by frog
By now, it’s a tried and true PR trick: give the media a slow trickle of vague pointers about what’s going to be in the Budget so you can get positive media coverage in the weeks (even months) before the Big Day. I would have thought, though, that you’d actually have to provide the media with some indication of what you’re going to do before you’re accorded glowing coverage.
Alas, no. It seems that all the Government has to do to get positive media coverage about tertiary education these days is to say: “Yeah, we’re on to it. We’re going to do something about that.”
On Friday, yet another report came out damning this government’s tertiary education policy, this time on the levels of student debt and stress among teachers. And how did some of the stories on the radio and the press play the new evidence? Well, they trumpeted, “the Government is promising action on student debt”. What action? When? How much? Well, they’re not saying, and, apparently, that’s not really what’s important. It’s the words, not the actions, that matter.
In fact, what Association Education Minister David Benson-Pope said was:
We know more needs to be done and we are progressively improving student loan and allowance rules. I can’t go into detail at this stage because of the budget process.
Well, that’s great, but I don’t know that you should get credit for this until you actually announce what you’re planning to do. Anyway, Mr Benson-Pope also blamed National for allowing student debt to spiral out of control. Someone really needs to teach Mr Benson-Pope about the colour of kettles. In 1999, when Labour came to power, the average student loan balance was $11,665. By 2004, it had ballooned by 24 per cent to $14,424. In the same period, the total amount of student debt more than doubled from $2.89 billion to $5.96 billion.
Labour has certainly done some minor tweaking around the edges of the student loan and allowance schemes, which has benefited some students in very small ways. But the fact remains that it has no room whatsoever for complacency. And, lamentably, an appetite for the type of strong action really needed to combat the student debt problem seems nowhere to be found within its current ranks.
Published in Media | Society & Culture by frog on Sun, May 1st, 2005
Tags: environment
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
What I’d like to know is the history behind and the justifications given for charging a rate of interest anything more than inflation.
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Christiaan,
The loan scheme was set up under Phil Goff as minister of education during the Lange/Roger Douglas Labour regime. The claim at the time was that anything less than market interest rates would disrupt the free market in credit, eg causing students to ‘max out their loans in order to pay down their mortgages’. ACT has made similar claims since.
This ‘logic’ (and I use the word loosely) has not been used anywhere else in the Western world: as a result we ended up with a student loan scheme that even Americans consider draconian (USA has a much kinder federal student loan scheme than ours). Quite how the supporters of market-like interest rates failed to notice that overseas loans scheme don’t hit the problems that claimed were ‘inevitable’ I won’t go into.
The student loan scheme has been tweaked since, but the basic history is that is started draconion so minor changes haven’t yet made a really big difference.
A further complication is that student debt is turning into a major part of the govt’s debt, so lowering interest is now a major budget-shock to the govt. This is the ‘intertia’ problem – the longer the loan scheme goes on, the more is owed by more people, the harder it is to change.
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