Today's students will become our teachers, social workers, health professionals, researchers and more. Photo / Michael Craig
Today's students will become our teachers, social workers, health professionals, researchers and more. Photo / Michael Craig
OPINION:
Once upon a time, tertiary education was recognised as a public good. Students were supported to study, because their education was our education; their success was the progress of our country. Those who ended up making more money on the other side paid it back through higher tax settings, in turn investing in education and support for those who came after them to flourish.
All of this changed through the "personal responsibility" era of slash and burn economic reforms, intent on instilling corporate sensibility and cost-cutting in our supposedly public institutions through the 1980s and 1990s. These were political decisions. Political decisions can change this system once again.
In mid-2001, then-Victoria University of Wellington Student Association president sent out a press release titled "Student debt set to cripple NZ". Figures had been released under the Official Information Act showing government estimates for student loan debt had nearly doubled from a 1999 projection of hitting $11.6 billion in 2020 to $19.4b.
The association's president lamented: "The current generation of politicians are mortgaging the future of our country. The burden of this will not only be felt by students who graduate with large debts, but also by the future taxpayers of New Zealand who will be left to clean up the mess ... If we are to get this debt under control, fees must come down and access to living allowances will have to increase."
Twenty years later, VUWSA president Chris Hipkins would become the Minister of Education. In the year 2020, student loan debt would sit between those two historical projections, at $16.1b.
In the final budget of his first ministerial term, the former student advocate would break Labour's election promise of reinstating post-graduate student allowance and extending fees-free education, citing the need to tighten the fiscal belt while the Government signed off an historical budget nearly 10 times bigger and tens of billions of dollars larger than they planned to spend pre-Covid. Almost 10 years before that press release, in 1993, the president of Otago University Students' Association told The Dominion newspaper: "Phasing out tuition fees and returning to universal living allowances would allow a better, more balanced diet [than two-minute noodles] ... Allowances should not be means tested against parental income, overall funding should be improved and more money should be available for students with disabilities and dependants."
Chris Hipkins and Grant Robertson. Photo / NZME
In 1996, that former OUSA president would go on to be elected as co-president of the NZ Union of Student Associations, penning an opinion editorial noting: "Only 37 per cent of full-time students get any kind of allowance ... The main culprit here is the National Government's absurd means-testing programme."
Around 30 years later, the Honorable Grant Robertson would be elected with Labour colleagues in the strongest Parliamentary majority in MMP's history, commanding 65 of the House's 120 seats. Just 61 of those votes are needed to pass a Budget – the same number held by the National-NZ First coalition Government that Robertson once railed against.
NZUSA president Robertson of 1996 was worried that just 37 per cent of full-time students were getting any kind of allowance. In 2021, it was even fewer, at 27 per cent. He was concerned specifically about students being means tested on their parents' combined gross income until they were 25 years old. That rule remains in place to this day.
Last week, the Greens, NZUSA, Te Mana Ākonga, Tauira Pasifika and the National Disabled Students' Association released the findings of our People's Inquiry into Student Wellbeing. It's grim.
Two-thirds of students regularly do not have enough money to buy food, clothing, pay bills, buy groceries, access healthcare or other basics. They're spending nearly 60 per cent of their weekly income on rent, double the accepted "affordable housing" ballpark of 30 per cent.
These are the strained learning conditions of the New Zealanders who we so desperately need to become our teachers, social workers, health professionals, researchers and more.
Among rent controls, rental WOF and free public transport, the inquiry recommends precisely what ministers Robertson and Hipkins once knew to be necessary: universal student allowance and fee-free education.
The Greens and Student Unions will continue working to remind the 400,000 students of their power and force the necessary political willpower for decades-overdue change. In the meantime, it's worth remembering VUWSA president Chris Hipkins' 2001 warning to the then-Labour Government: "We've had enough of broken promises by politicians, it's time for the Government to put their money where their mouth was, before the election."
• Chlöe Swarbrick, Green Party, is the MP for Auckland Central.
