Catholics limiting choice

“Committed to choice, the Coalition Government is determined that all parents, having paid their taxes, will receive support in the choice of school they believe best suits the interests of their child - State/Territory government, Catholic or Independent.”

The quota proposed in Tasmania, and the legislative amendment required to achieve it, will clearly reduce that choice. If this is allowed to happen, public funding should be reduced in direct proportion.

The other issue facing tax payers is the potential cost of the massive student transfer being proposed by the Catholic education system.

Doyle’s quota (PDF 22KB) would reduce by almost half the number of non-Catholic students in Catholic schools. That’s effectively 3,000 potential students out of a total Catholic school population of 15,000 who will no longer find places in these schools, and a corresponding 3,000 students the Catholic system will have to lure from elsewhere onto Catholic campuses.

Where will the students who fall foul of Doyle’s quota go, and where will he find thousands to replace them? What if the whole scheme fails? What if state schools are left to accommodate hundreds of students who would otherwise have found places in Catholic schools, while Catholic schools suffer enrolment deficits, both because of their self-imposed quota and the negative message it sends, and then call for public bail-outs to stay solvent. Who will pay?

These are not my fears alone.

In 2005 Victoria’s Catholic Education Office conducted a review of its cap on non-Catholic students in the light of threatened litigation from disgruntled parents and predications that enrolment could drop by as much as 10 per cent, sending smaller Catholic schools to the wall.

Some defenders of religious schools have responded to these practical concerns by retreating to the seemingly unassailable bastion of “religious freedom”.

From behind its walls Cardinal George Pell has recently advocated greater religiosity in Catholic schools, including “oaths of fidelity” for Principals.

But schools are not churches, nor principals clergy, especially when taxpayers fund them. Neither, according to the High Court, is religious freedom unqualified. It may fall before what the Court calls “an overriding public purpose”.

Such a purpose, in the view of many Australians, is the maintenance of basic standards of fairness, decent treatment and democratic pluralism.

In 2002 an eight-year-old boy was expelled from a Christian school in Western Australia because his mother’s de facto relationship violated the school’s religious precepts. His family had no recourse because WA has an anti-discrimination exemption exactly like that being sought in Tasmania. But if these victims of discrimination had no friend in the law, they did in public opinion. Sparked by the expulsion, a wave of indignation swept Perth.