As students continue to navigate rising living costs, growing student debt and the government’s decision to end the first-year Fees Free scheme, tertiary education has become a major election issue. To discuss what these changes mean for students and why young people should pay attention this election, Aoife sat down with Green Party co-leader and MP Chloe Swarbrick and spoke about the future of Fees Free, why she believes students have more political influence than they realise, and what the Green Party is promising for tertiary students ahead of the election.
Recently all of us students know that fees free has been axed, what is the importance of fees free?
So look, I think that it’s really cooked how this whole supposed debate has played out. And the reason I say supposed debate is that there hasn’t even really been a proper debate. The government didn’t actually meaningfully engage with anybody about its intention to rip this away. Fees free for me was always about actually ensuring that our young people and people who are retraining are not saddled with immense amounts of debt, which then is a kneecap to their ability to progress into the future. And part of the reasons that it’s like so obvious to understand that this is entirely possible is that there is a generation of politicians currently sitting in parliament who once upon a time not only had fees free tertiary study but also were paid to go to university and to undertake tertiary study. So it’s within a generation that we have seen tax cuts for those at the top, a deregulation of corporations and effectively this trickle down economic model instilled which in turn has made it really difficult to be a young person navigating the world which now means that based on a ton of different research that my generation and your guys generation if we keep going with this economic model are likely to be the first generations in 100 or so years who will experience worse material conditions than our parents. So something’s got to give. Something’s got to change. And the key point to turn that very sad story on its head is that this is not inevitable.
Nicola Willis and David Seymour have said that Feast Free hasn’t achieved anything. Do you think that they’re incorrect? How sir?
I mean it’s insane, right? Like these guys keep talking about how there’s no magic money tree yet they can find $3 billion down the back of the couch for tax cuts for landlords. They can find $12 billion to pay for new military equipment to tick off Donald Trump’s wish list. Yet they need to cut a third of a billion dollars for tertiary education students who are just trying to not only better their future but better the entire country and help to grow this economy that Nicola Willis and David Seymour say that they care about. I guess this is where if we’re to try and use the logic of their own argument about what is it achieving? Again, like this to me was never necessarily about more and more people taking on tertiary study. It was about barrier free access to study and about ensuring that students weren’t settled with immense amounts of debt. And in plenty of other jurisdictions, plenty of other countries around the world, they still maintain free tertiary education. And those economies are far more prosperous, far more inclusive, and far more equitable than what we have here at home right now. I mean, if you wanted another example of why this government doesn’t care about our future, you only need to look at them ripping away fees free here.
How as a party and as voters can we reverse the decision for free?
So, this is where students so desperately need to understand how godamn powerful you guys are. There’s approximately 400,000 students in this country. Yet students, young people tend to be among the cohort of the perennial missing million who don’t really turn up and vote. Right? Meanwhile, there is another cohort of voters who tend to oftentimes organize and collectivize their power and express their entitlement to certain policies that work in their favour. You might have heard of them. They’re called landlords. There’s approximately 100,000 of those guys and they consistently get policies that work in their favour. the entire economy is rigged towards this housing casino of speculation to the detriment of absolutely everybody else, let alone again this growth and this productivity that the government says that it cares about. So, if you’ve got, you know, a handful of landlords compared to how many students there are, why are students not the ones who are getting the political wins across the line? I think part of the reason is that students haven’t quite yet connected the dots that all of you guys have the same shared interests and if you decide to work together then you can actually not only change the government but get a government of change and this is I’d also just reflect on like ever since I’ve been engaging particularly in this Fees Free issue subsequent to the government budget being passed a few weeks ago where they decided to cut it. I’ve had a few people in my comments um particularly you know people who self-identify as trades and stuff just going oh you know these privileged uni students why should we care about them and I’m like my guy I think it is really demonstrative of the place that we’re in in 2026 when we have trades positioning themselves as in conflict with university students. two regular little people fighting over scraps while massive corporations are laughing their way to the bank screwing you over. Like actually all of us should be working together to change that system for the betterment of regular New Zealanders.
Do you have any tips for learning about and deciding on party policies? What should people especially students and first-time voters be looking out for or avoiding?
So usually I mean look you can always obviously go to political parties websites but they’re always going to tell you in flashing lights the things that the viable the read on how they want you to understand their policies. Um and there are some political parties who are having a massive influx of donations despite things being really terrible for regular people. The same guys who are responsible for those terrible circumstances are getting a bucketload of money. I wonder why. It’s almost like the cost of living isn’t hitting everybody equally and some people are benefiting from your cost of living. It’s called corporate profits. So, you can go to usually what’s set up by like I don’t know the spin-off and a few other um different kind of like not only publications but also non-governmental organizations the likes of Forest and Bird and stuff. They usually do a kind of scorecard for different political parties and their policies. Um I’d really love to see student unions also being involved in this and student media too. of you guys want to do the work of taking away all of the sound bites and the gloss that political parties put on top of their policies and instead just giving people a really clear indication of what political parties are actually committing to do and also how they’ll pay for it and what the ramifications will actually be for the future of this country then I think that students are able to have a far easier way of engaging with politics. So basically, yes, you can go and do your research. You can go and talk to um politicians. Plenty of them will be coming through trying to pick up student votes over the next few months.
There’s much talk about how voting for minor parties doesn’t get far. What makes this rhetoric incorrect?
Firstly, I just say that us talking about minor and major parties entrenches the power of the legacy parties and creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where we always expect to see what constitutes a minor party and what constitutes a major party. So that’s junk in the context of MMP. But secondly, the so-called minor parties of this coalition government have been the ones responsible for albeit supported by the legacy national party pushing through and creating massive culture war around the definition of man woman bill for the treaty principles bill for the regulatory standards act. But then also on the flip side, on the positive side of things, you can see the influence that the Green Party had the last time that we were in confidence in supply in 2017 to 2020, where we through the likes of the Zero Carbon Act and the creation of the Climate Change Commission actually got more climate action across the line than we had seen in the previous 30 years in just 3 years. So, so-called minor parties, so-called political parties, just really what is most important is that New Zealanders back the political parties that align with their values and are putting forward the policies that matter to them because the more votes that those political parties get, the more influence that they have to actually achieve that change.
Why do local member votes matter?
Back in 2020 when I was running for Auckland Central, everybody told me that it was impossible that a green politician could flip a blue seat green, let alone a seat that just didn’t win. But we did. And we did that because we reminded people that no politician, no political party is entitled to anything. And actually, if you feel as though your politicians locally are not actually delivering the things that you want, then you should understand that we’re never going to change anything unless we change those politicians. So, if you don’t like your politicians, find somebody who you do like and you do trust and support them in running. And that is how we get that change. There’s kind of three necessary but not by themselves sufficient things to win a local electorate. I think you need a candidate who obviously connects directly with that community, who is of from and by that community, can walk down the street, look people in the eyes. You need policies that actually will change and improve people’s lives tangibly. And you also need a massive grassroots campaign. By which I mean it’s not just about winning votes. It’s about trust and accountability which goes beyond the electoral cycle ‘cause politics doesn’t just happen every 3 years rather with a general election. It happens every single day with decisions that impact and shape our daily lives.
And what are the Greens doing for students this election?
Well firstly we are currently on the ground all across the country rallying students and reminding them of their power when it comes to fighting back against this cut to fees free. But we’ll have some really cool policies that we’ll be announcing in the not too distant future. But people can see that we have you know over the last the whole time that we’ve existed as a movement um been here to support students and student welfare. I mean I can reflect on the six years that I was our tertiary education spokesperson. I got the inquiry up into student accommodation. Um would you know do you know that under the residential tenancies act section 5B student accommodation and boarding houses are not held to any standards for that you can’t go through the tenancy tribunal. So in the midst of COVID-19 I did a huge amount of work through parliament to end up getting the first ever regulatory standards imposed on student accommodation for domestic students through a pastoral care code which was awesome. So now finally students who have things go wrong in student accommodation can actually seek compensation and seek a remedy for those things. We also through just all of these insane hearings that I was having with the Ministry of Social Development, Ministry of Education and otherwise, I’d ask them time and again like do you have any data on student hardship, on how many students are dropping out because they can’t afford to, you know, survive on how many hours students are working over and above their full-time supposed study? And they would always tell me, um, don’t worry, there is no problem. And I’d go, “Okay, so like how are you coming to that conclusion?” And they go, “Well, there is no data.” And I’d go, “Okay, can you collect the data?” And they go, “Well, there is no problem.” And I’d go, “Okay, well collect the data. There is no, you know, the tortology of the whole thing.” So we then ended up creating our first ever people’s inquiry into student welfare and student wellbeing. And in 2022, I believe we published that the first one. friends as our new tissue education spokesperson has gone and done an update of that but it told us unfortunately something that was not super surprising but incredibly despairing which is that two thirds of students at that point in time regularly cannot afford the basics and what I had hoped and what we’ve been trying to build towards despite all of these structural forces telling young people and students that their voices don’t matter and doing their best to exhaust and demoralize and disempower students is that these issues are not individual issues. They are systemic issues. They are structural issues. And the only way that we can fight back against them and change these things is by students working together. So, what are we going to do for students? Um we are going to be doing everything that we can to support you to organize to have a politics that puts our future and our present front and centre of everything that we do for an economy that works for people and planet.
