Spare a thought for the children of Wentworth. Some of them, let’s not forget, grow up in harbourless homes. One marvels how their parents manage, what with the price of wagyu burgers and roasted beets, and the daily misery of the preschool drop-off cooped up in the Audi Q5.
Now, Labor tells us, the heartless Morrison government is about to punish them further by ripping the silver spoons from their mouths.
“Scott Morrison has turned his back on the children of Wentworth with his massive cuts to education,” opposition early childhood education and development spokeswoman Amanda Rishworth claims. Morrison is robbing Wentworth of 9000 childcare places, she says, depriving them of a decent start in life.
Having mocked harbourside mansion dwellers for the past three years, Labor has reinvented itself as the unlikely friend of the battlers of Sydney’s Bellevue Hill.
This somewhat unexpected twist in the class war indicates that Bill Shorten is struggling for line and length since the Liberal partyroom elected a leader inexperienced in merchant banking.
In its campaign for Malcolm Turnbull’s former seat, Labor’s politics of envy has moved from ridiculous to absurd.
Consider this. Rishworth, the member for Kingston (median weekly family income $1412) is defending hand-outs to families in Wentworth (median weekly income $3231.)
More than two-thirds of secondary school kids in Wentworth attend private, non-Catholic schools. In Kingston, fewer than a fifth do so. The unemployment rate in Wentworth was 3.7 per cent in the 2016 census; in Kingston it was 7.9 per cent.
Labor, however, is less interested in easing the plight of the poor than in appeasing the sense of entitlement that permeates every socio-democratic layer of the nation. The ALP’s announcement that it will remove the means test on subsidised childcare — sorry, early childhood learning — has greater appeal in Sydney’s prosperous east than in Adelaide’s rusty south.
Wentworth women are likelier to have a job (69.4 per cent) than Kingston men (67.6 per cent). Six out of 10 working women in Wentworth are in full-time employment; in Kingston it’s fewer than four in 10.
For the Liberals, affluence is the sign of healthy economy. For Labor it’s a vote-buying opportunity. Federal subsidies for childcare grew sharply under the Rudd and Gillard governments as they tried to respond to cost-of-living pressures. Spending has continued to grow under the Coalition, since handouts once legislated are all but impossible to repeal by a government that covets a second term.
In public policy terms it’s a disaster. In common with almost everything Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard touched during that period, the intentions were heroic but the execution botched. Expansion was driven by demand, making budgeting impossible.
Expenditure on ChildCare Benefit and Child Care Rebate consistently exceeded budgetary estimates, in some years by more than 30 per cent.
On the advice of the Productivity Commission, the Coalition has reined in the worst excesses.
The government bungle, however, is a long-tailed beast. Early childhood learning and care, similar to the National Disability Insurance Scheme, Gonski, the National Broadband Network and the rest, will drain the pockets of taxpayers for years to come.
Cuts did you say, Ms Rishworth? If only it were true. Childcare subsidies have risen faster than defence spending during the past decade to more than $8 billion a year.
There has never been a better time to be a working parent. When Labor left office there were 1.1 million kids in childcare; now there are 1.3 million. In Labor’s last year, 90 per cent of places were subsidised; today it is 93 per cent. Subsidies account for more than half of the cost.
And let’s not even talk about fairness. The system Labor established transfers funds from the poor to the rich. It’s an impost on the taxpayers of Kingston to help the professional classes in Wentworth. For a family earning the median wage in Kingston, the out-of-pocket cost of a long daycare place will eat up 6.9 per cent of disposable income. The equivalent family on the Wentworth median wage will pay just 5 per cent.
Most international studies show that children who choose their parents well benefit little from formal early childhood learning. The children who benefit are those who spend their childhoods in less advantaged homes. They are not helped by a blanket government subsidy. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, for example, are far less likely to be in childcare.
Meanwhile the early childhood care caper, like any other subsidised industry, has ceased to obey the laws of supply and demand. Childcare centres are breeding at a rate of a little more than 3 per cent a year. The fertility rate for women, on the other hand, hovers around 1.8 per cent.
In its most recent annual report, the G8 group, which runs 500 childcare centres, complains of “challenging market conditions” because of a glut of childcare places.
More than 90 per cent of childcare centres have vacancies.
Some companies have resorted to giving away iPads and other goodies to bribe parents to sign up, a practice naturally condemned by Rishworth, who promises to end such “inappropriate use of public funds”.
Not by reducing the publicly funded subsidies that caused the glut in the first place, or by reducing the incentives to private operators to chase more customers. Instead Labor will pass a regulation to limit freebies to parents to a cup of tea or coffee on orientation day.
Labor promises more spending, its default public policy solution, creating more unneeded places. It will continue robbing road sweepers in Reynella to provide daycare for the darlings of double-income doctors in Darling Point.
What could be fairer than that?
Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.
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