Until a deal was struck with the small party and independent senators, Malcolm Turnbull’s decision to oppose the federal government’s economic stimulus package was putting at risk a once in a lifetime opportunity to improve education in Australia.

Why? Because this is a moment when we can begin to re-imagine and then build the schools that we want for our children and grandchildren in this century. These new public facilities will stand the test of time and will be seen in fifty or even a hundred years as evidence of our dedication to the education of all our children.

The federal government announcement to inject nearly $15 billion into the rebuilding of Australian schools is much more than a major renovation job. Yes, investment will save thousands of jobs. It will help many builders and suppliers right across the country keep their heads above the rising waters of insolvency. Every community has a school and this money (and therefore the jobs that will be created by it) will be spread widely across the country. These are no mean achievements when we need to do all we can to ward off the effects of recession in all of our communities.

But the true significance of this initiative for our country is that it begins to rectify in a serious manner the massive under-investment by governments in Australian public schools. In the broader sweep of our country’s social development, this massive investment may well be remembered as the first big step towards a renaissance in Australian schooling. I have built a career out of deciphering millions and billions of dollars and what they really mean when it comes to education. It is all too easy for ministers and governments to talk of billions and sound impressive when it comes to elections or budgets or quadrennial agreements. But in reality, and all too often, they offer very little that is either new or above what is already spent.

So let me assure you, this investment is the mother of all school investment programs. Yes, it really is new money and it is very big. What is important to know is this - it needs to be. The under-investment in our public schools has been accumulating for at least a couple of decades. A great many schools have been allowed to run down. Emblematic for many parents and teachers have been the dreaded demountables.

Research I conducted last year confirmed that public schools had a legitimate gripe when they compared themselves with their private counterparts. Data analysis spanning five years showed the average public school to be receiving a little over a third of what the average private school was allocating for capital expenditures. Not good for kids and not exactly a level playing field.

This year I compared Australian public schools with their public school counterparts in Britain and the United States. The key finding (presented in a forthcoming Centre for Policy Development publication) is that over the same five year period (2002-06) public schools in both of those countries received the equivalent of nearly $1000 extra per student to invest in capital improvements. In fact, the per student amount these countries were spending was very close to the average capital expenditure per private school student in Australia.

If Australian public schools had received the same level of funding per student as American and British public schools, they would have received more than $10 billion extra in additional funds over that same five year period. It just so happens that public schools stand to gain approximately $11 billion of the new money being promised by the Federal government.

This is one very big hit of additional funding to rectify five years of relative neglect. This is not substantially different from the 2004 Blair government promise to spend $110 billion over 15 years in rebuilding every secondary school in Britain. Similarly, Barack Obama has pledged the equivalent of $33 billion in additional federal money for urgent capital improvements to American schools.

The federal opposition leader seems to think that Australian schools are too high on the priority list of the government. In his speech to parliament he even suggested that perhaps $1 billion a year for schools would be enough. My research over the past year makes very clear that this kind of money would not be anywhere near enough for our public schools, let alone the private sector.

We need first rate schools, for children to be capable in meeting the formidable challenges of the new century and to operate from a position of advantage in the global marketplace. Our schools really couldn’t keep on doing more with less.