Posted by Blogger Name. Category:
Beehive
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David Cunliffe
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Education policy
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Labour Party
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Steven Joyce
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Treasury
David Cunliffe's desire for a positive run-up to the General Election hasn't begun very well. Associate Finance Minister Steven Joyce has been checking the numbers on Labour's education policies from the weekend, and he's positive; positive that Labour has got its sums wrong. He's put out this presser on the Beehive website:
Steven Joyce
7 July, 2014
Many questions unanswered about cost of Labour’s promises
Two and a half months out from this year’s election and already Labour cannot answer basic questions about the details and fiscal costs of its expensive early promises, Associate Finance Minister Steven Joyce says.
“David Cunliffe, David Parker and Chris Hipkins had a ‘hey Clint’ moment on TV last night, when all three of them failed to answer a simple question about the total cost of their grab-bag of education announcements,” Mr Joyce says.
“Labour has rejected having a Treasury analyst in its office, and it really is showing.”
Talking to media yesterday after announcing it would spend $403 million over four years to employ more teachers, neither David Cunliffe, nor David Parker nor Chris Hipkins could do the simple maths on how much their other promises would cost.
“That’s because their numbers don’t add up and their claims are misleading,” Mr Joyce says.
“For a start, the Government currently funds secondary schools for an average 20 students per classroom, well below Labour’s ‘new’ target of 23 students per classroom.
“When it comes to their costings, Labour’s figures include only the cost of the extra teachers’ salaries. They need to come clean on what the total costs would be including ACC, training, support superannuation, and all the other overheads involved in supporting more teachers.”
Oh dear; Labour releases a flagship policy at its flagship election year congress, but fails on numeracy. Is it any wonder they want to do away with National Standards?
Steven Joyce continues:
Mr Joyce says this is not the first time in recent days that Labour has undercooked its costings and exaggerated its promises to New Zealanders.
“Last week their press release clearly said they were going to end voluntary school donations – yet they put up only half the money needed to cover existing donations and none of the school activity fees parents pay.
“And on Saturday they claimed they would provide every student between years five and 13 with a digital device worth $600 by providing a $100 subsidy and having parents pay $3.50 a week for 18 months. This will be news to Labour, but this adds up to only $373 per device.
“And just to top it all off, David Cunliffe yesterday confirmed he would look at buying back shares in mixed ownership model companies – even though he’s committed to spend all the money raised by the share offer programme and then some.
“After nearly six years in opposition, Labour has learned nothing about responsible economic and fiscal management. They really do need to start showing New Zealanders the money,” Mr Joyce says. “Labour 2014 is already starting to look a lot like the 2011 version, only trickier.”
It's pretty obvious now why Labour let its secondee from Treasury go. There's no way that dodgy numbers like these would have seen the light of day had they been subjected to proper, independent scrutiny.
There are 2539 schools in New Zealand as at July 2013, according to the Education Counts website. So 2000 new teachers equates to an average of just 0.78 teachers per school across the country. Mr Cunliffe has already conceded they won't all be "new" teachers. He told Newstalk ZB this morning that immigrants and retired teachers would be used to fill the gaps until the flood of new graduates hit the market by 2018.
Labour's numbers in 2011 were exposed as highly dodgy, and they were punished at the polls. It doesn't look as though the party has learned anything in its second three year term in the wilderness of opposition.
Rather than apologising for being a man, David Cunliffe should be apologising to the New Zealand public for once again trying to dupe them with dodgy numbers. He may want to fight an election campaign on policy, and free from personal attacks, but he has a responsibility to front up with credible numbers, not Helen Clark's infamous back of a table napkin calculations.
