Children of Rogernomics: A Neoliberal Generation Leaves School

Sligo

1

GROWING UP IN NEOLIBERAL TIMES

Young New Zealanders born in the years immediately following 1984 are the focus of this book. They are this country’s neoliberal generation, who grew up during economic and social policy reforms that transformed New Zealand’s economy and society. By one reading, out of these reforms ‘fortress New Zealand’ became an open, internationalised economy capable of competing in the global marketplace. By another reading, the country abandoned its full employment goal and commitment to adequate social welfare provision in favour of privileging the market in allocating employment and resources. New Zealand was not alone in taking this path. Political leaders in the UK, US, Canada and Australia were similarly engaged in the neoliberal revolution during the 1980s. But New Zealand gained a reputation for going the furthest and fastest in the Western world in reforming its economy along these lines.*

Our intention is to explore how the generation born into this evolving landscape grappled with crafting identities and futures for themselves, particularly as they made the transition from school to their post-school lives in the mid-2000s. Like Ball, Maguire and Macrae (2000), who describe what neoliberalism meant for those growing up in Thatcher’s Britain, we explore what similar changes have meant in New Zealand for the children of Rogernomics (also see Andres & Wyn 2010; Gerson 2010).†

We interviewed ninety-three young people twice (and in some cases three times) over a period of two years. Most were in their last year of high school when we first talked with them, although a small number had recently left school. Some participants returned to school the following year, but most had embarked on their post-school lives by the time we caught up with them for a second, and sometimes third, interview. This was a diverse group in terms of social class, ethnicity and school-leaving status, ranging in age from fifteen to early twenties. In bald terms, the structure of the group was as follows: seventy participants were young women, twenty-three were young men. Fifty-three were Pākehā,* twenty were Māori, fifteen were Pasifika (most of whom were born in New Zealand) and five were from new migrant families from countries other than the Pacific Islands. Overall, sixty-eight participants stayed in school until Year 13, although not all completed this final year of high school. Twenty-five left school before starting Year 13 (in New Zealand usually aged seventeen or eighteen) and, in this group, fourteen left before the beginning of Year 12 (age sixteen years or younger). They spoke with us about school, family, friends, work, career plans, tertiary education, leisure, spirituality and growing up. They shared hopes about their imagined futures and anxieties about whether they could make these futures happen. Two of our research sites, involving fifty-five participants, were urban: Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, and Christchurch, the South Island’s largest city. The third site, involving thirty-eight participants, was a provincial town servicing a rural area.

We were not attempting a statistical analysis of a strictly representative sample of New Zealand youth. This has been done superbly elsewhere (Adolescent Health Research Group 2003, 2008; Rasanathan, Ameratunga, Tin Tin, Robinson, Chen, Young & Watson 2008). Rather, we were seeking a rich analysis of qualitative data drawn from in-depth interviews with a diverse group. Our focus was the identity work of these young people. How did they craft their identities as they navigated transitions into new forms of adulthood? What role, if any, did the discourses of neoliberalism play in their identity work? What other discursive resources did they draw on to construct identities? How were their choices and aspirations shaped by forms of inequality and social exclusion in their communities, schools and families? What kinds of adulthood were they inventing? (Thomson, Holland, McGrellis, Bell, Henderson & Sharpe 2004).

The following chapters explore these questions. Chapters 2 and 3 provide an account of the research tools, theory and method. Chapter 4 introduces some of the dominant themes that came through in the initial interviews, using participants’ own words as much as possible. The next seven chapters use individual case studies to offer analysis of some of these themes. Chapters 5 and 6 explore our young people’s plans and aspirations for the future, together with some of their accompanying pressures. Chapters 7 and 8 look at some of the resources that participants drew on for their identity work, including spirituality and aspects of popular culture. Chapter 9 examines how some participants who were seeking futures in the cultural economy used discourses of entrepreneurialism and enterprise to inform their pathways. Chapter 10 explores the crafting of identity in terms of gender and sexuality, and Chapter 11 considers the specific situation of a small group of young women who became mothers while in their teens. Chapter 12 offers a general overview, but this time from the second interviews, noting what had and had not changed in the intervening period of transition. The book concludes in Chapter 13 with reflections on the crafting of identity in neoliberal times. The remainder of this current chapter offers a brief overview of the reforms that shaped the economic, political and social landscape of these young people’s lives.

1984: The Reforms

Our participants were born into an era of economic transformation.† The fourth Labour Government came to power in 1984 during a time of high inflation, fiscal crisis and rising unemployment. The Government’s response to these challenges was informed by economic policies adopted in the UK and US in the early 1980s: it embarked on a programme of economic restructuring premised on opening up New Zealand’s protected economy to international competition in financial and export markets. Agricultural subsidies and import tariffs were progressively reduced, some state-owned commercial operations were corporatised and a range of state assets were privatised (Dalziel & Lattimore 1991). The most immediate material effect of the reforms on the general population was a rise in unemployment, particularly in the manufacturing and resource extraction industries. Communities where employment was concentrated in these sectors were hit especially hard. Unemployment levels peaked in 1991, at a post-war high close to 11 per cent, and did not begin to fall until the mid-1990s. Prolonged high unemployment led to poverty from which many families, and some entire communities, did not readily recover. Arguably, the reforms of the 1980s put in place deep structures of inequality which remain decades later.

These structures of inequality were further entrenched in the 1990s as welfare reform followed on from economic reform. Treasury briefing papers to the incoming National Government at the end of 1990 argued that inflation and unemployment levels could not fall unless welfare benefit levels and some wage rates fell (New Zealand Treasury 1990). Following this logic, the Government cut welfare benefits significantly, enforced strict eligibility criteria for receiving welfare assistance and introduced employment law reform that undermined collective wage bargaining in favour of individual employment contracts. Levels of poverty rose, disproportionately affecting Māori and Pasifika families (Atwool 1999; Cheyne, O’Brien & Belgrave 2008; Stephens, Waldegrave & Frater 1995). Atwool notes that by 1997, 30 per cent of children were living in households receiving a social welfare benefit of some kind, a significant increase from 12 per cent in 1985 (also see Blaiklock, Kiro, Belgrave, Low, Davenport & Hassall 2002; Stephens & Bradshaw 1995).

The welfare and employment law reforms were accompanied by a concerted effort by the Government to frame debates about unemployment and poverty in terms of welfare dependency, benefit fraud and the failure of individual responsibility. Again, these developments mirrored developments overseas (Fraser & Gordon 1994; Levitas 1998). Meanwhile, church and community groups and trade unions fought back with their own research on poverty levels, and attempted to reframe debates using the language of social responsibility (see, for example, Dalziel 1996; Jackman 1992, 1993; Robinson 1993; Young 1995a, 1995b).

By the time our participants were in school, high unemployment, significant inequality and the discourses of dependency and individual responsibility were well established. At the same time, New Zealand’s education system underwent a thorough transformation, aligning more closely with market principles.

Creating an Education Market Place

In 1987 a supermarket businessman, Brian Picot, was appointed by the Labour Government to draw up a blueprint for restructuring the compulsory education system. The existing system was regarded by reformers as too centralised, overly bureaucratic and inefficient. The resulting report, Administering for Excellence, framed its proposed reforms in the language of improved education quality and cost containment (Fiske & Ladd 2000).

Parental choice and competition among schools were central to these reforms. Competition was introduced through the dezoning of schools in 1991, allowing pupils to attend any school rather than the one closest to them. This was intended to motivate schools to attract students through improved performance, while parents were expected to choose the best school for their children, unconstrained by geographical location. Although education has always been ‘a site of struggle for credential advantage’ (Lauder et al. 1999, p. 135), these reforms intensified the struggle by creating a positional economy where a school’s reputation became a fundamental element of parental choice (Robertson & Dale 2002).

School choice had considerable popular appeal and it is not surprising that parents tended not to oppose these reforms, although many teachers and education researchers did. The freeing up and subsequent removal of zoning, together with increased state support for private education, appeared to provide parents with expanded options for their children’s education. But in research conducted in high schools during the 1990s, Lauder et al. (1999) showed that advantage was disproportionately available to particular groups: middle-class and Pākehā in particular (also see Nash 1999; Robertson & Dale 2002).

Māori education made some important gains during the 1980s and 1990s. The successful establishment of Kōhanga Reo ‘language nests’ was followed by the setting up of Kura Kaupapa Māori schools and wānanga,* in which education is based on Māori principles. The antecedents of these developments included the Māori renaissance of the 1970s and ongoing activism, but neoliberal conditions in the 1980s and 1990s were useful too. In the case of these education initiatives, the neoliberal emphasis on market demand was drawn on to support demand for schools and tertiary institutions where te reo Māori was spoken and tikanga Māori determined how things were done (Lauder et al. 1999; Tuhiwai Smith 2006).

The 1990s also witnessed the development of a tertiary education market, and a rise in student participation rates in universities, polytechnics, wānanga and private tertiary education organisations. Historically, these rates have been relatively low† and students have been concentrated in the universities and polytechnics. However, from the early 1990s, participation rose across the tertiary sector, particularly amongst women, Māori and mature-age students,‡ and the number and range of institutions offering tertiary study also increased. This period saw the introduction of a system of funding tertiary institutions according to student numbers, which encouraged these institutions to market themselves strongly to prospective students and to teachers and parents. Tuition fees were introduced in 1989, and in 1992 a system of student loans and targeted student allowances (for low-income students) was established. Wyatt Creech, Minister of Education in the 1996 National Government, explained the logic of student loans:

The student loan scheme is a good scheme. It improves access into universities by providing a vehicle by which students can afford to pay the fees. They get the loan; the fees are paid. They get their education, go out into the work-force, and earn money. From those earnings they repay their loan. (New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, 15/12/92, Vol. 532, 13234)

This logic embedded an ‘extended linear’ model of transition in young people’s post-school lives (Higgins 2002). Extended levels of childhood dependency were implicit in the model: student fees, targeted allowances and tightened eligibility for social welfare benefits established expectations that parents would contribute to the costs of further education and training. As we write this, young people up to the age of twenty-four are subject to a parental income test when applying for a student allowance.

The development of a tertiary education market in the 1990s arose within a wider context in which young people found themselves with reduced options: youth unemployment was high, the apprenticeship system had collapsed (Murray 2001) and welfare support for young people was retrenched in the general reform of the social welfare system. This had important implications for youth transitions.

Transition Transformed

The rise of the education market and the collapse of the youth labour market transformed traditional pathways out of school (Higgins 2002). Welfare benefits for youth were reduced (in some cases, abolished), and it became a stated policy goal that every young person should be in education, training or employment. Neoliberal and neoconservative policy agendas of the National governments of the 1990s came together, the former to encourage everyone of working age to be in the labour force or to be preparing to become employable, and the latter to encourage parental responsibility for children who were studying or were unemployed. For school leavers facing intense competition from experienced labour in the workplace, post-school education and training became an obvious next step.

The participants in our study were leaving school in the early years of the new millennium. By then, unemployment had been falling for several years, hovering at around 5 per cent at the time our study began in 2003. But the transition environment for these young people had changed. There was no return to the assumption that had dominated transition in the post-war years: that the majority of school leavers should go job-shopping in the labour market and undertake most of their training ‘on the job’ (Higgins & Nairn 2006). Tertiary education for school leavers was now an established expectation for many young people, their parents, teachers and employers.

Promotion of the knowledge society and its accompanying discourse fitted well with this rise of a post-school education market. A newly elected Labour Government in 1999 voiced alarm that New Zealand was ‘falling behind’ in the OECD ranking of nations in terms of economic performance. A poorly skilled workforce was taken to be a significant obstacle to the country climbing back up these rankings (GAINZ 2002). Tertiary education was proposed as an essential ingredient for building the knowledge economy necessary for the country’s global competitiveness.

A general trend towards de-industrialisation in the labour market since the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s is part of this picture (Higgins & Alfeld 2007; Higgins, Nairn & Sligo 2010). Tertiary education, particularly at university, is promoted as the pathway towards the managerial and professional (and associated) jobs that this labour market transformation has produced. It is also seen as the way to avoid the poorly paid and insecure sales and service jobs that are the other side of de-industrialisation.

Thus over the period when our participants were in school, a set of specific policy developments, together with broader economic changes, combined to structure school leavers’ transition paths in new ways. But education and subsequent pathways into employment are not the only changing features of transition.

Our participants belong to a generation for whom traditional life-course patterns have broken down: their grandparents, and to a lesser extent their parents, moved along a relatively standardised age-and-stage transition pathway that was structured by the institutional regime of the New Zealand welfare state. But the linearity of consecutive life-stage transitions – school, employment, marriage, family, retirement – has been replaced by the complexity of concurrent transitions (Heinz & Krüger 2001, Wyn & Dwyer 2000). Individuals move between education and employment on an ongoing basis and do not expect to settle into a single job for their lifetime; they develop significant intimate relationships at relatively young ages; they move in and out of the parental home, sometimes well into their twenties; and many embark comparatively late in young adulthood on purchasing a home and starting a family. This complexity contributes to the understanding of many participants that everything is ‘up for grabs’ and that they are individually responsible for making the ‘right choices’ about every aspect of their lives.

Other significant influences include the interaction between earlier onset of puberty and consumer-media discourses: from relatively early ages young people are perceived as, and encouraged to be, autonomous actors and consumers in the marketplace (Kenway & Bullen 2001; Lealand 2001; Maguire et al. 2001; Matthews et al. 2000; Skelton & Valentine 1998). Globalisation, including global labour markets and the relative ease of international travel and communication also feature prominently in the consciousness of this generation. Expectations of overseas experience (or OE) were often voiced by participants as though this was a necessary component of transition.

In the chapters that follow we will explore some of this complexity. As we investigate our participants’ identity work, we discover young people actively using neoliberal and other discourses as resources to make sense and meaning of their lives, and to imagine themselves moving into futures that their grandparents could never have imagined when they made their own transitions from school. The discursive and material resources in play are, of course, unevenly distributed, and young people are frequently required to reconsider and renegotiate their plans as they come face to face with setbacks, disappointments and constraints. It is within this environment that their identities (or subjectivities) are, as Davies and Banks (1992, p. 3) observe, ‘formulated through discourses, given substance and pattern through storyline and deployed in social interaction’.

* Economist, 15 June 1991, p. 72, cited in Kelsey 1995, p. 8 (also see Aberbach & Christensen 2001; Elliot 2002; Thrupp 2001).

† The economic reforms were named 'Rogernomics' after one of their main architects, Finance Minister Roger Douglas.

* Pākehā is the Māori term for New Zealanders of European descent. It is a contested term. We use it as a mark of respect for the right of the indigenous people to name those who came after them.

† This neoliberal transformation has been the subject of considerable interest and analysis. See, for example, Boston and Dalziel 1992; Boston, Dalziel and St John 1999; Briar, Munford and Nash 1992; Dalziel 1993; Dalziel and Lattimore 1991; Kelsey 1995; Roper and Rudd 1993; Sharp 1994; and the trilogy of documentaries by Alistair Barry, Someone Else’s Country, In a Land of Plenty and A Civilised Society.

* Wānanga are tertiary institutions conceptualised by Māori for Māori. Non-Māori are welcome but on Māori terms.

† In 1981, 6 per cent of men and 2.8 per cent of women in the New Zealand population had a university qualification. Polytechnic qualifications were held by 17 per cent of men and 14 per cent of women (Horsfeld 1988).

‡ Recent statistics demonstrate this. Females now have higher rates of participation in tertiary study than males: in 2009 the age-standardised rate was 13.7 per cent for females and 11.0 per cent for males. Māori participation climbed rapidly: the age-standardised rate increased from 7.2 per cent in 1998 to just under 20 per cent between 2003 and 2005 (Ministry of Social Development 2010). And in 2005, there were 139,000 New Zealanders aged forty or over enrolled in tertiary education, three times the number in 1995 (Scott 2006).

2

IDENTITY: A PROJECT OF THE SELF

How do members of New Zealand’s ‘1984 generation’ craft identities at the child–adult border? In this chapter we highlight key aspects of the conceptual framework that helped us begin to address this central question. Our aim is to enable readers unfamiliar with this framework to understand why we approached the concept of identity in the way we did, and to enable those who are familiar with this framework to consider our approach and our findings in the light of their own explorations and understandings.

In the early days of formulating the project, we discussed our ideas with a group of teenagers and asked them what they thought of research aimed at understanding youth identities. They were puzzled. ‘Identity’ was not a word they were accustomed to using or to applying to themselves. We explained that we would be exploring such things as how young people grapple with decisions about education and career pathways, and how they make choices in relation to leisure, clothing, music, and so forth. The young people we were consulting were happy to discuss these things, but they had difficulty talking about them in terms of something called ‘identity’. The core of our conceptual approach to identity lies precisely in this puzzlement. We approach identity not as a set of fixed attributes that can be readily described, having been acquired at birth or developed in growing up. Identity is not something we possess, but something we do: it is expressed ‘in performance’ (Butler 1990). Identity, then, is in the enactment: ‘the accoutrements used, the products consumed and the competence in behaviours displayed are the basis of claims and ascriptions of identity’ (Plumridge, Fitzgerald & Abel 2002, p. 169, drawing on Butler 1990). As such, identity is socially constructed, fluid and multifaceted, taking place in relationship with others.

Identity as Relational and Dynamic

The work of crafting identity takes place in the context of relationships: within families, neighbourhoods and communities, with peers, and within institutions such as school (Higgins, Vaughan, Phillips & Dalziel 2008). The relational nature of identity is explored, for example, by Archer and Yamashita (2003, p. 61), who look at the importance of peer relationships in the way young working-class men in the UK perform identities emphasising ‘hardness’, ‘coolness’ and an ‘anti-schoolwork’ attitude. Their participants identified themselves as ‘bad boys’ and identified their middle-class peers as ‘proper clever’ and ‘goodies’. By contrast, in research by Ball et al. (2000, p. 73) young middle-class women in the UK were found to be ‘heavily invested in school’, an investment encouraged by middle-class family expectations. In Australia, Bottrell (2007, p. 608) discusses the way in which young Koori participants in her research gained a ‘sense of belonging through claiming and being owned by’ their people. And in New Zealand, Anae (1998) examines the identity work of young New Zealand-born Samoans in the context of their church and community membership. She explores the extent to which their opting out of church involvement was regarded as a temporary opting out of Samoan identity. Thus, a vital aspect of identity concerns the way it is constituted through relationships.

Identity is also fluid, perhaps particularly so for young people at the child–adult border, where individuals experience ‘uncertainties, fluctuations, discontinuities, reversals and seesaws’, develop ‘patchwork lifestyles’ and undergo ‘the ups and downs of fragile and reversible transitions’ (European Group for Integrated Social Research [EGRIS] 2001, pp. 103–4; also see Dwyer, Smith, Tyler & Wyn 2005; Wyn & Dwyer 2000; Wyn & White 1997).

This fluidity occurs not only as young people move between childhood and adulthood, but cross-culturally as well, particularly for those belonging to more than one culture or ethnic group. For example, Borell (2005), researching with young Māori in South Auckland, found that these young people’s identity work was complex and diverse, growing out of their connections to locality and community, including affiliations with young Pasifika people. Borell argues against conventional labelling of these young people as ‘Māori’ or ‘not Māori’ based on whether or not they have knowledge of