The government cut funding to Adult Community Education in 2009. The number of schools being funded fell from 212 to just 23. More than 150,000 New Zealanders who once attended night school now don’t have the opportunity. Great swathes of NZ no longer have schools offering courses as they once did.
The enormous value of community education was acknowledged by Bill English in 2005, while Education Spokesperson. He warned of the bureaucrats who wanted to take it away.
Here’s the first few lines and last paragraph of a speech he gave :
Community education has a long and honourable history. I recall my mother going off to night time classes in furniture restoration, a quiet space in the busy life of a household of 12 children. In a painting class I visited a few years ago a man told about how the tutor had changed his life by challenging him, teaching him and making him finish the picture. He described how he had become part of a warm community. There are thousands of stories about how human needs are met by the collective and aspirational activity of learning.
A great and warm story, experiences that many of us have also discovered … until a year or two ago that is. Now those sorts of tales are thin on the ground. All for saving $13.5 million.
Here’s how he finishes:
I support community based less formal learning opportunities. I want to work with you to retain the funding arrangement that allowed community learning to be so successful for so long, and develop new mechanisms with the same qualities if your needs can be better met. In the end community learning should be driven by the community. It is not enough just to engage your organisations in consultation. You need the authority to make the decisions that make a difference to the community and the people you know. I want to make sure you have it.
He didn’t stop Tolley putting in the boot, despite being Finance Minister. Pity he didn’t reflect on those warm memories then.
Isn’t it a very honest or very deceptive speech then? If he makes this speech, knowing it appears he is supporting a long tradition, but knows his government has cut back on it, either he is speaking against the government policy (honest) or is assuming his audience doesn’t know about the cuts (dishonest)?
Isn’t it possible to support spending in an area, but at the same time to know that there isn’t sufficient cash around to provide everything that everyone wants?
Even if we spent twice what we do at the moment on the social portfolios – health, education, benefit, environment etc – there’d be those who’d find a sob story to back their claim that we should be spending more. And that would resonate with those who think they could possibly be (at least in the short term) net beneficiaries from a ‘soak the rich’ approach (where rich, of course, means anyone earning more than I do…)
If there is any real dishonesty about, it’s coming from those who blow the dog whistle at a certain section of the electorate and dangle the idea that there’s a bottomless pit of cash, leading them to believe that if they vote in a certain way they’ll get something (i.e. an increased level of whatever) for nothing (i.e. paid for by other people’s taxation, which is basically just a surrogate for other people’s hard work).
Tracey, Bill English’s speech was in 2005 when in Opposition, but yes Bill English is dishonest. Word was that he was the one telling Tolley what to do in the Education Portfolio.
@ George. Bottomless pit of cash? You mean like the forty odd million bucks handed over to Warner Bros under false pretenses, that could have paid for Community Education threefold.
Community education — good for Bill’s mother.
Social Welfare — good for John’s mother.
Welfare supported education — good for Paula Bennett.
—worked for them, so what do they do, cut it….its obvious….they’d sell their mothers for a dirty quid.
LOL!
What about the cuts that would have to have been made to compensate for the DECREASE in revenues if the film hadn’t been made here at all…
@ George. There was never a chance of the film not being made here, we were played for suckers by Jackson, Brownlee, and Key!
Judging by some of the comments made here it’s a role to which many on the Left are very well suited…
“DECREASE in revenues if the film hadn’t been made here at all” Strawman alert. One thing is very clear from the hobbit debacle the film was never at risk of going offshore. That is a lie/myth put out there to get people to accept the cash giveaway.
I sort of struggle with the $40m giveaway meme as well.
It’s not like Key pulled a suitcase from the boot of a ministerial limo containing $40m in used notes and handed it to Warners. It’s a tax rebate, right?
If $1 more in tax was made out of the transaction by the IRD then it was a sensible deal.
Whether it was a deal that needed to be done is a different matter. But that’s an issue of competence, not net benefit.