www.mccully.co.nz - 23 February 2007
new-zealand-national-party
Fri Feb 23 2007 13:00:00 GMT+1300 (New Zealand Daylight Time)
www.mccully.co.nz - 23 February 2007
Friday, 23 February 2007, 2:34 pm
Column: New Zealand National Party
www.mccully.co.nz- 23 February 2007
A Weekly Report from the Keyboard of Murray McCully MP for East Coast Bays
20 Hours Free
By 1 July the Government and Education Minister Steve Maharey need to find a way of delivering on a campaign promise to provide 20 hours per week of free pre-school education to three and four-year-olds throughout the land. The commitment was not part of a planned election year manifesto programme, with careful costings and solid logistical analysis. It was made out of sheer blind political panic in the weeks prior to the last election. And now the political chickens are coming home to roost.
The National Party’s commitment to deliver meaningful tax cuts during the 2005 election campaign still looms large in political debate. Less well remembered is a second major commitment that had a significant revenue cost: a promise to make the costs of child care tax deductible. The reasoning is simple: the costs of childcare are an actual cost of being employed for many New Zealanders, so why not treat them as legitimate deductions from taxable income? Suffice to say, the policy was very well received.
In the Budget of 2004, then Education Minister Trevor Mallard, had announced a policy of "20 hours free" for three and four-year-olds. But the policy applied only to Labour’s much-loved "community owned" centres. The National Party campaign promise, providing assistance regardless of the type of centre being attended, left Labour seriously exposed.
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With the polls showing a neck and neck race, the Labour Party decided they needed to outbid the National policy. But despite having had six years in office, with access to the burgeoning hordes of policy advisors and analysts, no meaningful policy work had been undertaken in the area. With only weeks to go until Election Day, virtually any old promise would do. The details could be sorted later. The easy answer was simply to promise to extend the "20 hour free" policy to children regardless of the type of centre they attended. And so the promise of 20 hours of free pre-school education for all 3 and 4-year-olds was born.
Borrowed from Comrade Stalin
Faced with actually introducing 20 free hours, the Government is between a rock and a hard place. You see, Mr Maharey and his mates have a very prescriptive view of the delivery of pre-school education, or any other sort of education for that matter. One they borrowed from Comrade Stalin. But the Maharey/Stalin view of pre-school education is one that is totally removed from the reality of the sector in 2007 New Zealand.
The Clark Government believes that pre-school education should be delivered by community-owned kindergartens, run on a not-for-profit basis. They are implacably opposed to privately-owned, commercially run, early childhood education centres, and the very thought of offering them any taxpayer support is enough to cause severe outbreaks of ministerial nausea.
The commitment made in the heat of the election campaign was a classic exercise in Labour double-speak. What voters heard was a promise that every 3 and 4-year-old child would be entitled to 20 hours of early childhood education per week. What the Labour Party actually meant was that they would be entitled to those 20 free hours provided they were claimed in a centre able to sign up to the $4.00 an hour deal. One that for the majority of New Zealanders doesn’t exist.
The Charade
The reality for vast numbers of New Zealand parents is that the only childcare they can get is through one of the many privately owned, commercially run centres that have been established in recent years. And anyone who has taken the trouble to visit a few of these institutions can hardly fail to be impressed with the professionalism and quality on offer.
Minister Maharey is now undertaking an elaborate charade with these centres. Having promised the parents 20 free hours, Maharey has been offering the centres the opportunity to avail themselves of the generous Government deal. The catch is that he is offering to pay around $4.00 per child per hour. Yet many centres, in order to provide the level of service expected by anxious parents, run on cost structures of around $15.00 per hour. So Mr Maharey is generously offering centres the opportunity to sign up for a scheme that will see them run roughly an $11 loss per child per hour.
Oh, well, we hear you say: just give the centres the $4.00 subsidy and let them charge parents for the balance. But Maharey can’t of course, because that wouldn’t be 20 hours FREE. So centres can only enter the Maharey scheme and take the $4.00 provided they don’t charge top-up fees, although they are allowed to ask for a donation. Which anyone with a few active brain-cells (which seems to exclude most of the Cabinet on this matter) would know is a sure-fire way of going broke.
So now poor old Minister Maharey is staring down the barrel at a July 1 implementation date drawing nearer and nearer, sign-up levels to his scheme that are little more than a joke (3.7% at last count on the North Shore of Auckland) and the growing realisation by many thousands of parents that they have been suckered.
The Philosophical Issue
Behind all of this sits an important philosophical issue – one that runs wider than just the early childhood sector. The Labour Party, more or less completely captured by the teacher unions, adheres to a prescriptive Stalinist view of education delivery. They find the notion of parental choice deeply abhorrent.
They now intend to spend some hundreds of millions of dollars annually attempting to impose their model of early childhood education on the New Zealand public. But they are at least 20 years too late. Parents and providers have moved well ahead of them.
At the heart of the Maharey position lies a view that parents are lazy ignorant bozos inclined to park their kids with any fly-by-night child-minding service, merely to get them off their hands for a while. The reality is that New Zealand is full of highly discerning, extremely fussy, and very anxious parents, prepared to part with significant amounts of their hard-earned cash to send their children to an early childhood centre only after they have subjected said centre to the most vigorous tyre-kicking. But there is zero chance that members of the current government will ever understand that.
The Empire-Builders at TVNZ
Not content with shrinking the once highly profitable and market dominant TV One and TV2 to also-ran status, the good people at TVNZ have been turning their minds to related fields of endeavour, in which they might apply their outstanding commercial acumen. The RadioWorks group of radio stations (The Edge, The Rock etc) owned by listed operator CanWest, to be precise.
Word has reached the worldwide headquarters of mccully.co that interest at TVNZ in pursuing the CanWest stations was far more intense than previously reported. The matter was discussed in some detail, and evidently given the green light by the TVNZ Board. An advisory firm (Bancorp, we are told) was hired to assist in preparing the case for the acquisition. And an approach was made to Ministers for their approval.
Somehow, just before a formal registration of interest was required, TVNZ decided not to proceed. Quite who was responsible for the change of heart we are, at this stage, unsure. But it sure will be fun finding out.
If TVNZ directors and managers, presiding over the company’s decline, see the purchase of a radio network, as opposed to lifting the standards of their existing TV channels, as the way forward, we should all find this deeply instructive. Now, at least we know what Trevor Mallard had in mind when he instructed SOEs and Crown companies to look for ways of expanding their businesses.
ENDS
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