Editorial: Childcare u-turn intriguing

An interesting move in this election campaign went too little noted on Monday, the same day that the National Party announced the detail of its tax-reduction policy. The Government chose that day to disclose that its financing of free early-childhood education would no longer be restricted to non-profit "community" centres. Henceforth the 20 hours a week of fully subsidised childcare would also be available through the private sector.

The timing of the announcement is as intriguing as its substance. The Government cannot have hoped that it would distract attention from National's keenly awaited tax package even though the childcare decision carried a $53 million increase in its allocation. The timing is more likely to have been designed to minimise the headlines the u-turn would have earned.

It was a reversal that had to be made. The refusal to use private childcare centres had created a potential electoral embarrassment. Last month the Herald revealed that just 37 per cent of childcare centres in the Auckland region, for example, were community owned and many parts of the country are served only by private enterprise.

Even so the backdown came very late. No mention was made of it as recently as last Friday, when Education Minister Trevor Mallard went to Greenlane National Women's Hospital Creche to announce a $6.6 million building programme for early education centres. He conceded then that there were not enough community-owned centres with qualified teachers to meet the demand but left no impression that the Cabinet might reconsider its attitude to the private sector. And there has been no public pressure on it to do so.

Ever since the 20 hours a week of free childcare was introduced privately owned centres have been protesting the policy's unfairness to them and the parents who use their services. But their complaint has never received the public support it deserved. Too many people were perhaps willing to believe Mr Mallard's insinuation that private centres provided an inferior standard of early education. In fact the state grant was tied to staff qualifications that could reasonably be required of all centres and most in the private sector were willing to meet them.

Or perhaps the lack of sympathy for private childcare centres was a sign that people uncritically accepted this Government's bias against paying public money for services provided at a profit. It is easy to paint private profit as a needless cost to the taxpayer and an unconscionable gift to those who own the business providing the service. But that picture rests on a narrow view of personal gains. Organisations which are supposedly "not for profit" have ways of providing benefits to managers and staff that are no less costly to the taxpayer, and quite possibly are more costly for being less visible and measurable than a company profit. The costs can be effectively contained by competition but providers will not compete unless they are permitted to make a profit.

This Government's distaste for private provision has been particularly pronounced in education. It was quick to end a state scholarship to private schools and took a dim view of private tertiary education that had been a good and rapidly growing service to industry training until Labour came to power. Its preference for funding publicly owned tertiary institutions has turned industry training into prolonged courses of more academic than practical content.

If the u-turn on early education is the sign of an ideological relaxation, education at all levels could be the better for it.