Pete Hodgson, Minister for Tertiary Education, says that the $150 isn’t intended to be enough to live on - it’s the same as they would get on benefit (well, nearly - you get a few dollars more on benefit). But of course, what Mr Hodgson sidesteps is if you are on benefit you don’t have to pay it all back at the end.

Of course, by highlighting the way it’s not supposed students would be able to live on $150 a week, he also highlights the shockingly low rate of benefits - which people conversely are expected to survive on. Perhaps it’s time for the government to return to school and learn logic. I must be missing something, but to my eyes there’s a lack of ethics and logic.

Back to students. I benefitted from a meagre maintenance grant and having my fees paid. Even so I had to work. So during my undergraduate work, I had summer jobs. I was able to rely on many years experience in the IT industry, and found jobs in that sector. But work I had to. Of course I’d rather have been having summer holidays, but there simply wasn’t room. So Pete Hodgson’s assertion that students should take on summer work rings true with me. But only to a point.

Having no loan system, I was able to walk away without debt at the end of my degree. There’s little hope for students these days to do the same.

That means we are normalising debt. If we normalise debt within a system, is it any wonder that young people are more comfortable to run it up and live with it? It’s not like they have had a great deal of choice in the matter - all the advertisers have to do is take advantage of their in-built necessary openness to being in debt, and create desire for other objects of desire.

Student loans are interest free once you have finished your degree, so long as you don’t work outside the country for more than 6 months. That’s a big help, but not a huge help. Once you start earning more than $18,148 the IRD claw back 10 cents in the dollar to start repayments. Overseas jobs pay significantly more than NZ equivalents - witness the exodus of doctors all trying to find a means of paying off massive debt. In a recent survey, over 75% of doctor respondents all identified they had a debt of more than $50,000, and 13% of more than $100K (see here too).

Tuition fees in New Zealand remain among the highest in the OECD.

It seems to me that, for example, the Minister for Tertiary Education would do well to have a long coffee break with the Minister of Health to think through how they might address the shortage of doctors in this country, and the problems of student debt.

By no means limited to medical education, here’s my two cents worth of policy solution.

The government identify the top areas of skill/profession shortage every few years, and make either make education free, or pay for the tuition fees for students to study in those areas. Medicine might be one of these. Nursing might be another. Robust enrollment and selection criteria would allow us to select the brightest, best, most committed, and most appropriate students (it would allow, for instance, for some positive discrimination in certain areas). Part of the deal would be they give the first 5 years to working in this country - but that would be less of a stick and more of a carrot because they don’t have a loan hanging over their heads any more. They could proudly contribute to NZ life and development. They might even be more likely to be willing to call it home (versus the vast number of “kiwi born” professionals who “make it big” overseas).

Furthermore, this idea can be extended simply. At the moment industry seems to get off relatively lightly, but what about industry beefing up its involvement with tertiary education by committing to pay for courses in certain areas (e.g. industrial design, agricultural science, tourism). This would bite no doubt into the immediate dollar-profit line, but increase exponentially the future profitability of companies by re-creating a modern day apprentice system through which students became tied to companies for a set period of time, and companies benefitted again by keeping the ‘brightest and the best’ onshore. It happens in small ways already, but it could be so much bigger and more beneficial.

There’s a lot more to be said - but this post is too long already. I think it’s enough.

The Hikoi of Hope has identified that accessing high quality, affordable education is proving difficult for many New Zealanders. Education is more important than ever. It’s hard to get a job without a qualification and increasingly a tertiary qualification is needed. But children from poor families attending schools in poor communities aren’t doing as well at school as children from well-off families.

Income affects achievement

Children’s abilities and talents are randomly distributed among the New Zealand population but children from poor homes don’t do as well as others in terms of their educational performance. This year the Competent Children project found that it’s the level of family income that accounts for some differences in children’s performance.

Researcher Dr Cathy Wylie says in her report on the project, “Children from low income homes will not approach life on a level playing field.” Low family income has enduring effects for children’s competencies – children from these families perform less well in subjects including mathematics, literacy and problem-solving.

Early childhood education

The most recent research on educational achievement shows that early childhood education makes a positive difference to learning. Children demonstrate more competency at primary school if they’ve started early childhood education before the age of three and if they’ve been taught by well-trained, reasonably-paid staff.

A briefing paper to Government states that early childhood services are seriously underfunded, affecting the quality of the service that can be offered. Underfunding has a more severe impact on low-income families who are less able to pay.

Children from low-income families are less likely to get early childhood education. A 1994 survey showed that only 57% of low-income families (earning less than $25,000 a year) were participating in early childhood education compared with 80% of those earning more than $50,000.

Funding for schools

Government funding for education does not meet school costs. By 1996 12% of school spending had to be met by school fund-raising and voluntary donations. A 1996 report to the United Nations stressed that students with wealthy parents experienced in decision-making are assured of access to better facilities, while students from poorer areas get the bare essentials.

Schools serving poor children can raise much less money than others. The result is a growing gap between money available to schools in poorer communities and other schools.

All children, regardless of ability or family income, need access to good educational experiences to ensure success in their education. To achieve this we need well qualified and experienced teachers and appropriate class sizes.

Adult Literacy

A Ministry of Education survey on adult literacy found a “high concentration of adults with poor literary skills (around 1 in 5 New Zealanders). Three quarters of all unemployed were found to be in two lowest literacy levels.”

Poorer literacy was also found to be high among Maori and Pacific Island New Zealanders. These results come from a survey based on a random sample of 4223 New Zealand adults aged between 16 and 65.

Maori Education

Maori achievement and participation in education is improving. But compared to non-Maori, Maori are:

- Less likely to participate in all levels of education
- Less likely to remain to senior levels of secondary education. (Close to 40% of Maori children leave school without a qualification)
- Less likely to go to University. (If they enrol for tertiary training it’s more likely to be second chance programmes)

Schools that foster the learning of Maori language have a high retention rate for Maori students and a reduction in cases of truancy and suspension. An NZ Educational Institute briefing paper states that Maori education is under-resourced, affecting the achievement of Maori children. The paper also highlights the serious shortage of trained Maori speaking teachers.

Who takes up tertiary study?

From the wealthiest 20% of secondary schools, one in three students goes on to university, compared to one in sixteen from the poorest 20% of schools. Students from poorer school districts are more likely to go to a polytechnic than a university. School-leavers from private schools are the most likely to attend university.

Student Loans

- Four out of five tertiary students now use the loan scheme first introduced in 1992
- Over $2.5 million was owed by about 250,000 borrowers at 31 March this year
- This is forecast to reach $3 billion by the end of the year and $4 billion by the year 2000
- The cost of tertiary education is going to keep thousands of New Zealanders in debt throughout their working lives.

Because of differences in income between men and women:
- 50% of women will still be repaying their loans by the age of 40
- 10% will still be repaying at age 64
- Up to 35% of Maori women graduates will still be paying off their loans at 64.

A Smart Society

With the strong emphasis on the need for a high skilled workforce we must face the reality if our dismal lack of qualifications. The 1996 census indicates 895,209 New Zealanders (33.9%) aged 15 and over have no qualification. This means as well as the educational needs cited above, many young people and workers will need to train and retrain on-the-job. Making that training affordable, accessible and relevant will offer them a way out of unemployment.

Education and training are the keys to our children’s future. If we’re serious about becoming a “smart” society we cannot afford to let our children miss out on educational and training opportunities. But a good education shouldn’t depend on how much money parents can afford to spend on their children.

Sources:
Six Years Old & Competent, Cathy Wylie with Anne Else, NZ Council for Educational Research, 1998
Adult Literacy in New Zealand: Results from the International Adult Literacy Survey, Ministry of Education
Maori Workload, Te Huarahi (PPTA) and Te Reo Areare (NZEI Te Rui Roa), October 1997
The Myth of Equal Opportunity: Wealth of a School-District as a Determinant of Tertiary Participation, APSU/NZUSA, 1998
Ministry of Education, replies to Select Committee questions, 1 May 1998

I would agree that nursing and teaching, among the civil service professions, should merit increases in their salaries. This is because of their direct service to human life; one deals with the health of our people and the other with the education of our children. These are fundamental to the kind of society that we wish to build and nurture; a compassionate, just and inclusive society. The nurses and the teachers may have genuine and legitimate concerns and, in this regard, I urge the interim government to listen carefully to the concerns of the nurses and teachers, and find a way to negotiate and mitigate them. Mediation is one that is not often tried. I urge the leaders in this dispute to go into mediation and negotiate their respective concerns and agree on what they can compromise upon, given our current situation.

However, because their professions deal directly with human life and the nurture of knowledge of our children, the strike actions by nurses and teachers are not justified. The greater claim on our moral responsibility lies with the preservation of human life, i.e., the care of the sick and the elderly, and the education of our children, and not with the demands of the interim government or the nurses or the teachers. Their concerns, whatever they are, must be dealt with through another formal mechanism and not through strike actions. In this regard, the strike actions by the nurses and the teachers cannot simply be morally justified.

Furthermore, health and education are not private goods where we can simply walk off our jobs without due consideration to the consequences of our actions to ourselves and to those whom we take an oath to serve, through thick and thin. These are first and foremost, public goods and as such, any action that will endanger the provision of these services cannot be justified action, even on ethical grounds. What seems to have been forgotten by the interim government, teachers and the nurses is the whole area of compassion and empathy to the very people they have pledged to serve. We must not forget that when we demand our rights, we must also hold out our responsibilities, in this case, to the sick, the elderly and the children.

Another reason why health and education are regarded as public goods is because of our society’s fundamental responsibility to the needy and the poor among us. We exercise this responsibility by making public health care and education affordable and accessible to them. Without this fundamental entitlement, the poor will have no recourse for their need for proper health care for themselves and education for their children. We should not ever subject our people to make a choice on whether they live or die, mainly because a few among us decided to hold what belongs to the public – health and education - ransom. We must also remember that many of our people are living below the poverty line and are worst off than most of us.

Where public goods such as health and education are put at risk, our first priority is to ensure that normal services in our hospitals, health centres and schools are not interrupted. This is because these are not only public goods to which all citizens are entitled to, but, as mentioned, they directly concern human life and our people’s right to life and our children’s right to education. These are basic values from a Christian point of view, and even from a humanistic one. Human life and the right to life are absolutes and must never be made relative.

We have all being called by God during this time of need to be servants to our “brothers and sisters”. In this regard, I wish to call upon all Anglican Church parishioners in the Episcopal Unit of Vanua Levu and Taveuni, especially those who have some medical knowledge, to help out, wherever you can and at a time that is most suitable to you and your families, in the hospitals in Labasa and Taveuni or in the other health centres around Vanua Levu. I would also like to request that we organise ourselves to visit the working nurses, doctors and the sick, and to volunteer our services in helping out in other areas of need in the hospitals and health centres around Vanua Levu.

In the Love and Peace of God
+ Bishop Apimeleki Qiliho

Bishop of the Episcopal Unit of the Anglican Church in Vanua Levu and Taveuni
2/8/2007
Contact Nos.: 9467048 (m) or 8811420 (ph)

[MEDIA RELEASE ENDS]

You might also be interested in his biblical reflection on forgiveness in a Fijian context.

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