The reason the funding stops has little to do with progress and a lot to do with old fashioned political expediency. Photo / 123RF
The reason the funding stops has little to do with progress and a lot to do with old fashioned political expediency. Photo / 123RF
OPINION: The Public Purse is a Herald column focused on the public sector and how taxpayer money is spent.
The Government programme to provide free period products in schools faces an uncertain future.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis pointed to the programme before Christmas as an example of a target="_blank">“fiscal cliff” left by the last Government. The problem is that the programme was announced with great fanfare in early 2021, following a pilot programme. But it was funded only through to the middle of this year.
If it is to continue, Willis will have to stump up the money for it in this year’s budget and wrestle the cost into the Government’s operating allowance. Then, for the first time, the cost would be factored into New Zealand’s long-term debt picture.
Though Labour Ministers did note the time-limited funding at the time, it is remarkable that they neglected to permanently fund one of its best-known policies, highly symbolic of a purported commitment to improving the lives of girls (the Ministry of Education calls them “menstruating students”) and a concern for reducing child poverty.
It was even name-checked by former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in her valedictory speech last April, among just a half dozen achievements of which she was especially proud. It was, she said, a mark of progress.
Indeed wide media coverage of the little programme – which extended to the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times – also cast the scheme in that light. Reuters expressed the tone as well as any in its headline: “New Zealand’s Ardern announces free sanitary products in all schools to beat period poverty”.
But it doesn’t appear that anyone asked why the money would run dry in mid-2024. This is odd, because as far as we know, periods and girls – many of whom we were told were missing school for want of a few tampons – will still be with us in the second half of the year and beyond.
The reason the funding stops has little to do with progress and a lot to do with old-fashioned political expediency.
The programme received $2.5 million in short-term funding for a pilot programme at just 15 schools in 2019. But the rollout across the country required in the order of $8m a year.
That plan was announced in early 2021, and there is no reason it couldn’t have been paid for through the ordinary course budget process that year. Except that this would have required the Government to weigh the cost and merits of the policy against its other priorities, and trade them off until all new funding fit within its operating allowance – a cap for net new operating spending that is not written in stone, but which is designed to provide a measure of fiscal discipline.
Former Finance Minister Grant Roberston. Photo / Mark Mitchell
But Ardern, and more particularly her Finance Minister Grant Robertson, eschewed this rigour. Instead, they made a long reach into the massive, debt-funded pot of emergency funding: the Covid Response and Recovery Fund (CRRF), which ultimately topped a whopping $61b.
The route was circuitous, likely because the period products scheme had nothing to do with Covid response and recovery. However, the Government had made the case – slight as it was – that a full rollout of another scheme, its free school lunches plan, should be paid through the emergency fund.
Some $220m of the CRRF was earmarked to pay for school lunches in the 2020/21 fiscal year (that programme is funded only to the end of the current calendar year and constitutes its own fiscal cliff).
Expanding the lunch programme took longer than expected. The original cost estimates were based on the assumption that the scheme would use just a few large suppliers. But ultimately more small suppliers were used and, in addition, it took schools longer than anticipated to prepare to deliver the programme. By late 2020 it was clear the delays would result in an under-spend for the year.
A January 2021 Cabinet paper, brought by then Education Minister Chris Hipkins, asked the Cabinet to agree that the unspent kitty – some $25m – be transferred to the period products initiative. The money would carry the scheme through to June 2024.
(Incidentally, there is no evidence the programme has lifted girls’ school attendance, which, along with achievement, is in long-term decline across the student body.)
But it also underscores just how wide the gap yawned, at times, between what that Government did, and what it said it was doing.
Only last week, it was revealed by ZB Plus that then Minister for Women Jan Tinetti announced a mandatory gender pay gap reporting regime in August last year without funding and before it was even costed. This too sits on Willis’ desk to yay or nay in the upcoming budget.
Willis is not above a few theatrics in huffing about New Zealanders expecting better. But part of her must be quietly pleased. Whatever her own budgeting talents, they cannot help but be flattered by the alternative.
Kate MacNamara is a South Island-based journalist with a focus on policy, public spending and investigations. She spent a decade at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before moving to New Zealand. She joined the Herald in 2020.
