Secondary school students prepare their own budget
Posted on June 10, 2019
At the end of May the Wellbeing Budget was delivered by the Finance Minister, Grant Robertson, and whilst school students do not have an official say until they turn eighteen they are still aware of the issues.
The RNZ programme First Up spent a morning at Macleans College talking to top senior economics students about what they had wanted from the new budget.
Hayley Xie (Upham House), Surathbudh Ebata (Batten), Elizabeth Koh (Upham), Sanjit Ramesh Chandran (Hillary) and Darsh Chaudhari (Batten) had taken part in the Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Challenge so are not strangers to scrutinising the country’s economy.
The students talked about their worries for the future, e.g. sustainability, the environment, automation and the workplace, and how they felt New Zealand’s infrastructure and housing projects are not keeping pace with the growing population.
Each student was given $100 of fake money to allocate to a mock New Zealand budget. They decided individually how the money would be applied across seven categories and then had to state the reasoning behind their decisions.
