If there’s one positive thing you can say about the Labour government, it’s that they look after their own. Whether it’s Mahuta Inc, grants to gangs or plunging tens of millions into the failing legacy media.
Now, Labour is poised to throw money at another pack of rusted-on grifters and bootlickers.
Labour will announce a major bailout package for [universities] after it came under pressure to step in, following news that hundreds of jobs are on the line and programmes are being slashed at Victoria and Otago Universities after what the bosses called years of chronic underfunding.
The panhandling academics have the chutzpah to bleat that ‘New Zealand will be a poorer place’, even as they’re scarfing up money from other government programs.
The bailout is expected to be reallocated from other spending and will spread over two years to tide them over while they recover.
New Zealanders might well ask what they’re getting in return for yet more of their hard-earned taxes being showered on the mendicant institutions.
Tertiary Education Union’s Victoria University branch president Dougal McNeil said […] “There’s a whole range of subjects from geophysics to Italian, to secondary teaching that looks set to go.”
So, ‘Women’s Studies’ will be staying on? ‘Fat Studies’? Not to mention the plethora of unintelligible ‘Kaupapa Maori’ cargo cult disciplines?
No doubt the small army of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion clipboard-tickers will continue to suck up their bloated salaries untouched, too.
Acting Prime Minister Carmel Sepuloni said Education Minister Jan Tinetti will make an announcement on Tuesday afternoon. Sepuloni wouldn’t be drawn on the detail when interviewed on AM.
“What we do recognise is that the tertiary sector is facing some challenges at the moment, funding because of the inflationary increases that everyone is facing,” Sepuloni said.
She said with employment high “lots of people make the decision not to go and study and instead to take up employment”, which Sepuloni said is “further exacerbated” by the increase in the cost of living.
Yes, because heaven forbid that people should work for a living. Sepuloni appears to be conceding that, normally, universities are little more than a soak for the otherwise-unemployed. Not exactly the greatest argument in their favour, I would have thought.
It should also be borne in mind that the government has already thrown half a billion dollars at universities.
Sepuloni said the challenges were recognised in Budget 2023, where the Government injected $521 million into the sector, with more cash on the way.
Newshub
Because throwing more and more money at failing institutions is going to encourage them to lift their game – just look at the wonders that government money has done for journalism in New Zealand.
Frankly, it’s hard to dispute the pithy assessment of one ticked-off Kiwi Twitter user:
“Hot take, Unis in NZ are f**ked because they’re full of lefty dick bags who try to indoctrinate and influence their students. No wonder the numbers have dropped off quicker than a Lepers knob”
Twitter
Brutal – but to the point.
It’s been over three years since I first questioned whether it was time to bulldoze the universities. I was only half-joking, at first – but less so as time has gone on and universities have sunk deeper into the sinkhole of far-left indoctrination.
Now it looks like we don’t even have to fire up the D9 – just let the universities fail all on their own. Then start anew.