Public funding for private madrassas?

As knee-jerk, emotive issues go, this can be a HOT one.

National has said it will increase state funding of private schools from $40M / year to $70M / year.

The "Independent Schools of New Zealand" claims to be able to provide education 20% more cheaply per child than in state schools and argue that more funding for "independent" (euphemism for "private") schools would free up money the state could spend elsewhere. Their web site is here. A useful backgrounder on public funding of private schools in NZ can be found here.

Presumably the "savings" are made through parents paying higher fees than in state schools. It would also be interesting to learn whether teachers in private schools were paid more or less than those in the state sector.

What sort of private schools can get state funding? Various Christian sects are particularly anxious to raise their children in an educational environment sheltered from religious views other than those of the relevant sect. Catholic schools in New Zealand were, for the most part, integrated into the state school system in 1975.

In the province of Ontario, Canada, the opposition Progressive Conservative (PCs) party, lead by the eponymous John Tory, blew what had appeared to be a sure win in the October 10th, 2007 elections due to public antipathy to taxpayer funding of private religious schools - in particular, Muslim madrassas.

Ontario has funded Catholic schools for many years as a compromise made between the (mainly French) Catholic and (mainly English) Protestant communities in Ontario. There were no other religious contenders for state education funds at that time. The law there currently allows no others.

The move by the Ontario "Tories" to expand state funding of religious schools beyond Catholic schools was driven by donations and the successful lobbying of the PC party, conducted by the influential Orthodox Hebrew community in Toronto. They argued that it was not fair to fund Catholic schools, but deny access to tax funds to all other religious schools. Ontario is a fair place most of the time, so it seemed to make sense to the Tories to go with it.

New Zealand also provides taxpayer funds to a variety of private religious schools. From the list on the ISNZ web site they appear to be mainly Christian and at least one Jewish school - Kadimah College in Auckland.

What the Ontario Tories didn't count on was the backlash against funding Muslim schools. To some extent, they have been hoist by their own petard as conservative Canadian politicians and their media backers (National Post and others) have been, in my opinion, cynically jumping on the anti-Muslim cross-currents reflecting across the US border after 9/11. Toronto is in the same time zone as New York and Canadians also watched in horror as jets flew into the World Trade Centre that morning.

Hoping to maintain public support for Canada's unpopular military presence in Afghanistan, where more than 65 Canadians have died in action, Conservative politicians and media have been scaring Canadians for several years now with the spectre of violent Islamo-fascism and the fear of Shariah Law encroaching on the primary legal system. A recent move in Ontario to allow for binding mediation of disputes between willing participants using Sharia Law mediators was portrayed in conservative media as the first step toward Shariah Law being implemented in Ontario. Pure hysteria, but it worked.

The anti-Muslim backlash to funding Muslim private schools saw the Tories blow a clear lead in the polls and they went down to defeat in a big way, with several of their own MPPs (Members of Provincial Parliament) responding to local pressure and effectively campaigning as independents (still blue, but no party logos and no mention of electing a "John Tory government") in opposition to their own party's policy.

Ideally, both Labour and National here would have an open mind on funding to religious schools, provided NZ curricula were being taught and other criteria deemed appropriate for all schools - state or private - were being met.

It would provide an insight into the Kiwi mind to find out what voters thought about funding religious schools of any denomination. How would they respond to a headline like the title of this post?