Ending Fees Free Punishes Young New Zealanders

Rolling back fees-free tertiary education isn’t just another Budget cut. It’s part of a decades-long transfer of wealth and opportunity away from younger generations and towards an older property-owning class that already dominates housing, politics and capital.

We on the Left have allowed Identity Politics to become such a dominant narrative that there is no oxygen or language available to critique what the fuck is going on from a class perspective.

Other than being little more than performance art for the perpetually woke, middle class Identity Politics robs us of understanding political events like the appalling decision to roll back fees-free student loans from a class perspective because all the Left are good for these days is free the nipple protests for militant vegan mummy bloggers.

Which is fine and dandy, but not so good at challenging the neoliberal hegemonic economic structure.

The class war nobody on the Left wants to talk about

Here’s how the Right sell it…

Fees-free university scheme ‘didn’t achieve any goals’, Christopher Luxon says

RNZ

…what a load of utter, utter, utter bullshit.

The goal was to reduce student debt!

Since Gen X, every generation has been blighted by user pays debt, meaning the propertied boomer class have laughed all the way to the bank.

We don’t have a youth problem in NZ, we have an adult problem in that we hate youth.

Bernard Hickey makes the case…

A political economy that enriches the old and punishes the young

New Zealand’s political economy has become such a housing-market-with-bits-tacked-on that it has spiralled into a self-reinforcing system, where the ever-older-and-ever-wealthier winners keep rewarding politicians that protect and enhance their gains, especially when it is at the expense of the young losers paying the rents and taxes in this system.

The losers then either give up voting or leave the country, reinforcing the political power of the winners and ensuring the system can stagger on.

After all, who will pay the rent to keep the system going if the young are allowed to buy their own homes after paying off their fees early?

It has led to (often unpromised) policies such as ending fees-free for students and the dumping matching Government grants for first home buyers. The political energy generating this spiral is encapsulated in support for NZ First, which has reinforced and bolstered the incomes and tax-free capital gains of older home owners for decades.

That support is rising, thanks to a turbocharging of anti-migrant views among older home-owners. Today’s news from our political economy encapsulates the latest twist of the spiral, including:

• Winston Peters boasting on Friday the Government will dump the final first year of fees-free tertiary education in the Budget later this month, adding to its ending of first home buyer subsidy grants as unpromised budget cuts hitting young voters hardest;
• A ‘poll of polls’ analysing the trend of support for the coalition of parties in Government parties vs the Opposition parties shows the Government is on track to win re-election, thanks to a surge in support for NZ First;
• A survey of 506 young New Zealanders for OneChoice has found 54% now define the ‘New Zealand dream’ as being financially independent, ahead of home-ownership (44%), while 65% say hoping to own a home is no longer relevant;
• The survey found 33% of renters spend at least half their income on rent, with a further 38% spending between 30% and 49% of their income on rent, while 71% are delaying starting a family and/or changing careers due to housing pressures, and 76% feel ‘trapped’ as renters being unable to save for a deposit; and,
• Police Commissioner Richard Chambers has conceded to 1News he can’t compete with the salaries and incentives being offered by Australian police forces, with at least 144 officers leaving for Australia in the past year.

…the neoliberal experiment has locked generations out of wealth creation and reduced them to a precarious gig environment as AI carves out middle-class professions with devastating ease.

Old Zealand versus New Zealand

Every generation after the Boomers have been penalised and universal free services funded by taxing wealth are the only inoculation.

This election is Old Zealand versus New Zealand.

It’s the propertied class vs the rest of us.

The true demarcation in a liberal-progressive-late-stage-capitalism-democracy is the 1% richest (plus their 9% enablers) vs the 90% rest of us and once you see politics through that lens, the Left can never lose an election again.