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There are strategic blunders in the lives of every government that become troublingly fateful.
In February 2011 Julia Gillard sought to make virtue of not involving herself in a "semantic and ultimately sterile debate" by saying upfront that her government's carbon pricing plan would work "effectively like a tax".
It became a lethal admission for the Labor prime minister.
Her Liberal opponent, Tony Abbott, who'd been kept from power by Ms Gillard's superior negotiation skills in the wake of the inconclusive 2010 election, was shaken from his funk.
Ms Gillard's determination not to get bogged down in arid semantics was used against her, becoming her carbon tax "lie", in that she had promised "there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead" in that infamous pre-election interview on SBS TV.
It was the beginning of her end.
The strategic blunder in the life of the Abbott government also came relatively early. It was in the form of a glossy pamphlet overview of the 2014 budget.
At the bottom of page seven of the pamphlet were two graphs. They purported to show the "more sustainable spending arrangements for schools and public hospitals".
The trajectory in black displayed what the spending would be under the Coalition government. Dotted green lines showed where the spending would've been under Labor.
The difference between the two trajectories was a saving of $80 billion; $50 billion in hospitals and $30 billion in schools.
Why is this significant? Because there was no other place in the 2014 budget papers that acknowledged, let alone quantified the supposed "cuts" to schools and hospitals.
Government's error now has it locked in an argument
Up until that point, the Coalition's political parry against Labor's so-called "full Gonski" funding of schools and Labor's promises on hospitals was that it was money promised so far off in the horizon that it may as well be imaginary.
But just as Ms Gillard's attempt to make virtue of her frankness about Labor's carbon plan only served to undermine her, the Abbott government's identification of a $80 billion "saving" in schools and hospitals only served to undercut its main charge against the ALP.
Which is why it is surprising that the Turnbull Government, in a pre-budget briefing paper on schools funding distributed to Press Gallery journalists earlier this month, should have conceded that "compared to Labor's arrangements, this represents a saving of … $22.3 billion over 10 years (2018 to 2027)."
The Coalition had not learnt its lesson and now Labor, desperate not to have its devastatingly effective schools campaign neutered by Malcolm Turnbull's audacious Gonski 2.0 acceptance of needs-based funding, cites the Government's briefing paper in damnation.
Think how its boasting about a $22.3 billion "saving" contrasts with how the Prime Minister answered a question from Labor's Sharon Bird on Thursday about a multi-billion-dollar "cut" to schools funding:
"She knows as well as we all do that the Labor Party's commitment to school funding was based on fantasy dollars," Mr Turnbull told Parliament.
"They did not even fund years five and six of what they claim to be the Gonski funding, so hopeless and hapless were they. They were running around desperately signing cheques they could not honour — one bouncing cheque after another. That was the Labor Party's approach."
The Government's error in giving credence to Labor's funding claims has locked it into an argument over tens of billions of dollars of illusory funding.
Some schools will be more equal than others
This is a pity because the Government's model is superior to Labor's patchwork of 27 agreements.
The $22.3 billion that Labor asserts has been ripped from schools is mythical.
If Education Minister Simon Birmingham's legislation doesn't pass Parliament, that $22.3 billion would not be guaranteed, even if Labor was in power.
That's because it has never been in existing legislation or the various deals with states and territories.
The six-year deals with the states (five years in Victoria's case) leaves schools funding for years seven, eight, nine and 10 unresolved.
And while under the Government's model all non-government schools would be brought into line with the School Resourcing Standard (SRS) within 10 years; under Labor's model this would take more than a century.
That is, under Labor's model it would take 150 years for the poorest resourced schools to catch up with the richest schools on SRS levels.
This is largely because of Ms Gillard's promise that no school would lose funding, no matter how over-funded they were (they were guaranteed 3 per cent annual indexation under Labor's model, compared to 3.6 per cent for adequately funded schools and 4.7 per cent for underfunded schools).
Compare that to the Government's model which not only proposes cutting or freezing the funding for some non-government schools but gives public schools an effective 5.2 per cent extra annually for the first four years and 5.1 per cent over the decade.
Labor will continue to claim it would have put $22 billion extra towards schools over the next 10 years but its hybridised version of David Gonski's original recommendations ensures some schools would be more equal than others for many decades to come.
The Greens, who only a fortnight ago appeared supportive of the Turnbull Government's Gonski 2.0 proposals, are now going wobbly.
If this is an indication as to who is winning the public argument over schools funding — Labor or the Liberals — the reforms are in trouble, even without the added complication of the Catholic sector's complaints.
Winning this argument has not been helped by the Government's short-sighted decision to claim that mythological $22.3 billion "saving".
Topics: schools, federal-government, government-and-politics, budget, education, gillard-julia, turnbull-malcolm, liberals, alp, australia
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