T3

days as a student, has no place in Steve Maharey’s brave new lecture theatres of the future.
If you want to study classical literature, when the Tertiary Education Council wants you to study
biotechnology, then you’ll have to pay the full tuition costs of a classical education out of your own
pocket.
Steve and his mates want graduates who can earn – not citizens who can think.
Of course with a $30,000 student debt hanging over your head, you will want to earn too – as much and
as often as possible. There won’t be a lot of time for anything else.
Those student loans – by the way – are a lot more dangerous than even NZUSA has let on. In fact, they
are proving to be sociological and demographic time-bombs.
A healthy democracy requires a large and relatively secure middle class, and if that democracy is to be
long-lived, it needs a middle class which is ready, willing and able to reproduce itself.
Massive student debt is making middle class reproduction extremely difficult. Not only is it causing
young adults to postpone marriage, but it is turning home ownership into a distant dream.
Most middle class people will not contemplate starting a family until they have a home of their own, so
parenthood is being pushed further and further into the future. That means much smaller families. The
norm for my parents was three or four children. The norm for the parents of the 21st Century – that’s
you - will be one or two.
The rapidly expanding middle class that characterised the period of the post-war boom is a thing of the
past. Today the middle class is shrinking, and with it the tax base that makes a decent and democratic
society possible.
New Zealand society used to be shaped like a rugby ball, now it resembles a Balinese stupa – a broad
flat base with a narrow spike of obscene wealth and privilege rising up out of the middle.
So, are the other parties any better? Well, if our criteria is time, the answer – with the exception of the
Greens, which I shall come to presently – is an emphatic "No."
In fact, National, ACT, NZ First and United Future are all committed to increasing the amount of time
people have to spend working for the capitalists. They opposed paid parental leave, they are adamantly
opposed to increasing the amount of annual leave, they see no alternative to raising the age of
retirement to 67 - or beyond - and they are determined to restore "flexibility" to the labour market.
New Zealand’s flexible labour market is, of course, the National Party’s greatest contribution to the
new economic order. The Employment Contracts Act effectively destroyed private sector unionism in
New Zealand, and with it all the numerous restrictions workers had imposed on their employers’ ability
to control the speed, intensity and duration of paid work.
Given that most of our adult lives revolve around the workplace – it is, after all, where we spend the
bulk of our waking hours – the destruction of the New Zealand trade union movement and the
introduction of authoritarian managerial models to the workplace was the New Right’s single most
effective blow against the rights and freedoms of New Zealand citizens.
National and ACT are also really keen on "Welfare Reform" – otherwise known as "working for the
dole". It is hard to imagine a better illustration of the way in which capitalism seeks to monopolise the