As a senior Labour MP Mallard must shoulder a lot of the blame for the 175,000 children Labour left living in Poverty in 2008 despite three successive terms of a Labour government in times of marvellous economic conditions.
On 20 August 2007, National’s new leader, John Key, made a stirring speech to the Auckland branch of the New Zealand Contractors Federation. In it, he lambasted the then-Clark-led Labour government;
Labour’s promise of a return to (limited) free tertiary education appears to be unsettling some, for whom the last thirty years has been dominated by the implementation and bedding-in of user-pays (often gradually, so as not to spook the punters) ; reduced-tax; and minimalist-government ideology;
I see that National Party apparatchiks are up to their usual disingenuous tricks, trying to suggest that Labour was a worse manager of the New Zealand economy than National;
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.