Table of Contents
It is always easy for governments to promise ‘free’ this and ‘free’ that. The word costs nothing at a press conference, but it costs taxpayers plenty in the end.
Case in point: the Victorian Labor government’s vote-grabbing promise of ‘universal free kinder’. It might have won the votes of the tilty-head set, but actually delivering expanded early education without creating instant shortages, cost-shifting disasters and broken infrastructure is much harder. Victoria’s Labor government is demonstrating the first part with gusto. New South Wales is at least making a more credible attempt at the second.
Parts of Melbourne could be short thousands of kindergarten places over the next decade due to a $1.4 billon state government program which has sent enrolments soaring across the state.
Victoria’s push to double free kindergarten to 30 hours a week by 2036 was sold as compassion. In practice it has produced exactly the capacity crisis critics predicted. Old single-room kindergartens built for 10 hours a week cannot simply absorb double the children and double the hours. Councils are left begging for grants that are oversubscribed, while ratepayers and parents cop the fallout. Some have already walked away from running the centres altogether.
Bayside City Council leases 14 buildings to kindergarten providers. Mayor Debbie Taylor-Haynes said the government had failed to explain how it would fund the infrastructure to support free kindergarten, which would cause significant shortages in the municipality.
“Meeting demand created by the state government’s reforms would require a significant investment, conservatively estimated at $65 million, representing an immense cost shift to local government,” she said.
This is the same government whose predecessor, Daniel Andrews, grandly promised 4,000 new intensive care beds during the Covid panic. The beds never arrived in anything like those numbers. The promise was simply memory-holed once the cameras moved on. Big announcements, thin delivery and costs dumped elsewhere: it is becoming a signature Victorian Labor move.
New South Wales has taken a different tack with its Start Strong programme and the push toward universal preschool access by 2030. Instead of simply mandating more hours in existing rooms and hoping for the best, NSW has put real money into new supply. The state is building 100 new public preschools on primary school sites by 2027, plus another $60 million for expansions in non-government schools in high-need areas. Recent federal-state deals have added tens of millions more for centres on public school grounds. Fee relief under Start Strong is targeted, up to around $4,456 for the most disadvantaged children, rather than a blunt universal ‘free for everyone, figure it out yourselves’ model.
That does not mean NSW has escaped problems. Workforce shortages remain critical, with ‘childcare deserts’ and long waitlists in some regional and lower-income areas. Community preschools have complained about funding settings that sometimes force fee increases. Quality conditions attached to funding from 2026 and services must lift their game or risk losing support: this shows the government is at least trying to link money to outcomes rather than just spraying it around.
And when it comes to spraying around other people’s money, Victoria is in a class of its own.
An Education Department spokesperson said kindergarten funding increased with enrolments and program hours […]
“The Victorian government is investing $3.8 billion to deliver hundreds of new and expanded kindergartens and has already invested $12.4 million in 62 early learning infrastructure projects in Boroondara since 2015.”
Well, what’s another $4 billion to a government already in record debt? Nudging $200 billion and no end in sight.
The contrast between Victoria and NSW is instructive. One state announced a massive hours expansion and is now watching existing facilities buckle under the weight. The other is actually constructing new places while directing subsidies toward the families and regions that need them most. Both are ultimately funded by taxpayers, of course. The difference is whether the taxpayer is also left funding emergency patches because the original plan ignored basic supply constraints.
The lesson is old but apparently needs constant repetition: ‘Free’ is never free. It is either properly planned and properly funded, which includes the boring business of bricks, mortar and workforce pipelines, or it becomes another expensive exercise in shifting costs and disappointment onto everyone else.
Guess which the Victorian government chose?
