Here's the first line: "Students have saved hundreds of millions of dollars".
Well whoop-de-doo good for them. And you're welcome, because I paid for myself, but hey, millennials, we'll pay for you - next year's on us, after all.
The point of the press release, I take it, is to crow about how successful the scheme apparently has been because "Students have saved hundreds of millions of dollars".
However, apart from all the savings they are making, they also said that 47,019 people took up the scheme, which is apparently a success.
Don't get fooled by that because they thought 80,000 were going to, so that's a fail.
That's a 59 per cent rate of what they expected. You know what 59 per cent gets you at university? An F.
Why'd they expect 80,000? Well, because they thought university was so unaffordable that kids were sitting at home and despairing because they could afford to go and they were wasting their lives scraping together the money to be able to go. And if only it was free then all those kids would get their backpacks and their books and wash their little faces and trot off to class. Tens of thousands of them, until now held back by the coast of university.
But nope.
So there was no point in this policy, other than wasting our money on kids who were going anyway.
And I'm wondering if maybe while we're re calibrating KiwiBuild we can recalibrate this one at the same time.