Are you equally concerned that primary health practitioners, including GPs, got increased subsidies to treat patients, including wealthy ones? Aren’t primary health providers treating wealthy patients primarily businesses? How about physiotherapists? Aren’t they businesses, too?

How about legal aid to lawyers? Aren’t law firms businesses as well?

How about when the government gives money to the New Zealand rugby union to assist in hosting the world cup? Isn’t international rugby a profitable business? Or how about subsidies to Team New Zealand?

How about the money spent on trade promotion overseas? Isn’t this a subsidy to private businesses trading internationally?

The government subsidises private businesses all the time, where there are direct positive returns to the taxpayer or the economy as a whole. A small subsidy to private schools (just 2% of the cost of the education, rising to 4% next year) makes it easier for parents to send their children to private schools, and reduces the burden on the taxpayer.

Argument stands.

I think it’s pretty silly to assume that the marginal cost of each extra student will be the same as the average cost for each existing one for starters.

Beyond that I reject the premiss about ‘paying twice’ in any case. It’s a fundamental misundersatnding of how our taxation and public education systems work. Handy rhetoric though.

Might it be the difference for a few kids? Maybe but the 30,000 kids you’re estimating were in the private system before this $35 mil, why wouldn’t nearly all of them keep going without that money?

Effectively,every private school kid has received an additional subsidy (of over 10% by your estimate) so that a few kids can stay private.

Using your numbers,even if 10% of private school kids went public without this money, it would still be cheaper for the govt… and there’s zero evidence that anything like that many kids would make the move.

It was a VERY rough estimate on my part, I agree. I couldn’t find any specific data identifying the savings to the taxpayer for students attending independent schools, so I used the following process:

First, the number of students in private schools. I used a reference in a speech from Heather Roy earlier this year, that identified 4.1% of New Zealand school students attending independent schools.

Second, the total number of students in schools in New Zealand. A quick google approximated around 750,000 students in primary and secondary schools in New Zealand.

From this I extrapolated around 30,000 students in independent schools in New Zealand.

Next, the costs per student. I couldn’t find easy references for this, and I don’t know if the costs I do have include capital and operational costs. I used OECD data in figure B 1.3, which identifies the costs per student being just under $6,000 USD. This data is from 2004, and is calculated using equivalent USD converted using PPP. I assessed this as being the equivalent of $10,000 NZD in 2009.

This was a five minute analysis, and very rough on my part, but the estimate was based on 30,000 students at an average of $10,000 per student, arriving at an annual saving of $300 million per year.

There might be some much more in-depth analysis available, but I didn’t find it in my quick search. You’re welcome to critique it and suggest a more accurate number.

It is all very well to say that rich kids’ parents shouldn’t be subsidised, and it’s a nice headline, but there are many examples of the government intervening in private businesses to protect risk to the taxpayer or the economy in general.

Just a few weeks before the election, Dr Cullen announced a retail bank deposit guarantee scheme, involving a substantial potential taxpayer subsidy to an otherwise very profitable banking system. If Dr Cullen hadn’t acted as he had, the viability of the banking system, and the economy as a whole, would have been severely undermined.

I dont have a problem with private school’s. But they are that…. PRIVATE, and this not the taxpayers responsibility to prop them up.