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.
