Voting students
Talking about “the student vote” is a little demeaning, because it can suggest that students vote as a bloc and only care about “student issues”. Nevertheless, journalists - because shorthand is inevitable in the media - continue to go down this path. For example, it has become fashionable to say that Labour’s student loan policy has hurt the Greens among young voters. In the absence of any compelling statistical evidence, I’m not really sure about that, and so won’t profess a strong opinion either way.
Certainly, Labour’s student loan policy will be attractive to many young voters (though the Greens’ loan policy is clearly better), but I struggle to believe that all that many people would allow it to be the determinative factor in their electoral decision-making. However, the temptation of Labour’s student loan policy must be acknowledged, and countered. This message went through to Victoria University students yesterday, with a strong Greens@Vic presence at a speech on campus by Education Minister Trevor Mallard.
NZPA spoke to Greens@Vic spokesperson Quentin Duthie yesterday:
“No doubt people who respected the Greens’ tertiary policy have been tempted by Labour,” he told NZPA.
The message Greens@Vic - which has 150 members on campus - was sending to students who wanted Labour’s policy implemented, was to vote strategically for a Labour-Greens coalition.
“We’ve got an uphill battle to remind students we’ve got the better tertiary education policy.”
The Greens are rolling out ads in student magazines over the last two weeks of the campaign in an effort to connect with young voters.
The first ad acknowledges that, like all voters, students care about a whole range of issues. Treating young voters as “whole people”, it talks about student allowances, foreign policy, GE, climate change, transport, drugs, minimum wages, and bigotry.
The second ad is a tongue-in-cheek attempt to make the point that while other parties are talking about rubbish (e.g. by raising the spectre of illusory bogeymen), the Greens are talking about the issues that really matter, the real challenges facing us as a nation.
I’d be interested in your feedback…
August 31st, 2005 at 9:52 am
The afore-quoted Quentin here: The second part of my point that didn’t get in the article was that students do care about many issues, not just tertiary policy. On the stall yesterday I had indepth conversations about foreign policy and race relations, for example. At today’s VUWSA AGM, the environmental club Gecko will be promoting Vote for the Environment. Students respect Green policy across the board, and while some will have been tempted by the calculators and free loans and Mallard’s honking, on voting day Green supporters will remember the strength of our whole policy, and also that strategically, a Green party vote is most effective for getting Labour’s interest-free loans AS WELL AS Green ideas and solutions to the real issues.
August 31st, 2005 at 7:28 pm
how about having the ads downloadable ???
September 1st, 2005 at 10:43 am
I actually have no idea what the second ad is supposed to mean… compared to the first, which states why people should vote for the Greens
Yes they’re talking nonsense, but why are the Greens better?
There are good (and non-environmental) reasons, no-one knows them yet!