The Price of a Student's Voice

ACT went to three student debates, listened to students describe the cost of their own training, and came back with a policy to defund the associations that hosted them.

Somewhere in Palmerston North this morning a nursing student is paying for a hospital car park out of a StudyLink loan. She will complete around eleven hundred unpaid hours on the wards before anyone is legally permitted to call her a nurse, and she will complete them while cutting back the supermarket shifts that pay her rent. A midwifery student across town faces two thousand four hundred hours. A social work student faces nine hundred and sixty. In health alone, some twenty-one thousand students hand over in the order of eleven and a half million unpaid hours every year to the institutions the rest of us fall into when we are frightened and unwell.

Last week ACT's education spokesperson attended three pre-election debates hosted by student associations at Victoria, Otago and Waikato, listened to students describe that arithmetic, and came away telling the country that these young people are disconnected from financial and practical realities.

The post lists their demands as though the list condemns itself. Higher allowances. An end to income-testing parents. Fees-free study. Payment for placements. The Winter Energy Payment extended to students. Read as a shopping list, it looks like appetite. Read as a description of the conditions under which people are currently trained in this country, it looks like a fairly precise inventory of what has been withdrawn.

The parental income test is the cleanest example. A student under twenty-four is assessed on what their parents earn, and the allowance disappears entirely once the household is somewhere north of a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, on the assumption that parents who earn will transfer. Many do not, and many cannot, because the mortgage and the power bill do not care about the elegance of the policy. The student then borrows to live, which is to say the state converts a parent's income into a young person's debt and calls the transaction targeting. Asking for that to end is not a fantasy about free money. It is an observation that the test measures the wrong thing.

The Winter Energy Payment is the same story in a colder room. We know what the flats around our campuses are like, because our own health researchers have been documenting the damp and the respiratory illness for thirty years. A superannuitant in a cold house gets help. A twenty-year-old in a colder one is told to put on a jumper and think about the future taxpayer.

And placements. In Australia, students in nursing, teaching, midwifery and social work receive a weekly payment while they do their compulsory training. Here they pay for the privilege of working, and the results are on the record: dropout rates reported at around thirty-seven percent in nursing, forty-two percent in midwifery, forty-five percent in social work, worse again for Māori and Pasifika students, in the precise professions where the country is advertising overseas because it cannot fill the roster. The spokesperson writes that these students are about to enter a workforce that depends on getting this right. He is correct. That workforce is haemorrhaging people before they ever reach it, and it is haemorrhaging them at the point where the training pathway quietly asks whether your family has money.

So the question of who is disconnected from practical reality deserves a straight answer. In May, this government scrapped the fees-free scheme, banking something over a billion dollars, and in the same Budget found thirty-five and a half million to enable providers to lift tuition fees by up to six percent in 2027. Students who had planned a degree around a final year of relief were told the rug was gone. Then the party that helped remove that support arrived on campus and told the students who had lost it that the problem was their unrealistic expectations. That is a communicative inversion of a familiar kind. The people who bear the consequences of a decision are recoded as the people who caused it.

The sentence at the heart of the post is the one I want to take most seriously, because it is where the ideology sits in plain view. The Government is them. In ten years these students will be the taxpayers funding these promises. Every dollar spent today is a bill sent to the person taking notes in the lecture hall.

Follow that thought all the way down and you arrive somewhere specific. It dissolves the public into a queue of individuals passing bills to each other across time. There is no shared enterprise in it, no sense that a country decides together to carry the cost of the nurses and teachers and social workers it will need. There is only the ledger and the debtor. The generation that governs us was itself educated by a public that decided the money would come from all of us, and it has spent three decades converting that decision into a personal loan with a name on it. The message to the student in the lecture hall is not that she must be prudent. It is that she is alone.

Then comes the policy, and the sequence is worth holding still for a moment. He went to three debates hosted by student associations. He heard arguments he disliked. He announced that the associations that hosted them should be defunded.

ACT will make the Student Services Fee voluntary, offered as a menu, with the compulsory levy replaced by user-pays. Around four thousand dollars off a student's loan across a degree, framed as a matter of freedom of association, the unfinished business of the 2011 legislation that ended compulsory membership. If a union wants a student's money, it should have to earn their support.

Put like that, it sounds almost modest. It is not, because the levy does not fund a union in any meaningful sense of the word. It funds the campus health clinic and the subsidised GP visit, the counselling waitlist, the food bank that quietly feeds students in week eleven, childcare, disability support, sport, clubs, the student media that reports on the university, and the advocate who sits beside a nineteen-year-old in a disciplinary hearing or an accommodation dispute or a complaint about a lecturer, at the one moment in her life when she is facing an institution with lawyers and she has nobody.

These are collective goods. They work the way insurance works, which is to say they work only if the pool holds. Most students will never need the advocate, until the week they need nothing else. Convert that into a menu and the healthy opt out, the pool thins, the price rises for those left, and the service dies of arithmetic while everyone congratulates themselves on the freedom of the transaction. Four thousand dollars is the number offered for it. It is a genuine sum of money to a student, and that is exactly why it is being offered.

There is a real problem buried in this policy, and it deserves acknowledgement rather than dismissal. The levy has climbed steeply, universities set it with limited restraint, tuition is capped and the levy is not, and student turnout in association elections is thin. All of that is true. It makes the case for putting the levy under genuine student control, with students holding the deciding vote over what is charged and what it buys, which is the reform an association would struggle to argue against. ACT has looked at the same problem and proposed instead to remove the money. The remedy for a democracy with low turnout is not to abolish the electorate.

Because the object here is voice. Student associations are one of the few pieces of infrastructure through which people who are young, poor and temporary can speak to institutions that are old, wealthy and permanent. They are how a submission gets written, how a survey on placement poverty gets run, how three pre-election debates get organised in the first place. Take away the funding and the argument does not become more rigorous. It simply stops, and the silence gets described afterwards as students focusing on their studies.

We should be honest about what students were told last week. They were told that their hunger is an ideology, that their unpaid labour is a rite of passage, that the organisations through which they speak are a tax on students who disagree, and that the appropriate posture for a young person facing an institution is to negotiate alone and pay as they go.

The money does have to come from somewhere. That is the one line in the post I would keep. It comes from us, from all of us, in the ordinary way that a country pays for the people it cannot do without, and the question of whether there is still an us is the thing actually on the ballot in November. Students asked that question out loud, in three halls, on the record. The answer they received was a proposal to charge them for asking.