It’s not the health budget that we should be worried about but the education budget.

Both the Prime Minister and the NSW Premier have been warning that health with consume the entire state budget by the 2040s if it continues to grow at its current rate.

So I went back to look at those growth trends and found, like all statistics, it depends on what you choose as your reference point.

Take a look at the New South Wales budgets stretching back 50 years.

Sure the government is spending a lot on health but economic prosperity has allowed it to happen. Total revenue has grown at almost the same rate.

And on these figures it is not the all-consuming monster many would have us believe. As a percentage of total revenue it’s stayed almost the same.

In 1990/91, health accounted for 27.3 per cent of the NSW state budget. In 2000/01 it was exactly the same (27.3 per cent). In the most recent budget, 2009/10, it was 26.9 per cent of the total revenue.

More of an issue is the decline in education spending as a percentage of the entire budget.

It shows that it was back in the 1970s when governments began diverting money away from education.

In 1970/71, it accounted for 35.6 per cent of the budget. A decade later it was 32.1 per cent. In 90/91 it was 29.2 per cent. During the 1990s it dropped below health. For the first time education became the government’s second priority.

The decline continued into the new millennium. In 2000/01 the education budget hovered just above a quarter of total revenue (25.5 per cent). This year (09/10) it accounts for just 22.5 per cent of the budget.

So health spending, in pure dollar terms, has risen sharply in the past decade but it was a period of great prosperity. By contrast, education has declined in a boom. That must be a concern for teachers, parents and politicians.

The Education Director-General, Michael Coutts-Trotter, agrees that funding has dropped.

“Education has fallen as a share, it’s true, in New South Wales,” he said.

“It’s true across the nation.

“But the Budget this year has risen 10 per cent on last year, with a $3,000 million capital works program.”

Mr Coutts-Trotter wouldn’t put a figure on what he thinks should be a floor on education’s share of the budget.

The Greens education spokesman John Kaye says it’s a worrying trend.

“The graph shows what teachers are telling us every day, that the needs of education have become more complex but the funding has not kept pace,” Dr Kaye said.

“We estimate that at least $1.5 billion is needed to address funding shortfalls in special needs education. Unremarkably, that correlates to the decline in budget share for public education.”