The first draft of the government’s poker machine reforms legislation will be released today and comes a day after local clubs in the ACT agreed, in principle, to host a year-long trial of mandatory pre-commitment technology.

The draft legislation, which industry and community groups will be consulted on over the coming weeks, includes placing a $250 ATM daily withdrawal limit from February 1 next year, with exemptions for venues in communities with limited banking facilities.

The trial of mandatory pre-commitment is not included in the draft bill, which also requires the Productivity Commission to review and report on the results of the trial.

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Precommitment will involve a minimum time for a player’s loss limit of 24 hours, with punters unable to play once they have reached their limit.

Poker machine reforms have been a costly headache for the government and one Labor MP told the National Times today that it had been a lesson in “how to argue both sides of a bad argument”.

“It is mystifying,” the MP said. “How do you stuff up on actually getting rid of the worst of the reforms? We got so much heat over trying to introduce pre-commitment and then it is canned but we get heat for backflipping on a deal no one wanted in the first place.”

Prime Minister Julia Gillard last month reneged on her deal with anti-pokies crusader, independent Tasmanian MP Andrew Wilkie, after she secured an extra vote in the lower house, courtesy of the Peter Slipper Speaker deal.

In exchange for his support of Labor in a minority government, Mr Wilkie secured a written guarantee from Ms Gillard in 2010 that she would pass legislation to tackle problem gambling by 2014.

Mr Wilkie’s withdrawal of support meant that Labor’s hard-fought two seat buffer in the House of Representatives lasted just one month.

The chief executive of ClubsACT, Jeff House, said yesterday that while the clubs had agreed to host the trail it was just the beginning of negotiations with the government, with many issues, such as compensation for clubs, technical specifics and the involvement of nearby NSW clubs, still to be sorted out.

As the only jurisdiction with the technology, Ms Gillard has promised $37.1 million in compensation for lost earnings to ACT clubs. The funds will also cover the cost of installing mandatory pre-commitment technology on poker machines and boost counselling funding.

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Julia Gillard. Photo: Andrew Meares

Julia Gillard is the new chief executive of Australia. She’s a youngish, unmarried, childless redhead with a razor-sharp brain and the patience to wait in the wings for the top job to be delivered into her lap. History has an almost complete doppelganger in the figure of England’s first chief executive, the woman who turned a failing European backwater into the most powerful of the Renaissance nations.

Put to one side a couple of minor differences between Gillard and Elizabeth I – virginity, a royal father and the divine right to lead – and Thursday’s tumultuous events in Canberra are an echo of the day 452 years ago when a subject of England watched the country’s new supreme leader walk past to claim her destiny and exclaimed: ”Oh Lord. The Queen is a woman!”

Like Gillard, Elizabeth did not seek the top job but was handed the reins at a time of bloody factional discord – in her case, the religious split between Protestant and Catholic that had been ripping the country apart.

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There was an economic crisis – the coffers were almost empty after war and other royal excesses, with only highly unpopular measures available to replenish them. And the nation was in stasis after several years under a vindictive, uncommunicative leader for whom ”consensus” was a dirty word.

Elizabeth set about building one of the greatest empires the world had seen and the lessons of her 45-year leadership make her a fascinating role model for Gillard – or anyone wanting to win the hearts and minds of the team they lead.

Like that other indispensable guide for women seeking the top job, Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office, Alan Axelrod’s book Elizabeth I CEO: Strategic Lessons from the Leader Who Built an Empire, could be laying out a blueprint for Gillard. Although according to his thesis, she already has some of the Virgin Queen’s tricks under her belt.

Be sure you’ll win. Elizabeth learnt at a young age how to keep her head when others around her – including her mother, Anne Boleyn – were losing theirs on the chopping block. Gillard likewise learnt early on how to navigate her way around Labor’s factions – something Kevin Rudd never managed, or bothered, to master.

After the bloody suppression of Protestantism under Elizabeth’s half-sister and predecessor Mary, Catholics expected the new queen would come down on them as heavily in revenge. Elizabeth did not, although Parliament was desperate to quash Catholic worship once and for all. Elizabeth, like Gillard, always made sure to pick her fights. She once vetoed a bill about mandatory taking of communion, fearing that it would force a showdown by exposing practising Catholics to official scrutiny. Gillard watched the polls and waited weeks before forcing a showdown which she knew to be inevitable, and which she knew she’d win.

Despite Elizabeth’s reluctance to take drastic action against her rivals, she acted swiftly when necessary. In the case of her chief rival, Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth kept her at bay for years before finally moving on the insistence of her advisers. Mary was tried for treason and executed; Kevin Rudd can be grateful Gillard’s decisive action this week didn’t involve any separation of head from shoulders.

Beware radical change. Axelrod writes that Elizabeth introduced change incrementally so she kept enough of the old to give everyone a sense of confidence. ”Strong-willed and decisive, Elizabeth came as a proverbial breath of fresh air, but not a whirlwind.”

On taking office, she had to choose members of her Privy Council (cabinet) and while she chose to keep the best of the old queen’s team, there was evolution, not revolution at the top – a rule Gillard appears to be following.

Always consider the middle course. Elizabeth eventually achieved a wonderful compromise between Protestants and Catholics: outwardly the country seemed uniformly Protestant, but they stopped killing each other and Catholics could relax.

When Labor’s queenmakers acted this week it was to stop the rot of broken promises and a potentially lethal war over the mining super tax. Gillard’s first act as chief executive has been to seek some middle ground, and encourage everyone back to the negotiating table by pulling the government’s mining tax advertising.

Create your own image, or others will do it for you. Elizabeth never married and she milked the virgin image until her death at 70. She looked nothing like Cate Blanchett, but she used every trick in the 16th century book to enhance her natural pale skin and light red hair, as they were the ideals of virginal beauty. Her spin was so successful that centuries later she is still known as the Virgin Queen.

She was also famous for her tight economic control, yet she invested heavily in expensive clothes and jewellery. As Axelrod notes: ”No leader of a serious enterprise can afford to neglect the shaping of an effective and powerful image that promotes the cohesiveness of the organisation.” Women who’ve watched Gillard’s progress up the ranks in recent years will have noticed how she has become progressively more groomed. On Thursday she positively glowed – and who wouldn’t if they’d just become the first female leader of the nation – with hair and make-up polished to perfection.

A woman in a man’s world Tudor England believed women were intellectually and temperamentally unsuited to leadership. Not much has changed over the generations. Looking at Australia’s list of prime ministers, one would think we’d felt the same until this week. Elizabeth’s answer to this was ”prudence, boldness and genius”. ”She used her formidable intellect … to make herself absolute mistress of the facts,” Axelrod writes. Sound familiar?

Elizabeth was a great speaker and performer. Her speeches to Parliament or troops about to head off to war stand today as examples for any CEO or PM in how to get it right.

Gillard is one of Parliament’s most fleet of foot, with a well-honed sense of timing, theatrics and oratory. Fresh from the glow of savouring her victory, she gave no quarter to Julie Bishop in Thursday’s question time, responding to the ”same old Deputy Leader of the Opposition, serving her third leader”.

Married to the job. Elizabeth’s unmarried state was a constant subject of discussion, but she resisted pressure to take a husband, devoting energy and cunning into avoiding it (to remain the mistress of no man). She portrayed herself as a selfless woman married to the job – to the nation.

While she has never said as much, on Thursday Gillard spoke of giving ”the most loyal service I could offer … I love this country and I was not going to sit idly by”. It will be interesting to see how the country’s first unmarried prime minister and her partner, Tim Mathieson, handle what will no doubt become an increasing spotlight.

The head that wears the crown. In Elizabeth’s final speech to Parliament in 1601 she noted: ”To be a king and bear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it.” This is one of Elizabeth’s lessons that Rudd knows first-hand and Gillard is about to learn.

 

Tanya Plibersek says low income-earners shouldn’t subsidise the private health insurance of those on high pay. Photo: Andrew Meares

High income earners face increased health cover payments – including up to $1300 extra a year for families – with the government poised to pass legislation to means-test the 30 per cent private health insurance rebate.

The means test, the legislation for which was rejected twice by the previous parliament, is worth $2.4 billion to the budget bottom line over the next three financial years and is critical if the government is to achieve its target to bring the budget back to surplus in 2012-13.

The latest Treasury estimates say the rebate is worth $768 million in 2012-13 alone when the budget is forecast to deliver a threadbare $1.5 billion surplus.

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The Health Minister, Tanya Plibersek, introduced the legislation yesterday after negotiations with the crossbench MPs. The government needs the support of three of the six crossbenchers. The Greens MP, Adam Bandt, already supported the proposal and it is understood the independents Rob Oakeshott and Andrew Wilkie, who first signalled his support last July, are in agreement.

Mr Oakeshott was not commenting publicly yesterday and Mr Wilkie said he was ”inclined” to support it.

The government is counting on the legislation passing through the lower house next week and soon after through the Senate, where the Greens hold the balance of power. The means test would apply from July 1.

In his successful election campaign in 2007, the then Labor leader, Kevin Rudd, promised not to touch the rebate, which the Howard government introduced in 1999.

At the time the cost to the budget was more than $2 billion a year but Labor argues that has now blown out to almost $5 billion and has created a structural deficit that will cost $100 billion over 40 years.

The Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, said the legislation was another broken promise by Labor and would exacerbate cost-of-living pressures.

”Australian households are paying a heavy price for Labor’s waste and mismanagement and its failure to manage the budget,” he said.

High-income earners who drop their insurance will have their Medicare levy increased. The 30 per cent rebate will be phased down, starting with singles on incomes of $83,000 and families on $166,000. It will disappear altogether for singles earning $129,000 and couples earning more than $258,000.

A family on a joint income of more than $258,000 paying $270 a month will lose the rebate altogether and pay more than $100 extra a month.

Ms Plibersek told Parliament that those who cleaned the chamber at night should not be subsidising the pay of MPs.

”We’re talking about people in the community – some of them on say $50,000 a year – who can’t afford private health insurance themselves, subsidising the private health insurance of people including very high-income earners,” she said.

Opposition health spokesman Peter Dutton said he would ”do whatever it takes” to block the legislation but could not guarantee a future Coalition government would throw out a means test on the rebate.

”We’re looking at a number of measures at the moment which may further enhance the attractiveness of private health insurance,” he told ABC TV.

”There may be smarter ways that we can do that.”

Mr Dutton said the Coalition would concentrate on ensuring there was a proper balance between the private and public health sectors.

He warned that about 1.6 million Australians would junk their private hospital cover over the next five years and another 4.3 million would downgrade their coverage if the rebate legislation was passed.

But the government has disputed the figures, citing Treasury modelling that suggests only 0.3 per cent, or 27,000 people, will drop out of the private system.

Yesterday legislation was also introduced to enable pay rises of more than $40,000 for MPs and more for ministers and shadow ministers. It is supported by both sides.

In a statement to Parliament, the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, reaffirmed the government’s pledge to return the budget to surplus next financial year but with the caveat that if the European crisis worsened, ”this will hit our revenues and obviously make it harder to return to surplus”.

Last night the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, said the government would deliver a surplus.

This week the opposition walked away from its commitment to return the budget to surplus at the same time as – if not sooner than – Labor, and now says that if elected, it would do so ”as soon as possible”.

But senior Coalition frontbenchers continued to confuse the message, with the Senate leader, Eric Abetz, calling the return to surplus an ”extravagant promise”.

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The long-awaited Gonski review into school funding will be released on Monday week.

Of all the scars the Labor Party carries from Mark Latham’s turbulent 13-month reign as leader, perhaps the most visible ones can be seen in its approach to school funding. On September 14, 2004, Latham announced a plan to slash funding to 67 of Australia’s wealthiest private schools and redirect the money to less-well-off schools.

”Labor has a very, very different approach to the funding of schools than the Howard government,” Latham said then. ”We fund schools on the basis of need, we want equity in action in the Australian schools system.”

The move was intended, and read, as an act of class warfare; private schools saw the announcement as an attack on parental choice, while the Australian Education Union and then Victorian premier Steve Bracks said the policy would institutionalise fairness.

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But the policy proved politically disastrous and much of Labor’s efforts in education since have been aimed at convincing the non-government school sector that it means it no harm.

When Kim Beazley regained the Labor leadership after Latham’s implosion, he promptly discarded his predecessor’s Robin Hood approach, arguing it was based on the ”politics of envy”.

When Labor, with Kevin Rudd at the helm, went to the 2007 election, it promised to preserve the Howard government’s arrangements for a further four years while it conducted a review of the funding model.

But this review was not launched until April 2010 and, when Julia Gillard rushed to the polls months later, she sought to neutralise the issue by promising to extend the current arrangements until the end of 2013, guaranteeing there would be no change in this term.

That the Howard-era system they hate survives untouched more than four years after Labor came to power is a sore point for public education advocates.

But the end of their anxious wait, and that of independent and Catholic educators and others with an interest in the nation’s schools, is in sight. The review panel, led by businessman David Gonksi, took more than 7000 submissions and handed its final report to School Education Minister Peter Garrett before Christmas.

The panel’s work – the first comprehensive review of school funding since the 1970s – will be released on February 20.

But it is likely to be some time before the implications of its recommendations are clear. Garrett told The Age that the government would issue only an ”initial response” to the report on Monday week, and that it had further work to do on ”an issue that lies right at the heart of our prospects as a nation”.

The federal government didn’t provide any funding to the states for schools until 1964, when it gave both government and non-government secondary schools grants for science laboratories. Then, in 1970, the Commonwealth began providing recurrent funding for schools.

At first, the assistance was aimed at the struggling Catholic school sector, at the rate of $35 per primary school student and $50 for every secondary school student. A turning point came in 1973, when the Whitlam government extended Commonwealth recurrent funding to government schools.

Today, only about a third of Commonwealth schools funding goes to government schools, which receive most of their funding from state governments. The Commonwealth gives government schools 10 per cent of the Average Government School Recurrent Costs, a measure of how much government schools are spending on each of their students.

It’s a different story for non-government schools, which receive about a third of their income from the Commonwealth and little over 10 per cent from the state (the rest comes from parents).

Under the current model, introduced by the Howard government in 2001, non-government schools are allocated federal funding according to the socio-economic status of the areas in which students live as determined by census data.

Each school is given a score based on the income, education and occupational characteristics of its school community. This score determines what proportion of the Average Government School Recurrent Costs the school gets.

Schools serving the least disadvantaged communities receive 13.7 per cent of this amount. Those serving the most disadvantaged communities, as well as special schools and majority indigenous schools, receive 70 per cent of this amount.

At least that is the way the model was supposed to work. Confusingly, more than 1075 schools have had their entitlements preserved and fully indexed at the levels they received under the previous system, because the Howard government promised no school would be worse off under its system.

Due to this quirk, two schools serving comparable communities can receive vastly different funding allocations simply because one existed before 2001 while the other did not.

The federal Education Department projects the difference in annual cost between funding schools in this way and funding schools according to their SES score will exceed $700 million this year. Garrett has declared there is ”no sound policy basis” for this, and Gonski told education ministers last year the panel viewed it as a historic anomaly that had to be corrected. Even non-government school representatives have conceded that the provisions are unlikely to survive the review.

This complexity, and the consequent lack of transparency, is one of the most common criticisms of the model, and Garrett is determined to address it.

”The main thing that I’d be saying about the review is we know we’ve got a funding model that isn’t transparent and clear,” he says. Others say the model has not delivered on the Howard government’s predictions that it would extend choice to lower-income families by making non-government schooling more affordable.

Research by the Australian National University’s Chris Ryan found that while enrolments in low-fee private schools had grown strongly since the model was introduced, the private school share of enrolments grew fastest at the top half of the income distribution, leading to a situation in which most students in the public sector attend schools where the average socio-economic status of their fellow pupils is below average.

Rather than using their increased subsidies to lower fees, private schools have tended to put their resources into lifting quality by employing more teachers and lowering class sizes.

The New South Wales government highlighted the impact of such concentrations of disadvantage in its submission to the review, citing research which showed that the backgrounds of a student’s classmates had a significant influence on that student’s chances of success at school, regardless of their individual circumstances.

While Australia’s overall results in international tests place it among the top performing nations, equity is a weak point. There is a much stronger relationship between a student’s background and their results in Australia than there is in nations such as Finland.

The panel has made equity a focus of its work, writing in an emerging issues paper in December 2010 that ”differences in educational outcomes should not be the result of differences in wealth, income, power or possessions”.

The Coalition worries the review’s focus on supporting ”equity in educational outcomes” is too narrow.

”In schooling, one size does not fit all,” Coalition education spokesman Christopher Pyne argued in his submission to the review.

”If the idea of ‘equity in educational outcomes’ were to result in schools becoming equally poor then the panel would agree that this concept is counter to the aims of this review.”

Pyne has accused the government of waging ”ideological war” on private schools and has said Garrett’s promise that ”no school will lose a dollar in per-student terms” will amount to a cut in real terms.

“Coalition estimates show there could be a $4.2 billion shortfall over four years if indexation is not maintained at current levels, which schools will be forced to find through higher school fees or staff cuts,” he said.

Garrett says Pyne is ”making mischief” and says that since coming to office Labor has delivered billions in extra resources to private schools, including for new buildings and computers. ”I think both our actions and our delivery, our legislation and our financial commitment speak volumes,” he says.

However, Bill Daniels, executive director of The Independent Schools Council of Australia – which represents 1100 schools that educate 1.2 million of the 3.4 million schoolchildren in the country – gets little comfort from the government’s assurance. ”School costs are rising every year,” he says. ”If funding isn’t maintained in real terms, you’re cutting funding.” And in tight budget circumstances, he says ”it would be extremely difficult to have a no-losers strategy”.

The Catholic sector has argued against an undue focus on the socio-economic characteristics of school communities. In its submission to the review, the National Catholic Education Commission warned of the danger of making erroneous assumptions about the capacity of parents to pay fees.

”It effectively assumes a homogenous population with each parent having the same capacity to pay,” its submission says.

Unlike independent schools, the Catholic sector believes a school’s resources, including income from fees, should be taken into account in determining its funding allocation, although it says this should not be done in a way that deters private investment.

The Catholic sector says it sets fee levels low to keep its schools affordable, but receives similar grants to other schools with greater resources.

The Australian Education Union says nothing less than an overhaul of current funding arrangements, and greater investment in public schools, is needed.

The union’s federal president, Angelo Gavrielatos, says the current funding arrangements have caused standards to fall and led to an increasing divide between the performance of children in rich and poor schools.

Gavrielatos hopes the review will recommend a new model that will better target resources to where they are needed most. At present, governments cannot boost funding to government schools without also boosting funding to all private schools, because private school funding allocations are calculated as a percentage of spending on government schools.

Gavrielatos expects the panel to recommend the creation of a ”resource standard”, which would specify how much funding a school would need to achieve certain outcomes. Additional funding would be provided for special circumstances, such as for remote schools, or those teaching indigenous students or those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The feasibility of such a model was the subject of a report the review panel commissioned from the Allen Consulting Group.

As insiders speculate on what the panel has recommended and what the government will do, public education advocates take heart from Prime Minister Gillard’s maiden speech to the House of Representatives, delivered in 1998.

”The students from my electorate are not any less intelligent than those from [the wealthier electorates] Higgins or Kooyong but their educational opportunities are not the same,” she said.

”Certainly, this massive discrepancy would be lessened if we as a nation were prepared to seriously tackle the inequality of opportunity that exists in our education system and create a high-class state school system.

”My predecessor, Barry Jones, used to say that unfortunately postcodes are probably the strongest factor in determining a person’s expectations of success in life. It will be one of my priorities in politics to ensure that in the Australia of the future the famous quizmaster is, for once, wrong.”

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Prime Minister Julia Gillard has left Government House after calling on Governor-General Quentin Bryce to formally advise her Labor has the numbers to form a minority government.

Independents Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor backed Labor to assist them in forming a minority government on Tuesday.

Their backing gave Labor 76 seats to the coalition’s 74 seats after Queensland independent Bob Katter sided with the coalition.

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Ms Gillard travelled to Yarralumla to formally advise Ms Bryce she had the numbers to form a minority government on Tuesday evening.

The prime minister emerged a short time later with a smile on her face but did not speak to the media.

Ms Bryce’s relationship to Labor MP Bill Shorten was called into question after the election resulted in a hung parliament.

Mr Shorten is married to Ms Bryce’s daughter Chloe.

The governor-general sought legal advice on whether it was a conflict of interest in the event the numbers were even and found she could be confident of her position.

AAP

Prime Minster Julia Gillard was showered with gifts, including jewellery, cosmetics and CDs after seizing power from Kevin Rudd, new documents show.

An update to the register of MPs’ interests tabled in federal parliament, shows that in the three weeks after she took over as Labor leader, Ms Gillard received dozens of gifts from well-wishers.

Jewellery gifts included a pair of Kailis pearl drop earrings valued at $1990, and two necklaces and two sets of earrings with a total value of $605.

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There also was an unpriced silver and mother of pearl pen.

She also received lipstick, make-up, wine, a Twinings tea chest and two doilies.

Among the 18 books she received were How Remarkable Women Lead, The First President, and So You Want To Be Prime Minister.

The mysteriously named Mat the Brickie provided a Helen Reddy CD – presumably featuring I Am Woman – and Grant Blackley, the chief executive of Ten Network gave the Prime Minister a DVD of the television series Hawke.

Toys were also listed, including a Humphrey B Bear teddy and an Indigenous game.

In a note attached to the list, the prime minster acknowledged she did not have to officially declare many of the gifts.

“Although most of the gifts are clearly under the declarable amount, and there are many of which the value is unknown to me, it is out of an abundance of caution that I do declare them,” Ms Gillard wrote.

“I have surrendered all items to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.”

The updated list also noted that the “first bloke”, Tim Mathieson had received free travel and hospitality to perform his role as a men’s health ambassador.

Canoodling with her cavoodle … Julia Gillard with Reuben. Photo: Andrew Meares

She may be Australia’s political top dog but Julia Gillard still has a little trouble keeping hold of the newest man in her life.

The first puppy, five-month old cavoodle Reuben, escaped from behind the stately walls at the Lodge during a function held in honour of nominees for the Australian of the Year awards.

A Nine Network cameraman displayed impressive reflexes, grabbing the bundle of strawberry blonde fluff before handing Reuben to a waiting AFP officer, more used to protecting the Prime Minister than the Prime Pooch.

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Crisis averted and sporting a natty Australian flag kerchief, Reuben was soon cradled in the arms of the Prime Minister, turning hardened members of the media momentarily to mush.

The puppy was a 50th birthday present from Ms Gillard’s partner, Tim Mathieson, and he arrived with little fanfare in November despite a rather disproportionate degree of interest from the fourth estate who were disappointed to learn Reuben would be a no show at Ms Gillard’s official Christmas drinks.

Ms Gillard has described her bundle of strawberry blonde fluff as the”the best, best present” and said Reuben was highly interested in chewing several pairs of Prime Ministerial shoes.

Coincidentally, Ms Gillard’s new dog – a cross between a cavalier King Charles spaniel and a poodle – is the second canine Reuben to live at the Lodge.

Former prime minister Paul Keating’s German short-haired pointer bore the same name.

Reuben Mark I made headlines in the early 1990s when Mr Keating made the puppy purchase in Adelaide then wrapped the new family member in a tracksuit and nursed it home to Canberra aboard his VIP jet.

Reuben has proven a big hit with members of Ms Gillard’s close protection team while it is understood Mr Matheison has taken over training and dog minding duties.