Long division: Danyl McLauchlan on NCEA and a second neoliberal wave

NZ Herald

10-08-2025

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Erica Stanford: confronting malevolence and incompetence everywhere. Photo / Getty Images
NCEA was doomed anyway. No educational framework so dependent on internal assessment could remain viable in the age of artificial intelligence. Schools the world over are going back to end-of-year exams. But Education Minister Erica Stanford's unilateral decision to scrap the entire system – a multi-decade debacle in which students were graded on skills like making coffee, learning to juggle and picking up rubbish while our scores in international education comparisons relentlessly declined – makes a sharp break with the culture of New Zealand politics.
Ministers do not replace core components of the education system merely because they've failed hundreds of thousands of students and inflicted profound damage on the nation's long-term prosperity. It is simply not done. Consider the agonising decades of inaction about other known problems like the broken tax system, the broken energy sector, the inertia over fixing grocery markets. Consider the 30-plus inquiries into Oranga Tamariki during the past three decades – an organisation that remains horribly defective.
The unspoken role of ministers is to minimise media risk, follow official advice to conduct reviews, and oversee departmental mergers, reorganisations and rebrands: to create the illusion of change while leaving everything intact. If Stanford successfully reforms the public education system she will join a very short list of recent ministers – among them Labour's David Cunliffe, who fixed telecommunications, and National's Steven Joyce and Amy Adams (the ultrafast broadband rollout) – who drove meaningful change in their portfolios.
Why Stanford? Why now? In her time in government she's had her nose pressed hard against the glass of institutional failure – in education, in her other major portfolio of immigration (where the accredited work visa fiasco led to widespread exploitation of migrant workers) and in the Abuse in Care enquiry. It's easier to push back against the mandarins of the public service when confronted with their malevolence and incompetence on a daily basis.
Cracks in the ice
But perhaps there's also a deeper shift in our politics. There have been other signals – Nicola Willis's decision to capitalise Kiwibank to promote competition in the banking sector; Chris Bishop's declared intention to lower the cost of housing – that suggest a thawing of the status quo; a slow warming of the politically possible; cracks in the frozen pack-ice that has locked the nation into a state of dysfunction for the past three decades.
Many social scientists divide the post-war political order into two distinct eras: the Keynesian years of low unemployment, protected economies, powerful trade unions, extensive government ownership and high rates of progressive taxation; followed by the neoliberal order of free markets, free trade, low inflation and low taxes.
A political order is never advanced by a single party, it must enjoy widespread legitimacy across the political spectrum. The NCEA was forged by National in the 1990s. It was an artefact of the neoliberal consensus reimagining students as consumers of bespoke curricula. Subjects were fragmented into modular components, assessments decentralised. Education was reinvented as earning credits rather than acquiring knowledge.
Labour ministers Steve Maharey and Trevor Mallard rebranded it as a means of promoting equity in education, but there was never any reason to believe this was true, and it wasn't. We now have one of the least equal education systems in the OECD. (The Green Party's rage at Stanford's decision illustrates how this theoretically radical party has been captured by Wellington's bias towards the status quo. Labour – more cannily – has adopted a wait-and-see approach.)
Looking to the past
When a political order is at the height of its power, government and its institutions become fixed and almost impossible to change. But, like clay, they become malleable during periods of transition when the old order breaks down and the new is still forming. A few days before Stanford's announcement, the Trump administration imposed blanket 15% tariffs on New Zealand imports, a protectionist policy that was standard during the Keynesian years; unthinkable under the neoliberal hegemony.
Stanford's outline for the replacement of NCEA also looks to the past: a standardised, centralised examinations regime. Contrast this with David Seymour's more radical vision for education: the public provision of independently run charter schools.
New Zealand's intellectual right correctly senses the mood for transformation. It points to the success of Argentina's Milei government in reducing inflation and growing the economy after cutting government spending by 30%. The right cites this as a case for a second, more radical neoliberal revolution.
Where is the left in this contest of ideas? In New Zealand, mostly nowhere. In the US, UK and now Australia there is much debate in left-wing circles about the Abundance Agenda, an argument for progressive governments to solve problems of housing, transport, energy and healthcare scarcity via improved state capacity and supply – delivering more houses, infrastructure and green energy projects rather than more welfare.
But the closest thing to an Abundance politician in New Zealand is Chris Bishop. Labour is still litigating its tax policy, leaning away from a wealth tax towards a capital gains tax – an important component of most neoliberal economic regimes. Maybe we'll get there 40 years after everyone else. The recent Green budget draws heavily on Keynesian ideas: high taxes, price controls, a Green Ministry of Works, free GPs, free dental care and a dramatic expansion of the welfare state – none of which will work if the state's productive capacity and the supply of essential goods and services remain constrained.
Stanford can roll back to an earlier education policy model with some confidence that it will work, but many components of Keynesianism failed for a reason. Left-wing political parties that repeat old mistakes – or simply cling to the prevailing order as it falls apart around them – will find the aspiring architects of a second neoliberal revolution ready and waiting to profit from their failures.