Back to work for some, surfing for others

Clive Bibby

Opinion

On Monday I made one of my increasingly irregular trips to the “big smoke”.

Gisborne is 45 minutes away from our humble dwelling which is slowly emerging from the devastation left in the wake of Cyclones Hale and Gabrielle.

Our house is on a hill overlooking the moonscape of silt and debris that has, until recently, been a common sight on adjacent properties here in this river valley. However, the signs of recovery evident from the front veranda give one reason for hope that we are gradually returning to normal — whatever that might look like.

During the trip to town, we passed camping grounds alongside the beautiful Coast road that had recently been full to overflowing but now have only the odd tent or caravan, as the holidaymakers have packed up and returned to work after their well-earned summer break.

Another equally relevant observation was made as we passed the car parks adjacent to the beaches north of Gisborne, where the best surf breaks host the hordes of university and polytechnic students for whom a return to studies is still a month away.

The contrast in contributions being made to the nation’s coffers could not have been more stark.

I’m not criticising those who have chosen to spend their early adult life gaining a degree that will allow them to be self-supporting in their old age. That is an attitude most parents would want to see in their progeny . . . but in order to acquire the said “life-changing qualification”, there appears to be no accompanying sense of obligation requiring the youngsters to contribute to the cost of their studies.

I know l will be laughed at by many who regard my ideas about responsibility to make these contributions, no matter how small, as being archaic in the modern era.

I’m not bothered about being regarded as a relic of a different age, because there is a certain truth to those “throw away” lines that do have some relevance to this conversation.

However, there is also the inescapable truth that the nation would be a whole lot better off —and as a result, able to spend more of our scarce financial resources on those who, through no fault of their own, are experiencing hard times — if that notion were still part of who we are.

When l went to varsity, it was expected that you spent the whole summer holiday period sweating it out putting in long hours in some of the most boring yet highly paid manual jobs on offer, in order to cover the cost of three to four years of adult education.

As a consequence, university students of the day put a value on the opportunity to study, because it was likely that the end result would enable them to avoid ending up on the scrap heap.

Sadly, not so today!

Because successive governments have made it possible for students to book up almost the entire cost of their time at university to the state, we appear to have lost that opportunity for character building that was for so long an integral part of nation building.

I believe we are the worse for it.