As for a "hit list," there's no shortage of suggested mock-ups, none of them secret. One published in this paper shows 150 private schools, overfunded by hundreds of millions of dollars, a list that includes bluestone Melbourne Grammar and Oakhill College in Sydney, which boasts an indoor swimming pool and farm with livestock. As Birmingham negotiates a new funding deal with the states, the private school lobby argues that targeting over-funded private schools would only reduce the federal government's spending on schools by 0.5 per cent. And by the sector's economic frame of reference that's a coherent argument: to Melbourne Grammar an extra $2 million is mere pocket money.

The Independent Schools Council of Australia warned that private schools should not be treated as an "easy target" for funding cuts. If the past is any guide they have precious little to worry about.

Latham's electoral failure in 2004 gave rise to the mythology that our idea of the "fair go" had come to encompass an irreversible entitlement of rich schools to taxpayer funds. I won't trawl through ancient history other than to point out the popular wisdom that the public rejected the hit list when it rejected Latham is contested. But myths can be hard to uproot. From then on we were conditioned to view any proposal to cut funding to private schools as an attack on aspirational parents prepared to make "sacrifices" for their children. We apparently acquiesce to this scandalous inefficiency even as student performance stalls. Even as the gutting of middle-class students from government schools creates "residual" schools where the high concentration of poor and disadvantaged children places yet more demands on the public purse.

And all these contradictions were baked into the Gillard government's Gonski reforms, which purported to allocate school funding according to need but didn't really because of the prime minister's promise that no school would be worse off under the model. Philosophically, this needs-based funding that wasn't, soothed the middle-class conscience by encouraging a cognitive dissonance. Now "good" parents could send Celeste or Jackson to a private school citing all the usual caveats ("it's only because the local high school doesn't teach cello," "it's only because she's the fragile type, you know?") believing the funding bounty would eventually close the gap between rich and poor schools, enticing more parents like them – if not actually them – into the government system.

Don't blame the Coalition for repeatedly reneging on Gonski; the plan was always a typically unsustainable Labor fairytale, only this time twisted out of shape. Birmingham says it would take more than 100 years for some overfunded schools to return to their appropriate funding under the current model. And closing the gap between needy schools and their richer counterparts calls for an extra $4.5 billion a year nationally, an 8 per cent boost to Australia's total education spend, explains the Grattan Institute's Peter Goss. Given our budgetary constraints that would be "incredibly tough", he tells me, with careful understatement.