The Prime Minister has said that we should know her Government by their deeds. So far those deeds haven’t amounted to much more than non-delivery of bumper sticker slogans. But we are implored to “keep moving”.
One of their flagship policies at the last election was the fees-free programme for tertiary study. It was supposed to increase the number of people attending tertiary institutions.
The reality was somewhat different from the election sloganeering and now Labour has axed the flagship programme completely.
Stuff reports:
Labour has confirmed it will not extend the fees-free programme for tertiary education to cover any more years of study if elected this year.
The party’s education spokesman, Chris Hipkins, said following Covid-19 the focus would stay on encouraging and reforming vocational education.
The 2017 election policy was originally scheduled to extend to two years of academic study in 2021 and three by 2024, but this has now been indefinitely put on ice.
This is just another Labour failure. The policy did nothing but pay the fees of future lawyers and accountants and save their rich parents money.
Labour said it would allow more people to undertake tertiary education. They even implemented an official measure of its success set at being increased participation.
You can guess what actually happened?
In 2017 there were 343,590 students enrolled in tertiary education.
In 2019 it dropped to 328,075.
So Labour spent hundreds of millions of dollars to see a 4.5% drop in enrolments!
That’s just embarrassing. Instead of hanging their heads in shame they are still claiming it as a brilliant policy despite now dropping it.
Their election slogan “Let’s Keep Moving” obviously means Let’s Keep Moving Backwards.
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