Historical construction and Australian Catholic education: accounting for school funding policy from the cultural politics of Australian education

Abstract

This paper seeks to explain why the policy history of school funding in regard to Australian Catholic Education looks and sounds the way it does today through the production of a genealogy of the subject. The questions addressed are, first, why has the funding of Catholic schools in Australia become an occluded historical site since the 1970s, despite the controversy in which popular accounts of the funding of Australian schools is mired, and when its prevalence so completely dominated the discourses of Australian education in the prior century? Second, has funding policy discourse been defined and contained and what basis is there for contesting such discourse in light of events since that period of time? Third, which or whose policy version triumphs and becomes the accepted policy process and which other policy approaches are obliterated in this process? The theoretical perspective adopted in this paper draws from both postmodern critiques and cultural theories of historical construction, as framed within Foucauldian Studies.