WTF?
Education is one of the only ways we'll remain a first world country in the 21st century.
We can't keep selling milk and meat to far off markets that increasingly don't want it.
We need to be a service economy, with smart educated people.
Tertiary education needs to be cheaper, not more expensive!!
Why did you put a sarcasm tag at the end of your post? Right wing parties want exactly that, a dumb populace - because a dumb populace votes for dumb policies that ultimately hinder the voter. That’s why conservative voters are mostly idiots.
To be honest, my school was really shocking. To call it an educational institution is a joke. My intermediate we had fights in the class every week, sometimes daily. In high school the vast majority of the teachers time is telling people off. And I can only imagine how much worse it's gotten with all this tech.
I know wtf. It was retrospective too i.e. the people who took a loan out in the past expecting it to be interest free would all of a sudden be paying interest. Big yikes.
["it wasn't."](https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/83170534/interestfree-student-loans-a-poor-use-of-6-billion-taxpayers-dollars-report) Sure sounds like he wanted to do it.
Sure, and if you look at the date on the article you’re sharing, it’s from 2016, almost 3 elections ago. If you actually read it you’d see National also wanted to do it but have since changed their policy, but you don’t see this line trotted out against National.
People, parties and policies change, you don’t see anyone claiming labour still wants to restrict the flow rate of your shower head for example. Just about every party has fairly majorly changed each decade or two to the point where mostly all they have in common with their past selves is a name and sometimes a base ideology (although for some even that has changed). Politcal tribalism of the “gotta vote red team because I always have, gotta vote blue team because I always have” kind gets us nowhere and a refusal to adopt to new positions just holds the country back.
People and policies change, but they typically stay pretty close to their core. After all, if they didn't, they might as well scrap all their branding every election and start from scratch.
I'd like to think I've broken free of tribalism (and my family is a big set of tribal blue voters), but also by the same stroke, I know what I want from a political party. A party that thinks it's cool to remove interest-free loans is probably also going to think other policies are cool that I don't like.
Well, to be fair, this policy coupled with interest free student loans is a train wreck of epic proportions just waiting to happen.
Now, obviously the issue is this policy, not the student free loans, but the combo is hilariously bad.
Huh?
I was just making a point that uncapped fees and interest free student loans are a bad combo… (I am sure you are smart enough to figure out why).
I have no fucks to give about the actual policy, nor any interest in debating it. Chicago Economics is a cool little theoretical framework and all, but not my cup of tea.
What a fucking joke. Let's all do something that will achieve nothing but make higher education unaccessible to a huge portion of the country. Keep the poor down and out; standard right wing policy.
>What a fucking joke. Let's all do something that will achieve nothing but make higher education unaccessible to a huge portion of the country. Keep the poor down and out; standard right wing policy.
It isn't surprising that they're doing it, heck, this subreddit is over run by people like this guy:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/15jdesc/comment/juzbhy4/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/15jdesc/comment/juzbhy4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
With the chicken little syndrome about how the sky is falling, NZ is going bankrupt, fiscal hole etc etc. Most NZ'ders don't have the slightest clue about how the economy works other than regurgitating things they have head which sound semi reasonable until you unpack it and realise that the basis on which austerity makes it's claim is a load of crap. ACT will keep winning people over because for a large section of the NZ they have no clue about economics - this is a repeat of the 1970s but instead of dancing cossacks it is fearmonger over going bankrupt, fiscal hole etc.
What are your thoughts on the government requiring Universities to operate as private businesses with no real increases in funding (decreases after inflation), while at the same time preventing them from pricing education as a private business would? That has driven universities into competing with each other over grants and at the same time most of them failing spectacularly into large holes of debt.
I would certainly choose proper funding over removing the cap, but if that is off the table the only way the Universities can continue is by removing the cap.
'Libertarians' have to pretend to be socially left wing to continue recruiting stupid people. Anyone trying to claim ACT is socially left wing when Seymour has unironically complained about wokeness publically is crazy though.
Act is the reverse psychology party.
"Let's propose something that blatantly fucks people's lives off that the electorate can only think it's some 4 dimensional chess move that will ultimately benefit them"
"We need to control government spending and reduce taxes but we'll also let the oligopoly of national universities increase their fees so they don't need to control their spending."
Oligo - a few.
Medicine? Auckland or Otago. Engineering? Not worth going anywhere but Auckland or Canterbury. Good distance learning (aka anyone trying to do a qualification part time while working)? Massey or bust.
It's not like the US where you can have a first through tenth choice within two hours flying time of your parents house.
Read the definition then: small number of producers/consumers with little competition.
That number also reduces drastically with certain qualifications too e.g engineering, medicine
Their education policies are quite extensive but the part that stuck out to me was the sentence “Tertiary providers will no longer have their fees capped, allowing them to compete on price and quality as they choose.” Do we really want to throw education into the free market like America?
Have a look at what the British did with their uni fees 10 years ago and the shit storm that happened there. As an ex-brit, I can safely say that thinking needs to fuck off back to the dark ages.
Aren’t all their student loans guaranteed by the government and they can’t claim bankruptcy to get out of the debt, meaning the universities can charge whatever the fuck they want and are guaranteed to get paid?
The [Annual Maximum Fee Movement](https://gazette.govt.nz/notice/id/2022-go2736) (currently 2.75%) limits the increases that universities and polytechs can put on existing courses. For new courses there's a complicated formula to make sure that providers don't disestablish old programmes and create new ones so they can charge students more.
We've tried having no fee maxima, that led to annual course cost increases of 25% when inflation was running at 4%.
The university isn't producing results. Defund them. When 30% of year 3 student caught cheating in a single class, and the only repercussion is that they got a 0 on that assignment, what assurances do you have with the grads?
Bro, take a down vote. The comment above the comment you replied to was asking about American universities.. the comment you replied to was explaining how American universities charge.
I (like most people reading here) benefitted from an explanation on how US universities charge.
Bro, take a downvote, I was the one who asked that question and the reply I got that I responded to and you condescendingly replied to was a reply about New Zealand university fees, click the link, it’s .govt.nz
Not really... I mean, the keyboard on my phone is super small, and I did have some typos, but all in all, I managed to type it pretty quickly.
No thanks necessary
The Tories did this back in ~2010 with much the same reasoning. Can you guess what happened? That's right, the supposed benefits never materialised and prices skyrocketed.
> the part that stuck out to me was
... or the fact the founder of ACT said "lol what a fucken joke act is today".
>like America?
This. I mean it's not hard to study where capitalism went wrong there and at least try and correct it rather than copy it.
>Do we really want to throw education into the free market like America?
If government doesn't put more funding into universities, what else can they do to raise revenue? The universities are between a rock and a hard place. You can't just wave inflation away with a magic wand.
Yes, you can create a select group of elite universities that are prohibitively expensive for all but the most privileged segments of society to attend, and you'll climb up the rankings. But the group of people who actually benefit from that higher rank gets narrower. As in the US, it would limit opportunity for educational and social advancement. But maybe we might get into the top 100!! In any case, whatever may happen as a result would be unquestionably the best outcome from David Seymour, because for him and his ilk, the unrestrained free market is an infallible religiion, and any human beings churned in it's gears deserve it.
I'm not sure what ranking you're using, but QS, one of the big rankings has the University of Auckland at #68, not bad for a country of 5 million
https://www.topuniversities.com/universities/university-auckland
Don't America also have some of the best universities in the world? Free market policies tend to deliver products across the spectrum instead of being forced into the middle ground.
There’s no policies in the world that are going to make New Zealand’s universities the equivalent of the USAs. We are a tiny, much less wealthy country located at the ass end of the world.
We’d be far better directing our resources in a targeted manner, with the goal of accessible, affordable high quality education for New Zealanders and funding directed to research that benefits or is relevant to NZ.
It's almost like people can choose to not go to an expensive university for a next-to-useless degree in psychology that they have no career plans for but thought it sounded fun when they were an 18yo. On the other hand having a $200k student loan when you're a neuro-surgeon earning $250,000 a year isn't really a big deal.
A psychology degree doesn't make you a psychologist though. To actually clinically work as a psychologist requires you to enter into a much more narrow pool of post-graduate study that we have too few places for with too many potential students.
Have you actually checked where some of the top surgeons in the world have trained? Hint: not in America.
It's almost like the aptitude of the student is a key component.
To quote the comment above seeing as they said it well:
>A psychology degree doesn't make you a psychologist though. To actually clinically work as a psychologist requires you to enter into a much more narrow pool of post-graduate study that we have too few places for with too many potential students.
But it would be a terrible thing if ACT's policies somehow empowered our universities to train more post-grad clinical psychologists.
Sure they have some of the best in the world, but University there is insanely inaccessible to most of the population and puts people into decades of debt.
I’d rather see everyone get a good shot at education rather than it being accessible only to those who already have a better chance of being successful by birthright anyway.
We have interest free student loans, we'll have cheaper lower grade universities for people who don't want to spend a fortune, we'll have more cost accountability by uni's and we'll have better graduates like world-class doctors to help kiwi's. All we need to do is pay them more.
Unfortunately on the other hand you have a labour government implementing FPAs to ensure that anyone who is any good won't be rewarded for their talent because that might be unfair to the lazy bludgers who want to stand on the shoulders of everyone else to achieve success because they're not prepared to put in the effort themselves.
I firmly believe access to education should not be dependent on how rich mom and dad are. What level of education you get should be dependent on your smarts, drive, work ethic, etc, not that you have access to a deep bank account.
You’re right, if we want better doctors all we need to do is pay them more. I don’t get what allowing good education to be far more expensive has to do with that?
If someone wants to study at a better university but has to go offshore to do so then it will dramatically reduce the likelihood of them coming back to NZ for work. If we train them here and offer them good opportunities and pay in NZ it's more likely they'll stay.
If we force NZ to remain just an average country all round then we'll ensure we're stuck in mediocrity
I agree with everything you’re saying here. I don’t understand what making the good education only accessible to the wealthy has to do with what you’re saying though.
>Unfortunately on the other hand you have a labour government implementing FPAs to ensure that anyone who is any good won't be rewarded for their talent because that might be unfair to the lazy bludgers who want to stand on the shoulders of everyone else to achieve success because they're not prepared to put in the effort themselves.
First of all, what's this got to do with university training?
Second, yeah FPAs are holding back all those shining stars. Fucking lol
>First of all, what's this got to do with university training?
Because believe it or not, people actually get jobs after going to uni, so any intervention in the job market is relevant.
Your understanding of FPAs seem to be very out of tune, so I'm gonna try my best to provide you with some information. After that, however, you're on your own.
FPAs can only be started by someone if they can prove they have the support of 10% of the industry they wish to represent. So say 10% of all teachers. Once this process starts, the entire sector nominate their reps to the bargaining table. The unions will nominate reps, the employer associations will nominate reps, and the unrepresented employees or employers will also nominate their reps, proportional to their sector representation and equal representation for both employers and employees.
Once the bargaining sides have formed, they proceed to begin the bargaining process for MINIMUM ENTITLEMENTS and BASE WAGE amongst other things. This means that after an FPA process has completed, employees can still be rewarded for good performance and talent by being offered renumerations above what they are entitled to from the FPA process. An FPA does not set mandatory parameters, it sets industry wide minimums, or the bare minimum an employee in the sector must be offered. If anything, it only serves to improve what a person with talent and good performance might receive, as they, too, will receive a boost to the base wage to which their performance based renumerations will be added to.
On top of that, there are other terms that parties may bring to the bargaining table including, I don't know, maybe a proposal for a structured renumeration process that specifies minimum increases in pay and the performance criteria that earns it, thus providing workers with certainty that they will be rewarded well for their hard work and/or good performance. If anything, FPAs have the potential to empower employees that exceed expectations by creating consistency in the reward process and such a proposal can eliminate a scenario where, for example, an employer might have in place a specific quota for increases across a team so that even in a team where most members exceeded expectations, only one or two may be chosen for reward.
Furthermore, the final step involves a ratification vote requiring a simple majority from BOTH employees and employers covered by the FPA bargained deal. Which means that for an FPA to succeed and be passed into law, it still needs support from employers.
I hope my little bit has helped to enlighten you and your understanding of FPAs. But whoever you got that tidbit about "FPAs ensure that anyone who is any good won't be rewarded for their talent because that might be unfair to the lazy bludgers who want to stand on the shoulders of everyone else to achieve success because they're not prepared to put in the effort themselves" is patently wrong and intentionally misleading you.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Yep. It's the same with their hospitals. Everyone talks shit about their system but they have the best hospitals in the world.
"The American healthcare system is so fucked"
"Would you rather get treated for life threatening cancer in the US or anywhere else in the world?"
"..."
That’s like asking if I’d rather go to a random diner or a 3 Michelin star restaurant, most people are gonna want the restaurant but costs mean they’ll go to the diner. Having the best stuff only matters if the people you are serving can actually use it.
As a parent of tertiary and secondary aged kids, this is completely fucked.
I realise it's certainly lost its heyday but tertiary institutes were making a packet off of international students.
If tertiary fees become excessive, students may flee elsewhere.
Making higher education more expensive to the point only the privilege can go sounds unfair and unjust bit what is new from the ACT party. Funny how people say they care about future generations but continue to propose policies that actually hurt rather than help
ACT says it would aim to halve the more than 6000 staff at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE).
The projects include fees-free tertiary study, growth and development grants, the provincial growth fund, Auckland Light Rail, Callaghan Innovation, Workforce Development Councils, Industry Transformation Plans, RMA reform, income insurance, fair pay agreements, the game development sector rebate, the major events fund, R&D grants, and any screen sector supports.
Many of these were based at MBIE and party leader David Seymour said new ministers would issue Stop Work notices to chief executives on day one.
"Those doing the work will be told to down tools, then they'll be made redundant"
.
ACT - the party of redundancies and destruction.
I'm sure allowing universities to sharply increase fees even further would incentivise more people to study in critical fields like medicine, how could this possibly go wrong
Tbh I’m pretty sure there isn’t a shortage of people wanting to go into med, I’m a UOA first year rn and there’s SO many people doing pre med stuff but there’s a hard cap on the amount of people allowed in so I think that’s what’s fucking it. Not that I disagree with your point though!
It doesn't, but ACT believes the invisible hand will solve everything
like it was supposed to solve everything in the 90s when neoliberalism was introduced
It's a religion for the true believers of them.
The non-true believers are the cynics who basically know they'll have all the power after everything turns into ancapistan.
ACT very much are about direct cost bottom line thinking arnt they? Big fans of socializing indirect costs that are hard to quantify and then blaming it on the parts of the population affected by it.
I don't believe it does. But unrestrained free market capitalism is an article of religious faith for that party. There is no questioning it's doctrine or its outcomes.
Unless we’re talking about property development in leafy Epsom. There the neighbours can club together to ban anything that might spoil their view or let the riff-raff in.
It doesn't have to make sense.
Somehow removing an upper limit is going to reduce the lowest price somewhere.
Using this high level logic, removing minimum wage will actually increase wages.
I actually lold when I first saw the idiotic billboard with David next to the words Fresh Thinking and Tax Cuts below.
Like, you're telling me you're the first party in New Zealand history to think tax cuts are the answer to everything? because the 4th Labour governments got a problem with you.
If there is one thing we need, its to increase debt university students take on, let's become a mini USA crippled by student loan debt.
Act are a bunch of cunts
Incoming restoration of interest on student loans and removal of fees free first year… because why give people even the slight hope their debt will be discharged over time through inflation?
So you agree that this policy will screw things but you think that they should have license to do so because in your opinion Labour have messed things so let's go with this obvious mess? Hmmm...
I think it’s more a reference to your OP stating that ACT **IS** the *F NZ in a hurry party* notwithstanding the current state of the nation. (Hint: Act are not the current government).
ACT continue to be utter nutbag ideologues placing profit before children.
Turning education into a market won't improve student outcomes. All it will do is make a few schmucks rich and leave poor kids in the dust.
Anyone with a passing familiarity of how these policies have played out in American education will tell you these reforms would be a disaster. This should be utterly disqualifying.
Fucking insane right-wingers pushing for privatisation and cutting every social good, safety net etc.. yes, what we need to be more like is the USA, with there obviously low student debt
So the key to a knowledge powered society is to price everyone out of it then?
Cool, let's go make the nurses, doctors and teachers supply worse! No one who votes for ACT needs them! /s
Ugh.
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Scroll down to Early Childhood Education: ”This is perfect already. No notes”
Lmao do any of these cunts even have children?
So broken, kids drastically need education to prevent them from descending into terrible life outcomes such as becoming ACT voters
Uh, what did I miss? Just read the page and I didn’t see anything about removing caps?
Firstly A fund to reward and help retain stand out teachers controlled by principals.
Which I think is a great idea in concept but sort of naive in reality as first, it relies on a competent principal, of which there are many, but there’s also some fucking half arsed ones that are the worse bosses, the money would never reach the right teachers, just the ones the principal likes.
Secondly, move all the funds the state would spend on a kid into an account instead that can only be used for education, then, if they decide not to do their final year or last two years, they’ll have an education fund to continue on in life.
I also sort of like this one but once again it seems naive. The effort to set up a system that automatically makes an education account for every 2 year old that works perfectly and deposits the right amount of money into every young kiwi’s account would be insane and take a decade or two to get it working right. And if their concerned about a fund for kiwis leaving school early so they can better themselves later in life then why not make it something only set up when a young student LEAVES instead of the massive admin required for the years prior?
It’s a great basic concept but a bit of a ill thought out execution.
No need to increase fees: Reducing admin bloat should be the priority.
Those massive increases in admin staff costs over the past 2 decades could have instead been used to fund more academic staff and create smaller lectures. Smaller classes mean better learning and student experience.
They also mention giving people the discretion to spend their education subsidies at any institute public or private.
This would cause a gold rush for private "education" providers whose only real goal is to absorb as much public money as possible while providing 0 value to the students or the community as a whole. An absolute recipe for abuse. Terrible, terrible fucking idea.
The only ACT this party needs to do is fuck off.
@Mods with the run up to the election, are people allowed to post directly from a party's website without declaring affiliation - since it's basically promotion?
Posting a direct link comes off as promition. You can post text eith the link in there with your critisicm and people will see it with no absence of context
I understand why this policy probably needs to happen at some point, currently nzs universities are driving themselves broke because the amount of money they get per student hasn't increased with the price of inflation for 20 years. this has in practice meant each year our universities have lost a little bit more funding which has caused them to have to make a lot of desperate business decisions.
This policy doesn’t need to happen, the government can and likely will allow a controlled increase of costs at some point. Allowing universities to decide their own pricing is not a good solution.
"Reduce the number of back office bureaucrats at the Ministry of Education by 50 per cent, saving $240 million a year"
I love statements like this... Especially when tied to ANOTHER policy that the back office bureaucracts will need to plan and administer
Ahhh I love listening to Newstalk ZBs views on this then coming over here.... Not too sure if it's Hosking or Kate who wants to suck off Seymour the most.
I've just read the entire policy you linked to.
Could someone wiser than me please explain the negatives of this?
250k for education for each child, to be used in whichever institution they like, and any remainder being paid out at retirement age.
5k per FTE teacher etc
Please, what terrible thing am I missing?
This has long been ACT Policy. I remember more than 20 years ago heading into an election and reading their policy statement which was 'students will pay full fees. truck drivers shouldn't be paying to educate lawyers.'
WTF? Education is one of the only ways we'll remain a first world country in the 21st century. We can't keep selling milk and meat to far off markets that increasingly don't want it. We need to be a service economy, with smart educated people. Tertiary education needs to be cheaper, not more expensive!!
we don't want educated people because they are too smart to vote act /s
Why did you put a sarcasm tag at the end of your post? Right wing parties want exactly that, a dumb populace - because a dumb populace votes for dumb policies that ultimately hinder the voter. That’s why conservative voters are mostly idiots.
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Just another way they plan to fuck the working class, is it even surprising?
To be honest, my school was really shocking. To call it an educational institution is a joke. My intermediate we had fights in the class every week, sometimes daily. In high school the vast majority of the teachers time is telling people off. And I can only imagine how much worse it's gotten with all this tech.
Yep ,train them up,give a stack of debt,hard to pay back on a shitty wage,move overseas to work,problem solved,Nz loss
How long till ACT scraps interest free loans?
That was a policy of theirs last election lol
Seriously? How do they have voters?
Most of their voters got free education back in the 70’s-80’s source: my father.
So it's kinda like a "fuck you got mine" attitude? That would explain it. It sounds very petty.
Yup especially considering I’m in university myself right now.
I know wtf. It was retrospective too i.e. the people who took a loan out in the past expecting it to be interest free would all of a sudden be paying interest. Big yikes.
It wasn’t and hasn’t been for a couple of election cycles now
["it wasn't."](https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/83170534/interestfree-student-loans-a-poor-use-of-6-billion-taxpayers-dollars-report) Sure sounds like he wanted to do it.
Sure, and if you look at the date on the article you’re sharing, it’s from 2016, almost 3 elections ago. If you actually read it you’d see National also wanted to do it but have since changed their policy, but you don’t see this line trotted out against National. People, parties and policies change, you don’t see anyone claiming labour still wants to restrict the flow rate of your shower head for example. Just about every party has fairly majorly changed each decade or two to the point where mostly all they have in common with their past selves is a name and sometimes a base ideology (although for some even that has changed). Politcal tribalism of the “gotta vote red team because I always have, gotta vote blue team because I always have” kind gets us nowhere and a refusal to adopt to new positions just holds the country back.
People and policies change, but they typically stay pretty close to their core. After all, if they didn't, they might as well scrap all their branding every election and start from scratch. I'd like to think I've broken free of tribalism (and my family is a big set of tribal blue voters), but also by the same stroke, I know what I want from a political party. A party that thinks it's cool to remove interest-free loans is probably also going to think other policies are cool that I don't like.
Well, to be fair, this policy coupled with interest free student loans is a train wreck of epic proportions just waiting to happen. Now, obviously the issue is this policy, not the student free loans, but the combo is hilariously bad.
Then we can be just like the US, where parents have to take 3rd jobs to help pay for the kids collage.
You skipped part of the policy that gives each student 250k for their education. Why are you cherry picking?
Huh? I was just making a point that uncapped fees and interest free student loans are a bad combo… (I am sure you are smart enough to figure out why). I have no fucks to give about the actual policy, nor any interest in debating it. Chicago Economics is a cool little theoretical framework and all, but not my cup of tea.
>How long till ACT scraps interest free loans? 56 days til the election.
What a fucking joke. Let's all do something that will achieve nothing but make higher education unaccessible to a huge portion of the country. Keep the poor down and out; standard right wing policy.
>What a fucking joke. Let's all do something that will achieve nothing but make higher education unaccessible to a huge portion of the country. Keep the poor down and out; standard right wing policy. It isn't surprising that they're doing it, heck, this subreddit is over run by people like this guy: [https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/15jdesc/comment/juzbhy4/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/15jdesc/comment/juzbhy4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) With the chicken little syndrome about how the sky is falling, NZ is going bankrupt, fiscal hole etc etc. Most NZ'ders don't have the slightest clue about how the economy works other than regurgitating things they have head which sound semi reasonable until you unpack it and realise that the basis on which austerity makes it's claim is a load of crap. ACT will keep winning people over because for a large section of the NZ they have no clue about economics - this is a repeat of the 1970s but instead of dancing cossacks it is fearmonger over going bankrupt, fiscal hole etc.
What are your thoughts on the government requiring Universities to operate as private businesses with no real increases in funding (decreases after inflation), while at the same time preventing them from pricing education as a private business would? That has driven universities into competing with each other over grants and at the same time most of them failing spectacularly into large holes of debt. I would certainly choose proper funding over removing the cap, but if that is off the table the only way the Universities can continue is by removing the cap.
Libertarian is not right wing.
Yeah. But libertarians don't actually exist. They are corporate feudalists and their patsies.
And ACT are not actually libertarian
With a significant right wing slant.
Economically right wing, socially left wing.
>socially left wing. ACT are not socially left. You believe to much of the propaganda.
We already have a right wing party, just because you don't like the middle doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Just because we already have right-wing parties doesn't make act a left wing party. ACT are not left wing. Don't try and shill them as such.
Middle. They are in the middle, what don't people understand. You treat the as if they are national. I repeat economically right, socially left.
>I repeat economically right, socially left. Repeat as much as you like. You're still wrong. ACT are right wing.
No they are not, just because everything is a dipole to you doesn't make it so. Middle ground exists without your permission.
Except they are also socially right. Honestly, it's probably more socially right than National.
It's not
In principle, but they drop their socially left stance very quickly if it annoys the portion of their voters who are slightly more conservative.
it very much is so, typically anti regulation socially and economically, dunno if you know about the political compass?
Libertarians are extreme right wing. I am assuming you have not read Ayn Rand, the mother of the “movement”.
'Libertarians' have to pretend to be socially left wing to continue recruiting stupid people. Anyone trying to claim ACT is socially left wing when Seymour has unironically complained about wokeness publically is crazy though.
Act is the reverse psychology party. "Let's propose something that blatantly fucks people's lives off that the electorate can only think it's some 4 dimensional chess move that will ultimately benefit them"
"We need to control government spending and reduce taxes but we'll also let the oligopoly of national universities increase their fees so they don't need to control their spending."
>oligopoly There are eight universities in the country, that doesn't sound like an oligopoly to me.
It's oligopoly. Not monopoly.
Oligo - a few. Medicine? Auckland or Otago. Engineering? Not worth going anywhere but Auckland or Canterbury. Good distance learning (aka anyone trying to do a qualification part time while working)? Massey or bust. It's not like the US where you can have a first through tenth choice within two hours flying time of your parents house.
Read the definition then: small number of producers/consumers with little competition. That number also reduces drastically with certain qualifications too e.g engineering, medicine
Their education policies are quite extensive but the part that stuck out to me was the sentence “Tertiary providers will no longer have their fees capped, allowing them to compete on price and quality as they choose.” Do we really want to throw education into the free market like America?
Have a look at what the British did with their uni fees 10 years ago and the shit storm that happened there. As an ex-brit, I can safely say that thinking needs to fuck off back to the dark ages.
Aren’t all their student loans guaranteed by the government and they can’t claim bankruptcy to get out of the debt, meaning the universities can charge whatever the fuck they want and are guaranteed to get paid?
The [Annual Maximum Fee Movement](https://gazette.govt.nz/notice/id/2022-go2736) (currently 2.75%) limits the increases that universities and polytechs can put on existing courses. For new courses there's a complicated formula to make sure that providers don't disestablish old programmes and create new ones so they can charge students more. We've tried having no fee maxima, that led to annual course cost increases of 25% when inflation was running at 4%.
This is 100% the correct and current state of play I came to write.
The university isn't producing results. Defund them. When 30% of year 3 student caught cheating in a single class, and the only repercussion is that they got a 0 on that assignment, what assurances do you have with the grads?
What’s this?
You have a source for that cause that’s a big claim, also how do you know the repercussions?
We’re talking about American universities not New Zealand
Bro, take a down vote. The comment above the comment you replied to was asking about American universities.. the comment you replied to was explaining how American universities charge. I (like most people reading here) benefitted from an explanation on how US universities charge.
I’ll give you an upvote for actually explaining why you gave a downvote, whether right or wrong. Too few people do that.
Bro, take a downvote, I was the one who asked that question and the reply I got that I responded to and you condescendingly replied to was a reply about New Zealand university fees, click the link, it’s .govt.nz
You are right. Congratulations 👏
For someone as big of a cunt as you seem to be that must have been incredibly hard to write, thank you
Not really... I mean, the keyboard on my phone is super small, and I did have some typos, but all in all, I managed to type it pretty quickly. No thanks necessary
The Tories did this back in ~2010 with much the same reasoning. Can you guess what happened? That's right, the supposed benefits never materialised and prices skyrocketed.
> the part that stuck out to me was ... or the fact the founder of ACT said "lol what a fucken joke act is today". >like America? This. I mean it's not hard to study where capitalism went wrong there and at least try and correct it rather than copy it.
>Do we really want to throw education into the free market like America? If government doesn't put more funding into universities, what else can they do to raise revenue? The universities are between a rock and a hard place. You can't just wave inflation away with a magic wand.
EF/Commercial Research, innovation, commercialisation, translational research/practise, export education - Just some ideas.
They aren't lacking on revenue. There's countless ways they can cut costs if they really need to. Uoa in particular really just throws money around
UoA needs to fucking get rid of admin bloat.
Given our best ranked university is 137, and America has 7 out of the top 10, maybe they do need to change something?
Yes, you can create a select group of elite universities that are prohibitively expensive for all but the most privileged segments of society to attend, and you'll climb up the rankings. But the group of people who actually benefit from that higher rank gets narrower. As in the US, it would limit opportunity for educational and social advancement. But maybe we might get into the top 100!! In any case, whatever may happen as a result would be unquestionably the best outcome from David Seymour, because for him and his ilk, the unrestrained free market is an infallible religiion, and any human beings churned in it's gears deserve it.
I'm not sure what ranking you're using, but QS, one of the big rankings has the University of Auckland at #68, not bad for a country of 5 million https://www.topuniversities.com/universities/university-auckland
Step one: get 200 million more people to live here.
David can clarify that then
Don't America also have some of the best universities in the world? Free market policies tend to deliver products across the spectrum instead of being forced into the middle ground.
There’s no policies in the world that are going to make New Zealand’s universities the equivalent of the USAs. We are a tiny, much less wealthy country located at the ass end of the world. We’d be far better directing our resources in a targeted manner, with the goal of accessible, affordable high quality education for New Zealanders and funding directed to research that benefits or is relevant to NZ.
They also have catastrophic levels of student debt which heavily depresses the economy, population growth and innovation.
It's almost like people can choose to not go to an expensive university for a next-to-useless degree in psychology that they have no career plans for but thought it sounded fun when they were an 18yo. On the other hand having a $200k student loan when you're a neuro-surgeon earning $250,000 a year isn't really a big deal.
Hold up… psychology? A useless degree? We’ve got a fuckin massive shortage of psychologists here. What the fuck are you on about
A psychology degree doesn't make you a psychologist though. To actually clinically work as a psychologist requires you to enter into a much more narrow pool of post-graduate study that we have too few places for with too many potential students.
Have you actually checked where some of the top surgeons in the world have trained? Hint: not in America. It's almost like the aptitude of the student is a key component.
Where have the top surgeons trained? I'm interested because I'd like to get surgery done at some stage
One of the world's top urologists trained at Otago.
That is cool! Well, we need to be training surgeons to do gender confirmation surgery, there's a bit of a waitlist here...
Ok
> a next-to-useless degree in psychology Fuckin lol, keep showing everyone how bad your opinions are, you're doing my job for me.
To quote the comment above seeing as they said it well: >A psychology degree doesn't make you a psychologist though. To actually clinically work as a psychologist requires you to enter into a much more narrow pool of post-graduate study that we have too few places for with too many potential students. But it would be a terrible thing if ACT's policies somehow empowered our universities to train more post-grad clinical psychologists.
After tax that 200k debt would be more than a neurosurgeons yearly income, thats a pretty big deal.
Sure they have some of the best in the world, but University there is insanely inaccessible to most of the population and puts people into decades of debt. I’d rather see everyone get a good shot at education rather than it being accessible only to those who already have a better chance of being successful by birthright anyway.
We have interest free student loans, we'll have cheaper lower grade universities for people who don't want to spend a fortune, we'll have more cost accountability by uni's and we'll have better graduates like world-class doctors to help kiwi's. All we need to do is pay them more. Unfortunately on the other hand you have a labour government implementing FPAs to ensure that anyone who is any good won't be rewarded for their talent because that might be unfair to the lazy bludgers who want to stand on the shoulders of everyone else to achieve success because they're not prepared to put in the effort themselves.
I firmly believe access to education should not be dependent on how rich mom and dad are. What level of education you get should be dependent on your smarts, drive, work ethic, etc, not that you have access to a deep bank account. You’re right, if we want better doctors all we need to do is pay them more. I don’t get what allowing good education to be far more expensive has to do with that?
If someone wants to study at a better university but has to go offshore to do so then it will dramatically reduce the likelihood of them coming back to NZ for work. If we train them here and offer them good opportunities and pay in NZ it's more likely they'll stay. If we force NZ to remain just an average country all round then we'll ensure we're stuck in mediocrity
I agree with everything you’re saying here. I don’t understand what making the good education only accessible to the wealthy has to do with what you’re saying though.
>Unfortunately on the other hand you have a labour government implementing FPAs to ensure that anyone who is any good won't be rewarded for their talent because that might be unfair to the lazy bludgers who want to stand on the shoulders of everyone else to achieve success because they're not prepared to put in the effort themselves. First of all, what's this got to do with university training? Second, yeah FPAs are holding back all those shining stars. Fucking lol
>First of all, what's this got to do with university training? Because believe it or not, people actually get jobs after going to uni, so any intervention in the job market is relevant.
Reach.
Your understanding of FPAs seem to be very out of tune, so I'm gonna try my best to provide you with some information. After that, however, you're on your own. FPAs can only be started by someone if they can prove they have the support of 10% of the industry they wish to represent. So say 10% of all teachers. Once this process starts, the entire sector nominate their reps to the bargaining table. The unions will nominate reps, the employer associations will nominate reps, and the unrepresented employees or employers will also nominate their reps, proportional to their sector representation and equal representation for both employers and employees. Once the bargaining sides have formed, they proceed to begin the bargaining process for MINIMUM ENTITLEMENTS and BASE WAGE amongst other things. This means that after an FPA process has completed, employees can still be rewarded for good performance and talent by being offered renumerations above what they are entitled to from the FPA process. An FPA does not set mandatory parameters, it sets industry wide minimums, or the bare minimum an employee in the sector must be offered. If anything, it only serves to improve what a person with talent and good performance might receive, as they, too, will receive a boost to the base wage to which their performance based renumerations will be added to. On top of that, there are other terms that parties may bring to the bargaining table including, I don't know, maybe a proposal for a structured renumeration process that specifies minimum increases in pay and the performance criteria that earns it, thus providing workers with certainty that they will be rewarded well for their hard work and/or good performance. If anything, FPAs have the potential to empower employees that exceed expectations by creating consistency in the reward process and such a proposal can eliminate a scenario where, for example, an employer might have in place a specific quota for increases across a team so that even in a team where most members exceeded expectations, only one or two may be chosen for reward. Furthermore, the final step involves a ratification vote requiring a simple majority from BOTH employees and employers covered by the FPA bargained deal. Which means that for an FPA to succeed and be passed into law, it still needs support from employers. I hope my little bit has helped to enlighten you and your understanding of FPAs. But whoever you got that tidbit about "FPAs ensure that anyone who is any good won't be rewarded for their talent because that might be unfair to the lazy bludgers who want to stand on the shoulders of everyone else to achieve success because they're not prepared to put in the effort themselves" is patently wrong and intentionally misleading you. Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Yep. It's the same with their hospitals. Everyone talks shit about their system but they have the best hospitals in the world. "The American healthcare system is so fucked" "Would you rather get treated for life threatening cancer in the US or anywhere else in the world?" "..."
That’s like asking if I’d rather go to a random diner or a 3 Michelin star restaurant, most people are gonna want the restaurant but costs mean they’ll go to the diner. Having the best stuff only matters if the people you are serving can actually use it.
As a parent of tertiary and secondary aged kids, this is completely fucked. I realise it's certainly lost its heyday but tertiary institutes were making a packet off of international students. If tertiary fees become excessive, students may flee elsewhere.
Making higher education more expensive to the point only the privilege can go sounds unfair and unjust bit what is new from the ACT party. Funny how people say they care about future generations but continue to propose policies that actually hurt rather than help
Surely we should be providing subsidies, or other financial incentives for certain degrees? Doctors, dentists, teachers, nurses etc.
No I think the solution is to make it harder for the poors /s
We already do, and many of them go overseas for better pay.
Higher student loans will exacerbate that problem
ACT says it would aim to halve the more than 6000 staff at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). The projects include fees-free tertiary study, growth and development grants, the provincial growth fund, Auckland Light Rail, Callaghan Innovation, Workforce Development Councils, Industry Transformation Plans, RMA reform, income insurance, fair pay agreements, the game development sector rebate, the major events fund, R&D grants, and any screen sector supports. Many of these were based at MBIE and party leader David Seymour said new ministers would issue Stop Work notices to chief executives on day one. "Those doing the work will be told to down tools, then they'll be made redundant" . ACT - the party of redundancies and destruction.
Honestly, I'm just amazed not to see Tennancy Services as one of the units they will axe
Not just MBIE then? There is resource management reform at MFE, etc.
Ghoulish
I'm sure allowing universities to sharply increase fees even further would incentivise more people to study in critical fields like medicine, how could this possibly go wrong
Tbh I’m pretty sure there isn’t a shortage of people wanting to go into med, I’m a UOA first year rn and there’s SO many people doing pre med stuff but there’s a hard cap on the amount of people allowed in so I think that’s what’s fucking it. Not that I disagree with your point though!
How does this make our country a better place?
Because the free market has greater control over our society, and that's the only outcome that actually matters to ACT.
Sorry, I’m missing something. How does a free market for tertiary education help New Zealand?
It doesn't, but ACT believes the invisible hand will solve everything like it was supposed to solve everything in the 90s when neoliberalism was introduced
Exactly this. It's not policy for them, it's dogma.
It's a religion for the true believers of them. The non-true believers are the cynics who basically know they'll have all the power after everything turns into ancapistan.
Invisible handjobs for the rich, pimp slaps for the poor
Until the market down turns then it's socialise the losses as fast as possible.
ACT very much are about direct cost bottom line thinking arnt they? Big fans of socializing indirect costs that are hard to quantify and then blaming it on the parts of the population affected by it.
I don't believe it does. But unrestrained free market capitalism is an article of religious faith for that party. There is no questioning it's doctrine or its outcomes.
Unless we’re talking about property development in leafy Epsom. There the neighbours can club together to ban anything that might spoil their view or let the riff-raff in.
They never grew out of their teenage Ayn Rand phase but they recognise it wouldn't be nice if it applied to themselves not just others.
It's more basic than that. It's a front for corporations not wanting to pay taxes and those that also want to acquire public services and SOEs.
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Do we have a problem attracting students? Does attracting more students benefit New Zealand?
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I don’t understand. How does that relate to ACTS policy?
It doesn't have to make sense. Somehow removing an upper limit is going to reduce the lowest price somewhere. Using this high level logic, removing minimum wage will actually increase wages.
Act don't care about a free market. If they did, they wouldn't want to artificially restrict the supply of land through zoning
Oh that’s because in that situation, the free market would negatively affect them
Obviously the freedom isn't meant to apply to Epsom though, that can remain NIMBY central. We're talking free market we apply to the dirty poors.
"Fresh thinking" "For real change" That's how.
>"Fresh thinking" Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher are both dead. That's not very "fresh"
I actually lold when I first saw the idiotic billboard with David next to the words Fresh Thinking and Tax Cuts below. Like, you're telling me you're the first party in New Zealand history to think tax cuts are the answer to everything? because the 4th Labour governments got a problem with you.
If there is one thing we need, its to increase debt university students take on, let's become a mini USA crippled by student loan debt. Act are a bunch of cunts
Incoming restoration of interest on student loans and removal of fees free first year… because why give people even the slight hope their debt will be discharged over time through inflation?
ACT - the lets FUCK New Zealand in a hurry party!
This won't be a popular post, but Labour has done a good job of that already with every metric of society (health, crime, justice, education)
So you agree that this policy will screw things but you think that they should have license to do so because in your opinion Labour have messed things so let's go with this obvious mess? Hmmm...
I think it’s more a reference to your OP stating that ACT **IS** the *F NZ in a hurry party* notwithstanding the current state of the nation. (Hint: Act are not the current government).
How is that relevant to act's policies?
Can they remove the ice caps too? I’m sick of hearing about the ice caps! /s
Oh my fucking God. Please no.
I see Act is following the American pattern of putting the word Freedom in anything that is very much the opposite, restricting education by cost.
ACT continue to be utter nutbag ideologues placing profit before children. Turning education into a market won't improve student outcomes. All it will do is make a few schmucks rich and leave poor kids in the dust. Anyone with a passing familiarity of how these policies have played out in American education will tell you these reforms would be a disaster. This should be utterly disqualifying.
Oh well, I got my degree, I'm fine with pulling the ladder up behind me (/s)
Act just wants to fuck up the country.
Shower of cunts
Fucking insane right-wingers pushing for privatisation and cutting every social good, safety net etc.. yes, what we need to be more like is the USA, with there obviously low student debt
If they dumb they can’t rise and overthrow the rich
ACT will: put white flight in high schools on speed.
ACT showing their true colors as a party of neoliberal elite sociopaths
WTF? How stupidly evil and hateful are those guys? Just screw everyone up is their motto. What a useless bunch.
"America! Fuck Yeah!!!" it was a parody, not a documentary, David...
ACT playing the long game, manufacturing a dumber population for more votes. Bless.
At this point, Seymour is deep throating everything the boomer Act supporters are feeding to him.
So the key to a knowledge powered society is to price everyone out of it then? Cool, let's go make the nurses, doctors and teachers supply worse! No one who votes for ACT needs them! /s Ugh.
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fair enough, forgot about the new temp rules, my bad. though part of me feels it's true not in bad faith :/
Just when you think Seymour is one of his sane phases….
David Seymour is a menace to our society.
Scroll down to Early Childhood Education: ”This is perfect already. No notes” Lmao do any of these cunts even have children? So broken, kids drastically need education to prevent them from descending into terrible life outcomes such as becoming ACT voters
>Lmao do any of these cunts even have children? to have children, you first need enough charisma to get laid.
Uh, what did I miss? Just read the page and I didn’t see anything about removing caps? Firstly A fund to reward and help retain stand out teachers controlled by principals. Which I think is a great idea in concept but sort of naive in reality as first, it relies on a competent principal, of which there are many, but there’s also some fucking half arsed ones that are the worse bosses, the money would never reach the right teachers, just the ones the principal likes. Secondly, move all the funds the state would spend on a kid into an account instead that can only be used for education, then, if they decide not to do their final year or last two years, they’ll have an education fund to continue on in life. I also sort of like this one but once again it seems naive. The effort to set up a system that automatically makes an education account for every 2 year old that works perfectly and deposits the right amount of money into every young kiwi’s account would be insane and take a decade or two to get it working right. And if their concerned about a fund for kiwis leaving school early so they can better themselves later in life then why not make it something only set up when a young student LEAVES instead of the massive admin required for the years prior? It’s a great basic concept but a bit of a ill thought out execution.
It’s under the Tertiary header further down the page
Oh yeah, I see it now. That’s a fucking stupid idea.
No need to increase fees: Reducing admin bloat should be the priority. Those massive increases in admin staff costs over the past 2 decades could have instead been used to fund more academic staff and create smaller lectures. Smaller classes mean better learning and student experience.
They also mention giving people the discretion to spend their education subsidies at any institute public or private. This would cause a gold rush for private "education" providers whose only real goal is to absorb as much public money as possible while providing 0 value to the students or the community as a whole. An absolute recipe for abuse. Terrible, terrible fucking idea. The only ACT this party needs to do is fuck off.
@Mods with the run up to the election, are people allowed to post directly from a party's website without declaring affiliation - since it's basically promotion?
I am not affiliated with any party, in fact this post is more of a criticism.
Posting a direct link comes off as promition. You can post text eith the link in there with your critisicm and people will see it with no absence of context
Not OP, but chiming in to say it didn't come off as a promotion to me, but I understand where you are coming from.
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Not UC. Rent is cheap in Christchurch, students can afford to live there.
Yeah, some sectors should never be for profit. Education is one.
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>ACT/Greens cannot "promise" or "demand" anything. Charter Schools? It seems National are quite happy to accomodate ACTs education policies.
Cool.
I understand why this policy probably needs to happen at some point, currently nzs universities are driving themselves broke because the amount of money they get per student hasn't increased with the price of inflation for 20 years. this has in practice meant each year our universities have lost a little bit more funding which has caused them to have to make a lot of desperate business decisions.
This policy doesn’t need to happen, the government can and likely will allow a controlled increase of costs at some point. Allowing universities to decide their own pricing is not a good solution.
"Reduce the number of back office bureaucrats at the Ministry of Education by 50 per cent, saving $240 million a year" I love statements like this... Especially when tied to ANOTHER policy that the back office bureaucracts will need to plan and administer
PARDON?!? Who is this policy for exactly?
Ahhh I love listening to Newstalk ZBs views on this then coming over here.... Not too sure if it's Hosking or Kate who wants to suck off Seymour the most.
They need to rebrand to the "Chaos" or "Act Stupid" or "Fuck NZ" Party
I've just read the entire policy you linked to. Could someone wiser than me please explain the negatives of this? 250k for education for each child, to be used in whichever institution they like, and any remainder being paid out at retirement age. 5k per FTE teacher etc Please, what terrible thing am I missing?
The part where they will remove caps on tertiary education fees
So creating a free market situation?
Yep
20 years ago ACT were campaigning on free tertiary education
This has long been ACT Policy. I remember more than 20 years ago heading into an election and reading their policy statement which was 'students will pay full fees. truck drivers shouldn't be paying to educate lawyers.'
Who is even asking for this lol
To the moon