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NEWS

FEATURE

INFOGRAPHICINTERVIEWNEWS #2

FEE FO FIE FUMBLE

MORRISON CAUGHT OUT AT SILLY POINT

THE OTHER DAVID

OH MARY JANE

MAHARAJ SNAPPED ON SNAPPER ISSUE

VUWSA Presidential candidate Thomas Maharaj has been falsely implying that his connections to Snapper would make him better placed to achieve fare discounts for tertiary students.

A number of students reported to Salient Thomas Maharaj had told them that “just between you and me” he had connections at Snapper which would help him to introduce student fares. On his campaign Facebook page, one comment suggests Maharaj’s father owns Snapper.

Since the story was published this evening, Maharaj has contacted Salient to deny the extent to which he has been relying on personal connections to support his campaign.

“[N]ever have I said that these connections would achieve fairer fares—although to some extent, I do believe that these connections can be helpful.”

The companies register reveals Maharaj’s father, Noel Maharaj, is CEO and owns 25 per cent of HTS Group Limited (HTS). HTS are contracted by Snapper to provide services and maintenance. Maharaj has

admitted he worked for his father’s company in the past—most recently in January this year—providing installation services for electronics on buses.

A representative of HTS told Salient the company did not have any influence on fares for any group, including for tertiary students.

“It has to do with the equipment, the installation, the maintenance of the card… it’s not to do with fares and stuff,” they said.

When asked by Salient on his plans to achieve fairer fares given the absence of influence HTS has on fare structures, Maharaj stated the importance of connections with councillors and central government. Maharaj has worked with Labour MP Trevor Mallard as a community organiser, and also with Greater Wellington Regional Councillor (GWRC) Paul Bruce.

Fares in the wider Wellington region are decided by the GWRC. In June, the GWRC announced a long-term draft proposal for fare structures which did not include fare subsidies for tertiary students. [S]

Chris McIntyre

Maharaj

on Snapper IssueSNAPPED

What did you think of the politics of the day when

you were a Scarfie? I was a Scarfie in the early ’80s, so that was the last days of Muldoon. To say I was no Muldoon

fan was an understatement—I thought he was awful, I thought his economic management was a joke, I really hated the way he overrode good process and public involvement with things like the Economic Development Act. It was basically what he wanted, and when. That’s how the Clive Dam was built, among other things, which proved to be very expensive.

How much did it cost you to go to university?I grew up in a generation where we had a better deal than students have today, and I’ve always been very conscious of that. I want to make sure that today’s generation gets a better chance than they’re currently getting. I forget exactly how much fees were, but from what I can recall is, if I worked at the pub in the weekends, and worked in the varsity holidays I could normally make the budget pretty much balance, except for in my last year when I got into debt a little bit. But I was able to get through. In those days we had a bursary as well, which helped people. We didn’t have to take on student debt as people do now.

QA

Why do you think students of your day got a better deal than students currently?

We went through all the rigours of Rogernomics and neoliberalism and particularly in the early ’90s the idea was that education was just a market like any other, and I think that really ignored the fact that it’s a public good. It’s not only good for the individual student but also good for the community, if people are going to be productive.

What made you decide to get into politics?

I’ve always been pretty passionate about public service, but not always thinking I was going to be a politician. I was a student at Otago, I was studying politics and economics, and a couple of other things. I thought I’d probably end up working in the public service. I turned down a job at the Treasury because I didn’t like Rogernomics. About ‘87, ‘88, I went to work in Foreign Affairs and had eight years with them, a couple of postings overseas, worked on an aid programme in the South Pacific for a while.

I found that a really good learning experience, but after a while I got a bit frustrated with being a civil servant. I thought that only very rarely you got to make a decision, and I wanted to see if I could have a more direct impact. After Foreign Affairs I took some study leave, I went off to grad school on a Fulbright Scholarship. Then I went private sector for a while, to see what it was like in the so-called ‘real world’, and learned how business worked, because I thought, “well, you won’t be that useful in government if you haven’t seen it from the other side of the fence.” I did that for four years or so, and then ran for Parliament—a little earlier than I thought I might, I was 36 when I ran in 1999, in Titirangi.

And now here you are as Leader of the Opposition. Congratulations!

Thank you very much. Yeah, well, you never know how these things work out, do you? I’m just part of a really good Labour team, and we’re all committed to working together to make a difference, and hopefully that will make a difference to Kiwis.

Thinking about Labour’s presence in the political sphere at the moment, in recent years there’s been a feeling that some of Labour’s campaigning and its media presence has failed to excite voters and has missed the mark at times. What changes do you think need to be made to Labour’s public image?

Well, let me just say that it’s never easy for any party going into opposition, and I want to give credit to Phil Goff and to David Shearer and the teams that have led us through those very difficult years, where the public is typically enthusiastic about the prospect of a new government actually doing something useful. It takes four or five years to dawn on the public and I think it now has, that actually the Key government isn’t really on their side, and isn’t really showing us a way forward. So I do want to acknowledge my predecessors for all they’ve done to keep the party together and to keep us

in as good a shape as we can be.

Some of the things that I think we can do that are appropriate for this time now, are to move more towards

a proactive rather than a reactive approach to the media, to be very clear about what we stand for. Let’s be clear and different from the current Government, because they are taking

the country in a different direction from where we want to go, and let’s be as proactive and as strategic in the media as we can be, so that we are disciplined about talking about our agenda and our messages, and making sure people understand our direction.

Looking ahead to next year, with the general election coming up, what do you think will excite young voters who are traditionally and increasingly apathetic when it comes to voting?

Well, I guess the first thing I’d say to young voters is that you get what you vote for. And if you want three more years of widening gaps and an economy going nowhere, just stick with the lot you’ve got. But if you want a better chance at a good job, and if you want a country

that means something positive, you really need to think pretty hard about getting off the couch and getting out to vote on election day.

What do you think it is that makes New Zealand different from the rest of the world?

Oh, all sorts of things. According to the World Bank, we’ve actually got the highest level of “natural capital” of any country, per capita, in the world. That is, Kiwis are blessed with wonderful natural resources, whether it’s our farms or our forestry or our fisheries, and we should be able to have a good life for everybody based on that. We’ve got a wonderful cultural heritage, bicultural, Treaty partnership. I come from West Auckland which is pretty cosmopolitan, four out of ten of my constituents, nearly, weren’t born in New Zealand, so we have a pretty positive, you might call Pacific, fusion. So I look forward to living in a tolerant, decent, open-minded country where everyone can be themselves, and we celebrate difference and we celebrate culture, and we invest in the arts, and it’s good fun. I hear you two are big

“I thought, “well, you won’t be that useful in government if you haven’t seen it from the other side of the fence.”

“It’s not about me, it’s about getting a job done for Kiwis.”

Beyoncé fans?

[Laughs] Will you be going to the concert?

No, but I hear you are!

Yes we are—have you got the GCSB onto us?

Not the GCSB, yet.

What do you think are the major issues that are facing young people specifically today?

I think a lot of people are concerned about whether they can get a good job in New Zealand, or whether they have to leave the country. And a lot of their parents are hoping they’ll stick around so they can be with them too. So I think good jobs are the number one. Access to education—in the university system we’re particularly concerned about the situation of postgrad students for whom the ability to continue to take out student loans is limited by the current government. A lot of people won’t be able to finish postgrad degrees. There’s a whole lot of stuff—there’s a sense of drift, there’s a sense that the country’s not as thriving as it used to be, and in an internet world, we can make anything in the world happen right here. So we want to be able to take advantage of those opportunities.

You mentioned young people leaving the country because of jobs. What would a Labour government do to create jobs for graduates to move into?

Invest in R & D, invest in good science, look at the school-to-work transition, look at the tertiary-education-to-work opportunities. But underneath all that, there’s a strategic shift that’s got to happen, from being a sort of cost-based resource-extraction economy where basically we’re farmed or mined for someone else, to an economy which is smart and investing in knowledge and

investing in science and innovation, and commercialising that, and adding value to our raw materials, protecting our environment, enjoying tourism, and just earning a better living in the world. At the moment, it’s just a third less per capita than Australia, and we can’t sustain a further widening of that gap, really.

Where are you going to get the money to put into those areas?

Investment in R & D won’t be cheap, and we’re going to have to work hard to garner more resources for that—within a fiscal framework that is responsible and keeps us in a situation where we’ve got a well-balanced economy and our books are looking okay. But the great thing about when you move things forward, and you get some growth going, tax receipts go up, and if you’re careful with spending you can move some of those balances towards high-return areas of investment, both social and economic.

Another factor that is likely to drive young people overseas in the coming years as more and more of the Baby Boomers move into retirement, is increasing financial pressure on our generation. What can the Government do to alter this situation and what will a Labour government do?

To be honest about the cost of s u p e r a n nu at i o n . And the current government is not. They’re saying they’ll never change the age of superannuation, but they’re being

very disingenuous with younger New Zealanders by not telling them what the impact on their tax burden will be, which will virtually double if you don’t do anything about super.

What Labour stands for is keeping sustainable publicly funded universal superannuation, but moving to take some account of the fact that people are living longer by gradually raising the age from 65 to 67, starting that

process of change after 2020, while at the same time making sure that there are transitional benefits available for those who are no longer able to keep working in their regular job. And that’s important because if we do that and we resume pre-funding NZ super once we’re in surplus, then we’ll be able to drastically reduce the impact on today’s younger generation’s future taxes.

Last week, you promised to better fund tertiary education at a rally at Auckland University. How would a Labour government fund tertiary education differently to how National is?

It’s a matter of priority-setting within the Budget. We really do believe that education should be a right, not a privilege, and we really want access to education to be based on ability, not based on ability to pay. And it’s really important in terms of our future productivity that as many people as possible can get the best education they can, and it’s important for social mobility that a kid of a miner or a driver can have pretty much the same opportunities that the kid of a doctor can have. You need access to a combination of a very heavy state subsidy for public education, right through to tertiary; and the ability to finance that through a combination of part-time work and student loans.

Do you agree with popular perception among students regarding degree inflation (degrees are worth less in the job market despite costing more)?

I think it’s certainly true that internationally there is a trend towards more careers requiring more than just a basic bachelor’s. A bachelor’s is a good general foundation, but increasingly people are either getting honours, master’s, or professional qualifications on top of that. I think there is that trend, and that could be said to disadvantage those students, but the world is getting more competitive and standards are rising. To a certain extent we just have to compete with that.

“..in an internet world, we can make anything in the world happen right here.”

can get the best education they can, and it’s important for social mobility that a kid of a miner or a driver can have pretty much the same opportunities that the kid of a doctor can have. You need access to a combination of a very heavy state subsidy for public education, right through to tertiary; and the ability to finance that through a combination of part-time work and student loans.

Do you agree with popular perception among students regarding degree inflation (degrees are worth less in the job market despite costing more)?

I think it’s certainly true that internationally there is a trend towards more careers requiring more than just a basic bachelor’s. A bachelor’s is a good general foundation, but increasingly people are either getting honours, master’s, or professional qualifications on top of that. I think there is that trend, and that could be said to disadvantage those students, but the world is getting more competitive and standards are rising. To a certain extent we just have to compete with that.

What would a Labour government do to combat degree inflation?

Making sure that our tertiary-education system is as good as it can be; funding it as well as we can; helping students to keep it affordable right through their degrees, and ensuring that—which is really a matter of the universities and technical institutes’ own governance—but that the degrees and diplomas that are being taught are relevant and taught well.

What do you think of Voluntary Student Membership?

I’m worried, frankly, about the free-rider problem. I think university students’ associations do a really good job for the welfare of students. I think it’s fair if students contribute to that through membership. I didn’t particularly like the fact that the current Government made it impossible to have a required student association

membership—compulsory voluntary if you like. I would hope that we could look at a system—subject to full consultation with my caucus colleagues—where if people weren’t opting to join a students’ association, that the equivalent cost might be donated to charity or something like that. So that there wasn’t a financial incentive for people not to belong—it’s not fair if some people do the work and pay for it and others don’t.

Last week you said that you would repeal Steven Joyce’s changes to University Council size, despite the fact that it’s been supported by many Vice-Chancellors. Why?

We think that, as well as effective governance, there’s an important role for representation. I’m advised that this is not new; this is the position the Labour caucus has held for some time. We think that it’s proper that there’s a student voice on university councils, and a staff voice—as well as the voice of independent directors and academic administrators.

Why do you want to be Prime Minister?

It’s not about me, it’s about getting a

job done for Kiwis. New Zealanders want a change of direction; they don’t want a country that’s tearing itself apart. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is getting wider and wider. A lot of them are getting sick and tired of an economy that’s

stuck in first gear, and they want less unemployment and better jobs and better opportunities for young people. They want to believe that we’re a country that means something positive, and that we’re going to look after our environment and we’re going to thrive and flourish—and I just don’t think they’re seeing that under the current government. I think it’s lacking of imagination, short of ideas, and is patently governing for the few not the many. People are sick of it, they want to change. My job is to give them the opportunity to get a change by ensuring that our team works together to be a credible government-in-waiting, and create policies that will deliver a better result.

——

What We Really Want to Know…

If you could go back and give your Scarfie self one piece of advice, what would it be?

Enjoy the moment, probably.

Is that the equivalent of today’s YOLO?

YOLO, what’s YOLO?

What?! Errr… It stands for You Only Live Once.

[Laughs] Oh, I like that. Yeah, you only live once. Of course I wish I knew then what I know now. I had a lot of fun; I played sport, had good friends. I worked pretty hard, played reasonably hard. I enjoyed the university life as well as the study, so no

regrets about that.

Were you involved with the Otago University Students’ Association?

No, not formally. I wasn’t big into student politics, I was more into

Y O L O , w h a t ’ s Y O LO ?

No, not formally. I wasn’t big into student politics, I was more into sports and academics and my friends. I wasn’t a student politician.

Should the Kiwis take Sonny Bill Williams back?

Yeah, if he b e h av e s himself.

How do you feel about One Direction?

Not my gig.

Would you consider bringing your beard back?

Hmmm…. No, it might cause a revolution.

Which superpower would you have?

I’d stay on good terms with both.

What is your favourite Beyoncé song?

Hmmmm… I’m not a big Beyoncé fan.

Travesty! Is that official Labour policy?

No.

Thank God. What’s your favourite song on the Top40 right now?

The last one I listened to was

Lorde’s ‘Royals’, but my kids have been getting me to listen to Imagine Dragon’s ‘Demons’, which I like.

Are you aware of the ‘Cats That Look Like David Cunliffe’ blog?

I am.

Why do so many cats look like you?

I think people have trawled the internet to find lots of

cat photos that do, and it’s pretty funny.

So it’s misrepresentative

of the wider cat population?

Yeah I think it’s unfair to cats.

Who will you be voting for in Bird of the Year?

There’s a hot debate going on within our caucus about Bird of the Year. I think the kea is much maligned, so currently the kea’s got my vote.

Will collective responsibility apply to the Bird of the Year

vote?

No, it’s a free conscience vote.

I hear that you have chickens at your house, should I get them at my

flat?

We’ve got chooks—they’re really good at turning food

scraps into eggs.

Do you think Parliament should

Voting on campus is up in the air, following an attempt by a mayoral candidate to further disenfranchise the already overwhelmingly apathetic youth vote.

Yesterday the Wellington City Council Electoral Office confirmed that there would be no voting drop-off boxes provided at the University. However, a special voting facility will be available on Wednesday 25 September from 9.30 am to 3 pm. The initiative to have voting on campus, a first for Victoria, came about through efforts by VUWSA to try to get students engaged in September’s upcoming local-body election.

Though the Electoral Office refused to release details of the complaints, Salient understands that mayoral candidate John Morrison was one of the complainants.

In a statement released to Salient, Morrison said that his “issue is about providing the same opportunities equally to all sectors of our community,” but that he “[doesn’t] have a problem with this process”.

However, following a public backlash on social media from students who suddenly discovered an interest in local-body politics, and an outrage over a right most don’t choose to exercise, Morrison backed down from his complaint.

“I’m very unhappy about the way the matter has been handled by all concerned,” Morrison said in a statement.

“I am disappointed at the outcome of the question I raised, which was not about removing ballot boxes, but the

question of ballot boxes throughout the city at appropriate venues.”

The Electoral Officer Charlie Inggs said that after taking into account legal advice he had received, he “determined that although providing voting drop-off boxes at the University would encourage voter participation, this initiative was not communicated to all the candidates and the public at the outset, and the University library and students’ administration are not public places.”

VUWSA President Rory McCourt said he was “pretty gutted to hear anyone would complain about having postal ballot boxes on campus. It was something to get students engaged in the local elections, to do something about the notoriously low y o u t h - v o t e r turnout.”

“I’m not convinced that this is just one big misunderstanding. I think John needs to release the correspondence he’s had with the Elections Office to show exactly what he advocated for and against,” McCourt said.

“We hope with John backing down, the Elections Office will see sense and return our ballot boxes.”

The Electoral Office had not released any further statements on the campus drop-off boxes when Salient went to print. [S]

Molly McCarthy and Stella Blake-Kelly

“I’m very unhappy about the way the matter has been handled by all concerned.”

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FEEFIFOEFUMBLE

Duncan McLachlan and Cam Price

How do fees work?In the early ‘90s, the

government paid for the bulk of your education. They funded 90 per cent of your degree and set the fee level for the ten per cent that you paid. For your average student in 1990, fees were set at a flat rate of $2085 in today’s terms. In 1993, founded on a philosophy of cutting spending, the National Party began decreasing university funding levels and simultaneously transferred the responsibility for setting fees to university councils. As you can imagine, when the body in charge of setting fees was also the body receiving those fees, prices skyrocketed.

Then Labour took over and sought to halt astronomical fee rises. They froze student fees. In the years following, they introduced the Fee Maxima, which allowed university councils to increase fees each year, but by a maximum of four per cent. That maximum remains today. Nowadays, university management recommends the level at which fees should rise, with the University Council (which is made up of representatives from the Uni, the Government and the student body) having the final say. Without fail, fees rise each year by the maximum amount. The ceiling has become a flaw.

TL;DR: Through a complex and confusing process which inevitably leads to students having to pay more.

Does the uni have to raise them

all the time?

Some would say that they don’t. They will point to the fact that Massey a few years ago did not. Many students view the University Council as a group of greedy villains who don’t care about students and only care about profit. But Ian McKinnon, Chancellor of Victoria University, thinks that is a mischaracterisation. As a University Council member, McKinnon wonders: “Why would you enjoy disrupting your student body? Why would I want to kick the students in the guts?” When governing, “You are there for the betterment of that body.” Sometimes, McKinnon believes, that means making decisions that are “not palatable for students… We have a responsibility to ensure the viability of the University.”

It would be unfair to say that the University could continue to operate without increasing its funding each year. There are a number of reasons for this: first, Labour’s across-the-board fee freezes had the effect of locking in disparities in fees between universities. Put simply, in the 1990s, Auckland and Otago had better law schools and therefore charged more for them. Since then, Victoria’s Law School has risen to be the top Law faculty in the country. But the Fee Maxima has meant that we can’t increase our fees to Auckland or Otago levels (because theirs increase by four per cent each year as well), and therefore we have less money to spend on a better school.

FEEFIFOEFUMBLE

Duncan McLachlan and Cam Price

Last week, the University Council voted—somewhat unsurprisingly—to increase your fees by four per cent. Last year, they did the same. And the year be-fore that. And the year before that. The cost of your degree is forever rising. But how does it all work? Will fees always rise? Are students getting a raw deal? And what can we do about it? Duncan and Cam investigate.

Q1 Q2

Secondly, the University faces rising costs. Infla-tion alone means fees must rise by about one per cent each year just to keep the same amount of stuff. Boring accounting stuff like the deprecia-tion on assets means annual increases in costs. In order to compete in an international market for lecturers and equipment, the University has to be prepared to pay top dollar. The Tertiary Educa-tion Commission mandates that the Uni run at a three-per-cent surplus each year.

Interest-free student loans exacerbate this prob-lem. As McKinnon notes, student loans are not interest-free. In fact, the Government pays the interest on your loan for you. But this money is taken out of the tertiary-education budget as a whole. The more the Government has to spend on your loan and its interest, the less it has to spend on your uni. The result is a bizarre money-go-round: interest on student loans leads to less government funding, which leads to universities having to increase fees, which leads to increasing amounts of interest on student loans. Which is pretty shit.

What about just increasing the total tertiary-education budget to suit everyone? Fat chance. Tertiary education isn’t foremost in the wider voting public’s mind when it comes time to make the three-yearly trip to the ballot box. Fee increases and the erosion of quality are slow and subtle changes. They happen over a long, drawn-out period, which means students generally don’t cause too much of a stink. Moreover, the current government has argued that universities provide largely a private benefit and so should be funded by the private individuals who are benefiting from study. That’s why it has not increased the per-stu-dent grant to reflect cost increases. In fact, it has moved to reduce the burden it has to pay to 70 per cent, with students having to make up for the rest. Prospects of funding increases are grim.

Ultimately, the Government has offloaded responsibility for your fee rises, deflecting the responsibility of fee-setting to universities and leaving them to suffer the social and political flak. David Alsop, one of two Student Representatives on the University Council, believes that, “there is a perception among students that fees are rising and quality is remaining static, or worse, falling… If this perception is maintained, there is a nega-tive reputational effect on the University”. The Dominion Post was so eager for an anti-university

spin on fees that last week, it misquoted VUWSA President Rory McCourt as saying that the Uni was increasing fees by $2500—ten times the actual fee increase. Perhaps this issue has come to a head most clearly at the University of Auckland, where students are locked out of their fee-setting meeting due to the intensity of their protests. There, the relationship seems broken. However, this is more a function of structural changes by successive governments than a fault of university management.

TL;DR: Not necessarily, but it’s inevitable largely because of successive governments’ policies.

Do we see an increase in

quality relative to increase in cost?Fee increases are not a bad thing per se. If fees went up four per cent, but the quality of the University went up ten per cent, there would be no prob-lem. The larger issue is whether we actually do get four-per-cent extra value to match the fee increase. Anecdotal evidence suggests students don’t feel that we are. There are fewer tutorials. The Gender Stud-ies department was axed. The Politics department suffered massive cuts. Of particular concern is a shift in focus away from hands-on time and toward less student-oriented endeavours, namely research. Along with per-student funding, universities also get government funding through the Performance Based Research Fund. Basically, it incentivises good lectur-ers to spend more time researching, and less time in the classroom teaching. McCourt agrees:

“There is such an emphasis on research at the mo-ment that we have great lecturers who are being pushed into the back office to do more research. We have less contact time. You have international students at undergraduate level who are treated like cash cows. It’s because it’s not about teaching and learning anymore. It’s about research.”

The University disagrees. McKinnon argues that: “Universities are a dual motorway. Both carriageways matter: the research carriageway and the teaching-and-learning carriageway.” This year, we were rated the best university for research in New Zealand. We are producing students who go on to do amazing things: whether that be being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize or playing for the All Blacks.

Q3

So students and the Uni disagree on whether quality is increasing. What’s new? The real issue is that there is no way of breaching that divide. There is a dearth of information available to students as to the University’s justification for fee rises. The document produced for students outlin-ing the reason for fee increases spent only half a page giving vague reasons for spending increases, but failed to show exactly where the extra money was going. Apparently the money is partially needed to continue “…development of Victoria’s distinctiveness, engaging with New Zealand, con-necting with the world”. Whatever that means. It’s impossible to say whether the four per cent has improved quality if we aren’t even told specifically where that four per cent has gone.

Further, the Uni might say that quality has increased, but they fail to put their money where their mouth is by using student satisfaction as a metric for justifying fee rises. It is preposter-ous that a company would not take into account customer satisfaction when deciding its prices, but that’s what happens thanks to the current processes in place.

McKinnon disagrees with these criticisms. He argues that providing so much information would be “a macro exercise”. “If you tried to do the cost centres for the whole of the University… I’d prob-ably have to employ two more staff… It would be a bible… an exercise in detail which would require enormous analysis over a long period of time.”

On measuring student satisfaction, McKinnon believes that “that would be a very, very subjec-tive way to determine the funding… Half the class are little nerds who breeze round the lecturers… the other half want to get through their degree… a third of them play snooker and go off to the pictures.”

All this amounts to is the University sidestepping its obligation to us. It considers us too ignorant to know what we value in our education. It believes it’s too expensive to tell us why our fees are in-creasing: to let us genuinely engage in a conversa-tion about fee rises.

TL;DR: It is unclear: students say one thing, the Chancellor says another. But the main thing is that the Uni makes it nigh on impossible to find out.

How do increased

fees affect students?For the students who are most sensitive to price (read: disadvantaged people from poor back-grounds), increases in fees mean that they simply can’t go to university. Full stop. People’s minds are being held to ransom by a system which is more interested in their wallets. However, the University has actively tried to remedy that situ-ation. McKinnon is emphatic: “Victoria spends a lot of time putting in place measures to counter these things. We have scholarships. We look to benefactors to assist us… We actually put a lot of supports in place for Māori students, for Pasifika students. We really go out of our way to try and assist people coming in.”

For the overwhelming majority of students, though, the harm is far more pernicious. On the list of pros and cons guiding your decision to study at Vic, price of courses is somewhere at the bottom, if it’s even there. Other factors play a far more important role: do you like Wellington as a city? How far away is it from your hometown? What uni are your friends going to? What value does your family place on education? What course of study are you planning on pursuing?

Moreover, we get interest-free student loans. We don’t have to pay them off until some point in the future. We don’t know how much they will be, but know they will likely be in the tens of thousands. What the fuck do we care if our 40-year-old selves have to pay a couple hundred extra dollars? We don’t actually feel the cost of the increase, so we are less likely to be engaged.

At the same time as degrees are becoming more expensive, their value as future earning tools is falling dramatically. ‘Degree inflation’ is the fancy term for saying that your Bachelor of Arts degree isn’t worth anything at the interview when all the other applicants have one too. When hardly any-one went to uni, graduates slipped straight into well-paying jobs, helping them to pay back their loan. This made the whole exercise worthwhile. Now, more and more graduates fall into shitty jobs at McDonald’s and Countdown with shitty pay and a massive shitty mountain of shitty debt that they’ll never be able to pay off.

TL;DR: Most of us will still study, but we will pay more for it and get less out of it.

Q4

So what do we do?Successive governments have attempted to change the culture surrounding universi-ties to make them feel and act more like a business. The problem is that students aren’t able to act like your average consumer. McDonald’s don’t make Big Macs with shit ingredients and price them at $50 because if they did, we would go to BK and buy Whoppers. But that expression of our op-position to a company’s business decision is not available within a university market. All universities increase their fees by four per cent, and students choose their universities based largely on factors that are not related to cost or quality.

Given our inability to disengage with the University in order to signal our dissatisfac-tion, we must be more open to constructive engagement. We are trying. The Chancellor gives “…full marks to the student leaders and the students themselves… They were prepared to listen.” In fact we do have a model of cooperation, pioneered by Victo-ria and emulated around the country, which forces the University to take student satis-faction into account. The Student Services Levy, which is separate to fees and pays for services such as student health and student learning support, is also decided on by the University Council. However, the recom-mendation must factor in consultation with students.

Perhaps the future will provide an answer. Universities, through the internet, are breaking down the costs of getting a degree. You can now get a degree from Princeton from anywhere in the world, using only the internet: watching lectures online, chatting with fellow students online, setting tests online; and all for a fraction of the price. A shift to e-learning changes the market for tertiary education, forcing universi-ties to compete. When you can study from anywhere, price and quality are now all that is important. Exciting.

TL;DR: Keep on voting for strong student advocates who cooperate with the Uni Council. Get excited about the internet and its implications for the future of learning. Resign yourself to the fact that fees will rise by four per cent every year you’re at uni, but realise that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

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Fees are rising. They will keep rising. Both Government and the University have used fees as a political plaything, entrenching a complex web of contradictory policies. The University thinks we are unable to decide what we need in our education. The Gov-ernment believes fees will never become an election issue, and hides behind interest-free student loans to justify their cuts. The system is broken, but that doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. Systematic change is possible, but only with systematic engage-ment by students, Government and the University. [S]

Q3