This is a government in headlong flight from any reform that could be construed by anyone, anywhere as the slightest bit threatening.

Its extension of current school funding arrangements until 2014 yesterday is a craven act of policy cowardice.

From 2009-12 the Federal Government is spending nearly $64b on school funding. Funding for non-government schools is driven by the famous Socioeconomic Status formula introduced by the Howard Government in 2001 – except, funding was fiddled so that if private schools lost out under the formula, they had their funding maintained anyway. In one of the many consequences of Mark Latham’s disastrous leadership that continue to haunt us, Labor vowed in 2007 to keep the system in place in its first term. Julia Gillard set up a review of funding, under Sydney Grammar alumnus David Gonski, in May.

Yesterday’s decision locks a confused and hopelessly wasteful funding model in place for a further year to appease private schools.

It isn’t just that the SES formula and its funding carve-out for losers delivers a vast windfall for certain elite private schools – Trinity Grammar in Sydney, $30m over the quadrennium; the King’s School, $19m, PLC $16.5m. Given the size of the funding pool, that form of upper-class welfare is almost a trivial aside. The point of the formula that on the face of it appeared intended to ensure funding went to schools in low-income areas was that the Howard Government wanted to encourage parents out of the public education system by funding the expansion of low-fee non-Government schools, particularly in outer-suburban electorates.

It was partly a direct electoral bribe, and also part of a larger attempt at social engineering, to convert “Howard’s battlers” into clones of their eastern suburbs neighbours – private schools, private health insurance, wealth management strategies, shareholdings – that would, so the thinking went, inculcate permanent habits of voting Liberal.

It was all marketed under the philosophy of “choice”, but it was choice at the taxpayers’ expense.

As an electoral strategy it may or may not have worked but as a formula for efficient use of taxpayers’ money to achieve optimal educational outcomes, it left much to be desired. And it sat on top of an already-flawed state funding model reliant on top-down control and bureaucracy.

Now Labor, despite the Gonski Review being scheduled to conclude early next year, has locked the system in place until 2014, because independent schools and the Coalition kept insisting the mere act of having an independent review of how to improve the effectiveness of school funding was some sort of act of class war.

The days of Labor waging class war are long gone. So, it seems, are the days of it being a party of reform.