TEU invited several representative groups from the tertiary education sector to comment on the what type of education is needed to help New Zealand out of the looming financial crisis.  Here is a response from the Quality Public Education Coalition’s (QPEC) tertiary education spokesperson, John O’Neill:

“QPEC has always campaigned on the basis of nationally planned, high quality tertiary education systems that meet local and regional needs, both economic and social.

“In our view, the tragedy of the last twenty five years is the ways in which (a) user pays tertiary education has created obscene levels of personal student debt; (b) the bums on seats market model has meant that consumption profits, not educational, social or community needs, have driven tertiary education provision at all levels; and (c) a perfectly good historical infrastructure of university, polytechnic, trades training and workplace apprenticeship has been left to the market to sort out – and has withered as a result.

“Ironically, the NZ Herald now calls for more on-site training as the way forward. That’s exactly what the state owned railways, power companies, post office, banks, state broadcasters and the rest used to provide in small towns up and down the country in the form of cadet and apprentice schemes. Meaningful on-site, ongoing education combined with satisfying, productive employment formed part of the social contract between government and all of us in our local communities. Then these collectively owned assets had CEO’s appointed and were told simply to become business-like and return a ‘profit’ to the Crown, or they were privatised to make money for their new shareholders.

“In all this, the losers have been those who were already at the bottom of the social and economic heap: the poor, women, children and the unskilled. Māori and Pasifika are grossly overrepresented among the poor and the unskilled yet the current government claims to want to give them a helping hand. Let’s be clear, education is the only way out of their cyclical trap of casualised employment and unemployment, yet what they’ve usually been given in the last two decades is expensive, short-term, low quality tertiary courses which lead neither to jobs or better self-worth, but do leave them further in debt.

“Government and business, big and small, now simply have to accept the principle of quality public education as a basic national infrastructure investment, and their moral obligation to ensure the system works. There’s a lot of talk just now about visible roading and broadband infrastructure projects and the invisible mountain of business compliance costs, but little genuine realisation that properly planned and funded good quality public education is the basis of lasting economic growth and social well-being.

“Big business, particularly the multinationals, pay less and less tax into New Zealand’s national coffers these days, even in good economic times. Tangible big business investment in worker education would go some way to giving back to our communities from which they hide most of their very substantial profits. Lower corporate taxes have in the past been justified on the basis that companies provide jobs and need an attractive tax regime to be persuaded to come. If they can no longer even guarantee jobs, they could at least divert some of their profits from offshore to retraining and education  in New Zealand- that too ought to be part of the social contract.

“In an economic crisis not of poor people’s making, the least we can do for the most disadvantaged in our society is to give them unhindered access to good quality public tertiary education in all those areas where there are already chronic national knowledge and skills shortages. Businesses could legitimately be given tax credits for expenditure they actually incur on New Zealand worker training and education, and those who lose their jobs as the economy contracts further could be given taxpayer funded education opportunities that are free at the point of use. That’s what genuine investment in the future of the country looks like.

“We hear constantly about the new prime minister’s pragmatic approach – what could be more pragmatic than free public tertiary education in an economic downturn. It certainly ought to prove more popular, cheaper, and more beneficial in the long run than taxpayer-funded bailouts for the ‘fat cats’ who got us into this crisis in the first place.”

John O’Neill, QPEC tertiary spokesperson