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| Dr Bryce Wilkinson | Senior Fellow | bryce.wilkinson@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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Of course, at today’s youth wage rates, employers prefer to hire people with work experience. But to get work experience a young person has to get a job. The youth unemployment rate in Auckland was 18% in March, up from 9% in March 2023. This was for 15-24 year-olds. For those aged 25-64 it was only 5% in March, up from 2.6% in March 2023. It is not just New Zealand, but New Zealand’s case is stark. In March this year the youth unemployment rate in Australia was 10%. For the 38 mainly rich member countries of the Paris-based OECD the average was 11%, hardly higher than in March 2023. The news stories this week made it clear that Gen Z is not the problem. Those being interviewed were qualified, motivated, and eager to contribute. They are being locked out of the workforce by a combination of economic headwinds due to fiscal extravagance, low productivity (due to low investment per worker and too much red tape), and barriers to youth employment. Governments could do much over time to reduce those barriers, if enough voters were willing. Some of those with jobs would strongly oppose reducing one barrier. Boosts to the minimum wage are fine for those who remain in paid work, but they make people out of work less affordable for employers. That handicaps those with the least skills and/or the least work experience. New Zealand boosted its minimum wage from 88% of Australia’s in 2017 to 99% in 2023 according to latest OECD statistics. New Zealand’s minimum wage is among the highest in the OECD relative to median income. Another barrier is the “Wellington-knows best” mess the previous government made of technical education. Countries with strong vocational systems tend to have better youth employment outcomes. Building that is a long-haul job. Those who care about an 18% youth unemployment rate in Auckland should care about making youth employment more affordable for employers. MBIE’s next minimum wage review should test whether the youth ‘Starting Out’ wage does enough to mitigate the harms that minimum wages impose on those who are starting out. |
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| Professor Barbara Oakley | Senior Fellow | barbara.oakley@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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After nearly six months speaking with New Zealand’s schools and universities, I have witnessed firsthand how this nation has become the unwitting laboratory for one of education's most destructive experiments. Over the past fifty years, New Zealand has plummeted from the top tier toward the bottom of industrialised world’s rankings. The culprit is not lack of funding or teacher dedication. It is 20th century educational ideology that neuroscience has revealed to be fundamentally flawed. Student-centred approaches dominating New Zealand schools sound appealing: let students discover knowledge naturally and minimise memorisation in favour of poorly defined “critical thinking skills.” But brain science reveals a harsh truth - these methods systematically undermine learning. It is just too hard to recognise mathematical patterns or develop the fluency for higher-order thinking if you do not know your times tables. Education schools have become echo chambers, training teachers in outmoded methods that violate everything neuroscience reveals about memory, learning, and skill development. These institutions resist change. Too many careers and reputations are built on failed theories. But students need foundational knowledge stored in long-term memory to think critically. They need explicit instruction for complex academic content. They need practice to develop procedural fluency. Disruption offers opportunity. New Zealand could pioneer new schools of education deliberately developed outside traditional education schools, freed from the failed orthodoxy. These new schools could create new, "trilingual educators" — teachers fluent in neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and evidence-based pedagogy. These new teachers could provide fresh blood to support the lonely, talented teachers who come up after my talks, cheering the clarion call from neuroscience supporting approaches they knew all along to be best for students. As Briar Lipson notes in New Zealand’s Education Delusion, in the year 2000, out of 32 countries, New Zealand’s students proudly ranked 3rd in mathematics on the PISA test for International Student Achievement. By 2018, they had declined to 19th—losing the equivalent of nearly a year and a half’s worth of schooling. But a turnaround is possible. When Taiwan experimented with mathematics teaching methods like New Zealand’s current methods in the 1990s, their math scores plummeted. When they moved away from those approaches, mathematics performance quickly improved. The choice is stark: continue the decline under educational theories that neuroscience has invalidated, or pioneer the future of evidence-based teaching. New Zealand's students — and global reputation — hang in the balance. |
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| Dr James Kierstead | Research Fellow | james.kierstead@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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This bill has apparently been introduced in the innocent belief that we have some kind of problem with academic freedom in this country. (If anyone disagrees, I am happy to set up a chat with HR.) But as I told the select committee, I’m not seeing any evidence of that, even though the evidence was recently conveniently assembled in a report for The New Zealand Initiative by an excellent young classicist. I’m not seeing evidence of US diplomat Bonnie Jenkins being deplatformed at Victoria University of Wellington last March. I’m not seeing evidence of a talk by gender-critical feminist Daphna Whitmore being cancelled at AUT in 2022. And I’ve already forgotten about a commemoration of the Tiananmen Square massacre being cancelled at AUT back in 2019 after the Vice-Chancellor met with an official from the Chinese Embassy. In fact, funnily enough I’m not seeing any of the many free speech flare-ups that have taken place at New Zealand universities in the past few years. As for the surveys showing that sizeable minorities of academics and students in this country feel they aren’t free to talk about vital public issues on campus, I do have a concern that some of these have very low response rates. Even if it was really just one of those surveys, and even if a University of Auckland survey with a 67% response rate found that only 15% of academics in the law school felt they could respectfully voice their views without fear of negative consequences. Finally, in response to concerns about health and safety obligations being weaponised to shut down debates, I’d say that is very dangerous talk. And I just can’t imagine it ever happening at a New Zealand university, except maybe for that one time when Massey University put out a statement saying it was cancelling the ‘Feminism 2020’ conference because of ‘health and safety obligations.’ All in all, I can assure you that I assured the select committee that there was nothing to see here. Our public universities can be trusted to uphold academic freedom and institutional neutrality on their own. I think our record over the past few years makes clear just how seriously we take academic freedom. |
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