John MacDonald: Why do families earning $200K-plus need govt. support? - Canterbury Mornings with John MacDonald

Isn’t it funny how the Government likes to talk about government support needing to be based on need, but seems to forget about all that when it comes to those nice middle-class people.  

Of which I am one. I’m not claiming to be nice, but I am what you would call middle-class.  

Which makes me fully qualified to ask why a family bringing in $229,000 a year should get taxpayer support to pay for their kids’ early childhood education.  

It also makes me highly qualified to answer that question, and to say that a family earning that amount of money doesn’t need or deserve that level of taxpayer support.  

The Government has expanded its FamilyBoost scheme, which is all about letting parents claim back some of the money they pay early childhood centres. The Government’s done it because not as many people were taking advantage of the scheme as it had expected and which Finance Minister Nicola Willis had budgeted for.  

Before yesterday’s announcement, families earning up to $180,000 a year were eligible to claim back 25% of their early childhood fees.   

Now families earning as much as $229,000 will be able to claim back 40% of their early childhood fees and I find it impossible to see how that can be justified.  

Granted, I’m looking at this through the eyes of someone who had kids going through the early childhood system 15-to-20 years ago. I’m also looking at it through the eyes of someone in Canterbury as opposed to somewhere like Auckland.  

Nevertheless, I still don’t see why or how the Government thinks a couple earning that amount of money —way more than 200k a year— needs financial support.  

I saw some parents on the news last night at the centre in Wellington where Nicola Willis turned up to make the announcement yesterday, and they were all for it. But, of course they would be.  

I can say that because I know how, when you’ve got pre-school kids, you’re still getting over the hit it has on the finances.  

You might be down to one parent working – that’s if there are two of you. You’ve possibly got a decent-sized mortgage. Or you’re paying rent. So, of course, you’re going to think you need a leg-up wherever you can get it.  

But what parents of very young kids don’t tend to think about is that it doesn’t get any cheaper. In fact, it gets more expensive the older the kids get.  

Which brings me my other criticism of this expansion of the FamilyBoost scheme: what about the parents of older kids?  

What about the parents who have got kids at high school and have to come up with money for all sorts of things, such as uniforms, sports trips, music trips, laptops. You name it.  

Not that I’m saying that every parent with kids at the high school stage deserve the kind of carte-blanche handout the Government’s giving parents who have got kids going to pre-school.  

But it highlights further how expanding the FamilyBoost scheme just doesn’t make sense.  

And I think the opposition parties can be accused of tiptoeing around the issue. Especially Labour, which is banging on about the Government’s changes yesterday to the FamilyBoost programme being “desperate”.  

Megan Woods is Labour’s acting finance spokesperson and she’s saying today that the Government is scrambling to help families dealing with the cost-of-living crisis. 

She’s saying: "If Nicola Willis truly understood the cost-of-living crisis, then she'd have acted a long time ago."  

But what Megan Woods should be doing is ripping into the Government for thinking that families earning just on $230,000-a-year need government support to pay for their kids to go to pre-school.  

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