Abstract   Australian multiculturalism has been a successful bipartisan approach to post-War socio-economic change, but now there are signs of fragmentation. Taking schooling as a contested site of public policy, the paper disputes the neo-liberal ‘Third Way’ as a justification of the provision of choice. Rather than allowing private schooling to hold sway, the paper promotes the place of public schooling, and a commitment to a ‘thick’ democracy that this entails. Both the market-driven managerialism of much Western education policy, and the political liberalism of Rawls, it is argued, are slow to appreciate the necessity of this. Yet neo-liberalism, in promoting individual choice-making, seems to require just such a democratic commitment.