Tertiary funding's third way

By COLIN JAMES

The centrepiece of Michael Cullen's Budget on May 23 will be the Government's plan for tertiary education funding. It will mark a significant change in how the Labour Party views social policy.

Labour's education policy has focused on developing the individual as a right, a goal spelled out in the 1930s. Individual development remains an important objective but primacy is now given, for tertiary education at least, to "national development".

This, says Tertiary Education Minister Steve Maharey, is intended to match the message of "growth and innovation" at the core of the Government's economic strategy.

The new funding strategy - which will mix funding according to the number of students taking a course and direct Government funding - will give the new Tertiary Education Commission leverage to encourage courses that relate to national development objectives.

"National development" is not just an economic concept. It incorporates social, cultural and environmental development.

But Maharey says: "The whole philosophy is trying to ensure that social development and services are directly linked to economic development. They are two sides of the same coin."

No longer is education for the student alone. It is primarily a national development tool.

Maharey, who is also Minister of Social Services and Employment, aims to import the same notion into benefit policy.

This is another significant change and comes as new Alliance leader Laila Harre sets out to re-emphasise health, education and poverty as her party's core messages, much as they once were Labour's, and to argue for much higher spending on all three.

Labour has long been guided by the 1972 Royal Commission on Social Security's declaration that benefits should be adequate to ensure everyone can participate fully in society. One outcome of that commission was the domestic purposes benefit (DPB).

But Maharey has reoriented Labour policy towards getting beneficiaries into work. This essentially picks up what National's Roger Sowry was trying to do before him but uses different tools.

In a sense, this harks back to the first Labour Government's approach, when it introduced comprehensive social security in 1938. The aim then was to organise economic and social policy to ensure everyone could get work and thus independently provide for himself (as it usually was then) and his family. In that vein Maharey wants to move from thinking of benefits as "income transfers", redistributing wealth from the well-off to the disadvantaged, to benefits providing an "adequate income" from which the beneficiary moves into work.

He argues that the work-for-the-dole approach of the previous Government kept people on benefits because it created make-work instead of real jobs. "We are focusing on how to get people off the benefit, instead of working for it."

That means "ensuring people have the skills and abilities to get sustainable jobs", which he calls "making work pay". That requires flexible approaches, including, for example, restoring the benefit for rainy days for fruit pickers.

He is trying to tie the benefit system more closely to training. That includes those on DPB: there is, he says, constant emphasis on personal development so that when family circumstances allow they can get into the workforce.

The Labour roots are still there. Mr Maharey says the New Zealander of the 21st century requires "a whole range of capacities and skills, a very different kind of person from the twentieth century".

But he says education and welfare policy must "tie in with local economic strategies and the Government's economic strategy".

It is too early to judge whether he is having any success. National and Act reckon he is just reinforcing a culture of dependency. But at least the rhetoric is changing.

* Email Colin James

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