Auckland student protest over education cuts. As many of today's lawmakers had to pay tuition fees themselves, there is a possibilty it has created an "I had to pay for it, so you should, too" mentality, says Jacinda Ardern.

Warning – the five words that follow will, for some, be construed as the political equivalent of a red rag to a bull.

I believe in free education.



At some point, that simple sentiment became controversial. I suspect it was a few decades ago. By then, free education (at tertiary level at least) was becoming a distant memory.

Yes, the loan scheme existed, but for families where no one had ever stepped foot in a university, the unknown was suddenly coupled with the prospect of debt levels previously only seen when you shackled yourself to a bank to buy your first Hardie-plank house.



I could bring out the old rant about the politicians who made the decision to remove free, post-school education being the ones who benefited from it themselves, which is still a fair point. However, increasingly the generation of politicians who we need to turn the bus around didn't get a free ride – and won't pay it forward.



I fear that we have grown a generation of "I had to pay for it, so you should, too" and it's our own bloody fault.



If we're looking for the source, it probably lies in the 1990s, the birth of the user-pays generation.

We told a whole bunch of young people that if they wanted an education they would have to pay, and pay handsomely. We told them that from the time they entered kindy to the time they left high school, their learning was something that we would all benefit from, but after that they were on their own.

Perhaps to hit the point home, that same decade saw the end of the family benefit, the creation of Crown Health Enterprises (our public health system) which were told to start turning a profit, and the introduction of market rents for people living in state houses.



Now the children of that generation are leaving tertiary education with an average debt of $20,000, and to top it off, the lowest home ownership rates since the 1950s.



The time has come to draw a line in the sand, not out of nostalgia, but because we have to.



Free education is not an ideological choice, it's an economic one. If we want a society where we have an untrained and unskilled workforce on low wages, where the government is consistently using a tax credit regime to top up incomes, and where unemployment increases because 45 per cent of jobs will simply be gone due to automation, then by all means, we should just keep doing what we're doing.



Or we could pick a different path, and recognise that free secondary school education is not enough, and start recognising the public good that life-long learning represents, and how desperately important training and retraining is.



I didn't get a free education, but I believe passionately that the generations that follow me should. It's time to pay it forward.

David Seymour responds

Free education is a lie. The people who build lecture theatres, teach, mark exams and write text books all expect to be paid. As do the people who make laptops and lab equipment.



These are some of the costs of education. Jacinda can't make costs go away, but she can make the taxpayer pay them.



Actually the taxpayer already pays 75 per cent of the cost of tertiary education. The student pays only 25 per cent. And then, students can take out an unsecured, interest free loan that they only have to start repaying if they earn more than $20,000.



It is already a generous deal considering the enormous benefit of increased earning power that students get. As further proof of this generosity, more people are studying than ever. But Jacinda wants the taxpayer to pay it all.



Under Jacinda's 'free' education, students will have no skin in the game. We won't know whether they value their study enough to pay even a quarter of its cost. Most probably will, but many won't. In a century when skills will be more important than ever, we can't afford poorly targeted spending.