The Hollow Brain strikes
Failing courses face chop
Thousands of qualifications will be dumped as the Government wields the funding axe on courses with too many student failures. Parents and prospective students will also play a part in the cull, with a new website to show the courses with the lowest success rates. A senior source said the push for more accountability would be "all-consuming" for officials. "It's not an about-turn, but it does clearly define a direction for us to follow," the source said. "It is a big project for us to get ready." Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce announced the funding changes yesterday in his first speech since taking the portfolio at the start of the year.
Isn't hilarious? I'm old enough to remember when student loans were brought in. The argument was that it would allow everyone to go onto higher education, that was it's defense. NOW we have Steven Joyce the Hollow Brain slashing back once the argument used to defend it's introduction decades ago has been forgotten.
Why is Steven Joyce the Hollow Brain?
The guy hasn’t even been an MP and now he is a Cabinet Minister AND is running tertiary education????? Personally I find it very funny that a man who is ramming through the doublespeak plus good Orwellian named 'Council Controlled Organisation' for traffic in Auckland only caught the bus for the first time after he became a Minister.
It seems if you attempt to warp democratic principle your reward can be a high party place ranking on the National list, let’s remind ourselves what we know about the hollow brain from the hollow men….
In the week of the 16-20 May 2005, Steven Joyce had a formal meeting with the exclusive brethren who were organizing their despicable advertising campaign and Joyce met quietly with other pro-National lobby organizations telling them the two crucial messages were “change”. Change was the main theme the Exclusive Brethren ended up using, remember National weren’t officially having these meetings with the Brethren and Joyce was the hollow brain behind this.
Joyce also saw the draft pamphlets and advertisements from the Exclusive Brethren before they went out, remember National initially pretended they knew nothing about the Exclusive Brethren.
When confronted with allegations that this was a stitch up job, Joyce’s ‘response’ was that Stephen Win (the contact person on the EB pamphlets and advertising) wasn’t a National Party guy and it certainly wasn’t a National-funded campaign – that of course is a twisting of the facts after meeting with the EB and providing input and viewing all material about to be released by the EB, we can see how hollow Joyce’s response really was.
In 2005 Joyce wrote to electoral campaign committees saying that “in this election National is planning to go close to its legal limit for Party Vote campaign expenditure (meaning $2,240,000), That has not happened previously”. Interestingly when the donation declarations were delivered to the Electoral Commission not one name from National’s largest financial backers were declared after their donations had been washed through the National Party launderette, the ‘Waitemata Trust’ so that their political influence through financial donations remained invisible. Interesting side note isn’t it, Winston was crucified in the media for something the Electoral Commission, the Serious Fraud Office and the Police cleared him on, has National’s funding ever been given that level of scrutiny?
Steven Joyce was credited in the last election by National Svengali Peter Keenan for keeping on Crosby/Texter, the Australian spin Doctors who were so good this election at spinning the ‘change’ and ‘moderation’ con job.
The Hollow Brain went to Australia to meet with Crosby/Texter and on October 19th 2004 prepared the con job they would use to try and spin the election on, it is incredible how much of that con job was so similar to the con job the Hollow Brain used to win this election, let’s go through them…
1: Stop us going down the path to rampant political correctness.
2: Put an end to the grievance industry.
3: Make our community safer by locking away violent criminals.
4: Ensure your hard-earned tax dollars are spent on Education and Health and not wasted on Labour’s pet projects and bureaucracy.
5: Put in place economic policies that will lift all our incomes closer to those of Australians.
6: Tighten up Welfare and ensure that everyone that can work does work.
Note, none of this is policy, just focus meeting tested bigotry.
Interesting to note that when Joyce was challenged on whether or not Crosby/Texter was giving National advice in 2005, Joyce said there was ‘some’ advice but National had no plans of bringing them to NZ, which was a clear twisting of the truth because Joyce had been to see them in 2004, when challenged again Joyce fudged the issue and pretended to not know the depth of any Crosby/Texter relationship and advised Don Brash to claim he only met them in passing.
And now he's running tertiary education, if anyone can denigrate a politician until they break it's Uni students, take this information and burn him.
posted by Bomber @ 7:05 am
7 comments
7 Comments:
Three points of note:
- a student who repetively fails, should we effectively be paying them to fuck around (remember 3/4 of course fees are paid by the tax payer and loans do have a cost).
- there are some pretty shitty courses out there, does NZ really need 6000 tax payer funded courses?
- I would rather Joyce than that bitch Tolley who is beyond incompetent.
Joyce is also on record as saying he has never used his degree (in zoology). I supposed he paid for it though, so thats ok?
you can fuck around a lot and still pass courses. if lots of people are failing a course consistently, there is something else going on. the government should be looking into the reasons behind failure, not just getting rid of courses so they don't have to deal.
the courses that will be hit are those that cater to the underprivileged. they are a part of NZ's future, but at this rate the only future they will have is as NZ's underclass.
Very pleased to see your aside on the contrast between the scrutiny of NZ First's funding and National's highly devious arrangements. I believe that Rodney Hide knew perfectly well that Winnie hadn't done anything illegal but he timed his lies perfectly so that the abject wankers in our media could slag off Winnie till the election, thus avoiding their duty to provide accurate information and foster intelligent debate (whassat??) while assisting the Tories to get rid of a possibly significant opponent. And they barely reported that he was cleared of every single allegation; I bet a poll would show that almost no-one knows that to this day.
On the main topic, no doubt there is all sorts of garbage out there masquerading as "tertiary education" but this is (a) the Nats' fault in the first place (their 90's market madness - anyone can set up a "university") and (b) a stupid and destructive way to get rid of the problem. Given this threat, institutions will have a range of really bad options like excluding risky students (mature entry, Maaori, Pasifika) or dropping standards and passing students who shouldn't pass, meanwhile being denied the resources to improve actual teaching. In fact this government seems hell bent on reducing educational quality and opportunities for as many of us as it can possibly manage.
Joyce is seeking to implement a very similar policy to what Steve Maharey was working on as Minister in 2003-4. Maharey's proposals got caught up in a whole lot of other problems (eg the wananga and polytechnic rorts and followup) so was taken off the table, but performance based funding is hardly a partisan policy.
Fair comment Dave, it's a very blunt and wasteful instrument in any hands. But I didn't actually say only the Nats try to use it, my remark was aimed at the fact that the country is alive with second and third-rate "tertiary" institutions as a result of 90's policies, which happened to be executed by National. (Quite possibly Labour would have done the same thing, except that the market idealogues had left by then.) Anyone connected with universities knows what a destructive time-wasting exercise PBF reporting is.
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