The deserving rich

In fact, private schools do not even have to tell us what they do with the money we give them.

The rationalisation for giving élite schools large sums of public money is that it will make them more accessible. Yet not one of these schools has lowered their fees since recurrent funding was first established back in the 1970s. A recent study by Louise Watson and Chris Ryan reveals that these schools have used government money to vastly increase the resources they offer the lucky few, rather than open their doors to a wider range of kids. If mutual obligation was actually being practised, wouldn't we be insisting on just the opposite?

In fact, becoming more accessible is the last thing many élite schools want, because if they were, how could they remain élite? They would prefer mutual obligation to remain something only the less privileged have to worry about. I'm not saying, by the way, that all private schools are lacking generosity or a responsible attitude to the public good, I'm simply saying we currently place no obligation on them to behave that way. We give something to them, without asking them to give something back to us.

As Malcolm Turnbull recently pointed out, mutual obligation can only be acceptable if it applies to everyone. In fact, I would go further than that and argue that we should be much more vigilant about the public money we give to those at the top of the pile, than the bottom. The current social problems in Macquarie Fields, for example, reveal how little society feels obliged to help the kids with the least. We have deserted them on dental care (if you want to know how socially disadvantaged a school really is, forget their addresses, look at their teeth), and there are stories of families in Australia who are unable to afford glasses for their children, particularly if they have more than one child with eye problems. According to the Sydney Morning Herald (March 12 -14, 2005) any attempts we're making in early childhood support amongst the disadvantaged are only fiddling around the edges. Dr Clare Cunningham, director of Tumbatin developmental clinic and learning difficulties clinic at Sydney Children's Hospital Randwick, is quoted by the SMH as saying, “There has been an attenuation of resources … the system is unethical”. And, we are systematically deserting these kids in education; comprehensive, co-ed, public schools in some parts of Sydney have become ghettos for kids who are well endowed with nothing but generations of unemployment and illiteracy.

All this has been aided and abetted by our current Federal Government, and with remarkably little protest from the top end of society, whose only response, it seems, to the widening gap between the haves and have nots, has been to grab their kids and run. As the Macquarie Fields riots reveal, why should less advantaged kids feel any obligation towards us and our rules and regulations, when we have so clearly demonstrated we feel no obligation towards them?

If mutual obligation, or “Shared Responsibility Agreements” are the new deal for what used to be called the deserving poor, why on earth do we not demand at least the same level of accountability from those who appear to consider themselves the deserving rich?