Penny Simmonds
speaker
17 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard yesterday
Penny Simmonds’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The button!
Absolutely.
They would have gone anyway.
Um fees free was set up um I would think pretty rapidly by Ardern just after she became leader.
Uh and it was supposedly going to lift participation rate and improve equity and uh over two billion dollars later it hasn't done that and we shouldn't be funding something that doesn't do what it was supposed to do.
Uh look, I didn't think it would work particularly uh and I thought that it encouraged some fairly bad behaviours.
I saw young kids, young boys that were going to enroll in a carpentry course who decided that they would go and spend a year on the booze at university instead on Jacinda.
Uh they were their words, but it wasn't on Jacinda, it was on the taxpayer and they eventually came
came back and did their carpentry after they'd had a year away on the booth.
So
So it it created some very per perverse incentive.
Not really because the last year they're going to finish.
Once you get to the end of your course you're going to finish it anyway.
First year it just encouraged people to go and have fun for a year.
Y yes it is and that's um that's global uh research has shown that it really doesn't change the price of of uh fees don't change uh your direction.
Well I mean what it did do is it stopped peop some people, about three hundred thousand people not having quite such a high loan, but they were going to do that anyway and you'd have to argue uh they are going to have better uh
employment rates, better continuity of employment, better uh overall salaries, should taxpayers who don't get that benefit be paying for those that do?
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