Remember that old saying about giving people fish and you might feed some but give them rods and they’ll feed a whole community. Abbott gifted Mundine and News Corp with money and they aren’t even private schools. The taxpayer paid but that action did little to close the gap between us and remote communities.

Australian Indigenous Education Foundation (AIEF), a Rupert Murdoch linked indigenous foundation, has been labelled a ‘game changer’. Is it?

Some experts said they weren’t opposed to boarding schools, but questioned whether an expansion of AIEF’s model was a good path to closing the gap in education.

Guenther said the AIEF was:

not a program designed to build equity or to address so-called disadvantage. It’s a program designed to justify the use of public funds … to fund a program that in some way does the opposite.

“By supporting that handful of kids, as well-deserving as they might be, they are taking money that could be going into remote schools to give a better education to those who are left behind. Those that don’t meet the eligibility criteria, those that really do need a leg-up – it bypasses those people altogether.”

“If schools were funded properly, in their communities, to deliver a quality education, then that is equally, if not more, likely to close the gap because you’re going to be then supporting those young people who need the help a lot more.”

Source: Warren Mundine wants an audit of Indigenous funding. How about the charity he chairs? – Michael West