The notion of free education in this country has become like our “clean and green” environment and “100% Pure” rivers: a fiction. New Zealanders are deluding themselves if they believe education is still free.
When born-to-rule Tories – with a bloated sense of self-worth and entitlement – slip up and let us peasant know how they really view us – it is usually unsurprising to most on the Left. Take, for example, Bill English’s candid admission that New Zealand’s lower wage rates were beneficial when it came to competing with Australia. On 10 April 2011, in an exchange with Guyon Espiner on TVNZ’s Q+A, English boasted of the benefits of low wages;
So many little occurrences and huge events have transpired over the last couple of months, to brand this as one of the most intriguing (and tumultuous) of election campaigns in my life. Only the 1984 and the 2014 General Elections rank as memorable. In all three, there were two threads weaving through the campaigns;
Speaking to a fully packed downtown conference centre in Wellington, on a cold, gloomy rainy afternoon, Labour-leader, Andrew Little launched into a fiery attack on the current National Government focusing on it’s inarguably lack-lustre track record for the past eight years.
It is amazing how many blame the victims of neo-liberal ideology, rather than looking at the causes of why things happen. Are some people really so simple-minded that they can’t see beyond their immediate prejudices…?
Prior to 1992, tertiary education at Universities was mostly free, with minimal course fees. On top of which, a student allowance plus part-time paid employment, was usually sufficient for students to graduate with minimal debt hanging over them.