Kids and consultants - Media run the rule over opposition policy

The National Party leader unveiled two dove-tailed policies in last weekend’s State of the Nation speech - pumping up childcare subsidies while cutting down on consultants to cover the cost. Mediawatch looks at how the media ran the rule over these - and talks to the author of a timely investigation into the lucrative childcare industry.

Luxon set to take aim at Hipkins’ govt consultant ‘gravy train’ said a Sunday Star Times headline last weekend. 

“Christopher Luxon will use his State of the Nation speech today to announce he will hit the brakes on government consultants and the contractor “gravy train” if elected in October, Stuff understands,” the story said.

They understood right. 

“Labour has created a gravy train for consultants through its obsession with working groups, ideological pet projects and expensive public sector restructures that are a boon for partners at the big consultancy firms, but are not delivering better results for Kiwis, Luxon is expected to say," the paper reported.

And that’s what the National Party leader said - almost word-for-word - at the end of his address last weekend. 

“The size of the public sector and what it achieves could well play as some of the mood music for this election year,” wrote Stuff’s political editor Luke Malpass. 

That seems certain, with political parties supplying the tunes for the political journalists' playlists, as National did last weekend. 

After the speech, plenty of other outlets seized on Luxon’s claims of a runaway gravy train.   

“Do you believe the public service is a gravy train?” PM Chris Hipkins was asked on Stuff’s new daily podcast Newsable the next day. 

But Christopher Luxon had targeted consultants in his speech  - and “big-time, big partners at consulting firms” in later remarks to reporters - rather than public service staffing and efficiency. 

Is consulting all gravy? 

National’s estimate that $1.7bn of public money was paid to consultants last year was widely reported by media too. 

The government has been accused of failing to consult on things like transport policy and Three Waters before setting policy - so what is the gratuitous ‘gravy’ and what is sensible spending? 

In the New Zealand Herald, political reporter Thomas Coughlan pointed out there were two parts to it.

“There are government departments contracting in expertise the public service does not have - often for major projects or reforms,” he wrote. 

But he also said ordinary core public service work is being done by consultants and contractors too, because of staffing shortfalls or sudden lurches in workload. Red and blue governments down the years had failed to curb spending on that, he said. 

For Stuff, Esther Taunton wrote a ‘cheat sheet’ called What is a consultant anyway?’ - and Stuff’s Anna Whyte set out where $1.2 billion on consultants and contractors went last year, according to the Public Service Commission’s stats. 

The Herald’s Audrey Young also explained the Commission lists “only ministries and departments  in the core public service, not Crown entities such as Waka Kotahi and Kainga Ora, which also report to Parliament on their expenditure.”

But last Sunday, Christopher Luxon said he wasn’t derailing the gravy train just to save some of that money. 

He said $249m a year in savings would fund ‘Family Boost’ - his party's plan to lower the cost of childcare for lower and middle income-earners.

Political points 

“Swing-voting young families - the National Party's made a play for your vote by promising childcare will get more affordable,” said Newshub’s Amelia Wade. Plenty of other analysis zeroed in on the vote-grabbing potential too. 

But some reporters also questioned the effectiveness and consequences. 

The Herald’s Thomas Coughlan said the childcare policy could push up the price of childcare and the profits of the providers, and extra regulation might be required if even more taxpayer funds were committed.  

“We can only hope that National's policy was motivated by lobbying and donations from owners of ECE centres because, if it is a genuine attempt to help parents, that suggests the blue team has the same problem of ignorance of even high-school economics that the red team has,” said pundit Matthew Hooton in a self-published column. 

Newsroom’s political editor Jo Moir was unconvinced by Luxon’s claim childcare fees wouldn’t go up because it is a “competitive market”.

“That seems a tad naive, especially considering reporting from Stuff on the same day as National’s policy was released, which revealed $450m a year of taxpayer funding goes to for-profit early childhood providers - and into the pockets of private investors,” she wrote. 

In that well-timed investigation - Raising children, rising profits - Stuff national correspondent Michelle Duff found two-thirds of New Zealand's early childcare centres are run by businesses now. 

Twenty years ago, more than two thirds were still community based and for profit, but these days almost a fifth of the funding goes to just five private ECE providers, Duff found.

In the last of a series of Stuff articles about childcare, Duff showed how the cost of it has steadily risen in recent years. Fees are now as high as they were when the Labour-led government introduced the ‘20 hours free’ policy.  

Duff concluded it was hard to tell just how much increased public subsidies had improved the standard of childcare or the availability of it across the board. 

While the Sunday Star Times quoted what Luxon was “expected to say” about the consulting gravy train last weekend, it said nothing about the childcare policy unveiled in the same speech that day - even though Michelle Duff’s analysis of the childcare industry was on the paper’s first three pages. 

“That was a complete coincidence. I’d been working on it for about six months and it was meant to be out the week before,” Michelle Duff told Mediawatch. 

“If it had been out then, who knows what impact it would have had. But . . . hopefully it will help shape a bit of that debate now,” she said. 

“I wanted to find out where all the subsidies in ECE go - and to find out how much was actually going into children and their education. There’s no great detail there and even the government doesn’t know,” she said. 

“Most people I spoke to in the sector . . . are saying the funding model is broken. There are historic funding gaps that mean for example under-three year-olds get hardly any subsidies. There’s no point putting more money in if we don't know it is making a difference," she said. 

Duff says issues that are important to women and families but don't make political headlines often get overlooked. 

She cited the Te Mahere Whai Mahi Wāhine / the Women’s Employment Action Plan launched last year.

“I’ve barely read any reporting on that but there’s a vein of stories there. You can look at every topic with a gender issue and find about five more angles,” she said.  

“Sometimes I feel some of the political reporting is really far removed from reality for people struggling to raise families. Childcare is in a mess because successive governments have failed to address it. Maybe that's because whatever they would have to do would be politically unpopular, but just talking about it to score points isn't helping,” said Duff.  

“National has put it in the spotlight and said they’re going to do something about it so it’s good that people are talking about it and hopefully it will get us somewhere,” she said.  

Finishing up - and switching to fiction

Michelle Duff’s timely investigation in last weekend’s Sunday Star Times was her last one for Stuff.

After beginning at the Manawatu Standard back in 2007, and spending the last six years as a national correspondent she has left to study creative writing at Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters.  

She plans to carry on freelancing, but why quit now with so many big national issues a national correspondent could tackle in election year? 

“It’s been a dream job in that I’ve been given the freedom and the trust to spend months sometimes working on stories, analysing documents and talking to people. These are things that in the grind of daily journalism you usually have to do in the background - or you get taken off it to work on something else,” she said. 

“It has become harder to be a journalist. Right now we are foot soldiers in this war against disinformation. With social media now and increased visibility - in particular for women journalists and journalists of colour - the amount of abuse and hate we get just for doing our jobs is unacceptable and designed to silence,” she said. 

“If I write about a gender issue or anything to do with disinformation you wouldn’t believe what comes to my inbox. My personal address has been published in some of these channels too,” she said. 

“The reason I have left is for this new project (creative writing), but I would be dishonest if I said that wasn’t a factor in taking a breather. It takes a toll,” she said.