The IPA’s Julie Novak received good media coverage earlier in the week for her new paper on vouchers.

I’m certainly in favour of school choice. But I’m not convinced that Julie’s proposals – which would cost between $5 billion and $10 billion, depending on various options – represent value for money. Most of it would be spent giving current private school parents the entitlement they would have received had they sent their kids to a government school.

It’s paying people to do what they would do themselves anyway without public assistance. As a classical liberal, I need a lot of convincing that this is a sensible use of taxpayers’ funds (and personally I have difficulty with yet more income redistribution to people with school-age kids).

It is likely to speed up the current trend, by which private schools gain 0.3-0.4% of market share each year. But there are limits on how quickly private schools can expand, and even at triple that rate the majority of kids will still attend government schools for years to come.
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