John Key has made claims about the costs of Labour’s early childhood education policy in Key: No big Budget spend-up (NZ Herald):
Mr Key cited Labour’s promise to increase early childhood education from 20 free hours a week for three and four years old to 25 hours a week.
The policy doesn’t take effect until July 2017 but Labour has costed it at $57 million in the first year and about $60 million after that.
Mr Key said the cost was more likely to be $600 million, $700 million or $800 million.
Rob Salmond at Polity has disputed this in Key in self-parody about lying (mk 2):
So Key thinks this policy will cost at least ten times as much as Labour does. That’s a very big claim.
He does some calculations:
- The policy is for 5 extra hours free, each week of the year. That’s up to 260 extra free hours per child.
- The Free ECE funding rates range from $4.91/hr to $11.56/hr, including GST, depending on what kind of centre you are using. Let’s assume everyone is in the top category and gets $11.56 an hour. After removing the GST that the government gets back in the end, the per hour cost could be up to $10.
- So, at absolute maximum, the policy could cost 260 hours X $10/hr = $2,600 per child. (In reality, of course, it won’t come close to this average.)
Here’s the problem: there are only around 120,000 three and four year olds in New Zealand!
That looks about right from this 2013 census chart:
120,000 x $2,600 = $312,000,000
That, at a maximum, is about half of Key’s lowest claim. It’s likely to be much lower.
Key looks to have grossly exaggerated the potential costs.
tracey
/ 2nd April 2014by grossly exagerated, you mean made up his figures, or lied. part of tge problem is people keep use false synonyms for behaviour.
Pete George
/ 2nd April 2014But we don’t know why he gave those figures. It could have been a wild guess, a deliberate exaggeration/lie, a genuine mistake, he might have been misinformed or something else.
So we shouldn’t make guesses about his behaviour.