The present Commonwealth funding arrangements are a Howard government legacy maintained by Labor, which - perhaps fecklessly - promised schools in the non-government sector that they would be able to keep what they had gained from it, irrespective of any new arrangements.

The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, appears to have taken this commitment a step further by promising increased funding to all independent schools, including those whose funding from all public and private sources enable them to operate at up to three times the resources available to other schools.

So why does the Coalition need to cry wolf about funding cuts? Part of the explanation is that the current scheme contains a funding bonanza in the form of a politically contrived, non-standard indexation mechanism based on movements in average government school recurrent costs. For Pyne to claim that this mechanism offers stability of funding is misleading, since the rate varied widely from 3 per cent to 9 per cent over the past decade. But, overall, it has been delivering windfall gains to schools across the non-government sector, irrespective of need.

The definition of a funding ''cut'' provides the rest of the explanation. In normal parlance, a cut is a loss of a current resource - a teacher, or a library, a subject dropped from the curriculum. But in relation to non-government schools, it seems a loss of anticipated gains is regarded not as a fond hope dashed, but as an actual cut.

With breathtaking hypocrisy, the Coalition is seeking to whip up fears of rising private school fees as a result of Gonski's reforms. It was the Howard government, with its competition and choice agenda, that removed all downward pressure on private school fees when it replaced the previous Labor scheme with its own model of deregulated fees. Its rationale was to increase ''incentives for private effort'' in a consumer market.