opted for a good school consistent with their own culture, their own motivations and their own prerogatives, are nonetheless taxpayers. If the school happened to be 'privately owned' (usually by one of the churches in trust not some corporate commercial entity pursuing 'private enterprise'), all that happened was they were being made to double dip, having to pay for their own children's education and for everyone else's as well. The situation was plainly unfair. It was insidiously unjust.

The other separate matter of those remaining publically owned schools that continue to wallow in poverty and chronic underachievement, as indeed many schools did for a very long time especially during the Depression and War years, is not going to be resolved by arguing over which school gets what money. It will not be resolved by continuing deployment of dated rhetoric over 'equality' or 'equity', by which is usually meant where taxpayers money is spent.

If those people still do not value education sufficiently to be motivated by the idea of it, to be enthralled by the achievement of it, as part of their culture and society, and their day to day lives, no amount of money being thrown at them will alter their condition one iota.

I do not believe as a group they are incapable. Every family, every social class, every culture and society, contains people of varying ability. The very real difference out here on the ground lies in whether your family and friends praise you for working so hard and happily attend your graduation, or whether you are likely to be dismissed as a nerd or a swot, ostracised for being intellectual, or worse beaten up for 'trying to be superior', putting yourself 'above your station in life'.

That's where it all happens, nowhere else.

Until we have a uniform culture of education here in Australia nothing will change. That's where the effort needs to be invested, and to successive governments' credit I believe that is what is happening. Strong bias against New Start Allowance in favour of Austudy aside, here in Western Australia policy is to privatise government owned schools, not nationalise or impoverish the so-called 'privately owned' schools.

If schools are currently continuing to raise their fees, and plainly parents are happy to keep paying them, it is only to provide better teachers and better teaching resources in a very highly competitive environment. It cannot be said that those fees contribute to corporate profits, or dividends to rich investors. Such an idea is grossly unjust. As John Howard famously said, every child taken out of the state-run system into a private school saves a bucketload of money.

All the rest of this stuff is diversion based on residual imported class hatred. I mean, get over it finally.