If the Budget doesn't reflect the Coalition's promised "unity ticket" on education funding, I expect a lot of Australians will be loudly reminding Abbott and Pyne of good policy and bad promises, writes Rob Oakeshott.

At the start of the 43rd Parliament, to try to resolve the issues faced in a one-seat Parliament, I was the guy who called for a unity ticket from Liberal and Labor. I concede the reaction wasn't pretty.

And it's this scar that itched when I heard the words "unity ticket" from one of my greatest critics at the time, Tony Abbott.

When he chose the same language of bipartisanship on the proposed model for Australian education funding in the weeks prior to the 2013 federal election, it seemed the lion wanted to lie down with the lamb after all.

What unravelled over time was that it was a unity ticket with some terms and conditions attached. While the package the 43rd Parliament passed into law was a historic, and stable, six-year Commonwealth-state funding agreement, the unity ticket from the LNP apparently only ran for four years.

Now, with the Australian Budget projecting out for the coming four years, it is in this week that these final two years in dispute will finally be revealed. There is nowhere left to hide.

The real truth of the pre-election "unity ticket" statement by Abbott will finally be answered in Budget 2014.

And if inside whispers, and screams, are to be taken seriously, there is no unity ticket. It sounds like the only question is whether there ever was.

If years five and six of the school funding reform package are frozen to indexation, as whispers suggest, it is nothing short of a disaster. It denies the whole point of a needs-based funding approach - it denies the major injection of resources into areas of most need in Australia, and it entrenches disadvantage.

Freezing education funding to indexation is a direct attack on families from regional and rural Australia.

Freezing education funding to indexation is a direct attack on Aboriginal Australia.

Freezing education funding to indexation is a direct attack on poorer Australia.

Education data does not lie. David Gonski himself picked up on this when he did the report into how we modernise our funding model in Australia. His report confirmed what education specialists had already identified, achievement gaps between rich and poor that are wider than in the majority of OECD countries, as well as gaps between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, and between regional and metropolitan students.

And if we believe in an egalitarian Australia, and if we believe that a productivity agenda is best delivered by engaging as many young minds as possible, and if we believe social indicators like crime are best minimised through education, then this achievement gap should be of the deepest, and most urgent, concern.

In response to this problem, David Gonski and his team of education specialists made a series of recommendations based on a fairly simple logic - those most in need attract most of the resources, because resourcing is intimately linked to achievement.

That this obvious, common-sense logic is likely to be denied in a weeks time will be rightly opposed by many.

Right or wrong, the ABC's Q&A protest last Monday night is, in my view, merely a taste of things to come. From conversations throughout the education sector, there is wide-scale disenchantment and frustration with Chris Pyne and Tony Abbott.

I get the sense that a breach of promise on the "unity ticket" on school funding will be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and bring many to the point of protest - students, teachers and parents.

And as a parent in a regional community, I don't flag a mood of protest lightly. But I'll be damned if my children are to be entrenched into a category of achievement 30 per cent lower than others, for no other reason than we live in regional Australia.

Needs-based funding is the obvious answer to the education data that does not lie. If the Budget doesn't present the promised "unity ticket" on this common-sense logic, I expect a lot of Australians will be loudly reminding Abbott and Pyne of good policy and bad promises.

And yes, as a dad who wants nothing other than a level playing field for his kids, I'll be one of them.

Rob Oakeshott is a former independent member of both the NSW and federal Parliaments. After the 2010 election he was one of the MPs who supported the Gillard government. View his full profile here.