Financial literacy will become a core element of the New Zealand social sciences curriculum for Year 1-10 students from 2027. But what is being proposed presents a limited picture of the factors influencing people’s financial wellbeing.
The specifics of the curriculum have yet to be released. However, the government’s announcement emphasised a focus on individual responsibility. Young people will be taught what they need to live within their means and how to accumulate enough wealth for retirement.
When announcing the new curriculum, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Scott Simpson said:
We are all consumers, and financial literacy can set young Kiwis up to be savvy consumers – whether it’s knowing how to invest wisely, choose the best loan at a bank, or even identify a scam.
However ... focusing only on individual responsibility risks ignoring the economic systems – and inequities – that shape young people’s lives.
Inequality in New Zealand has risen significantly in the past three decades. And the richest New Zealanders pay less tax than in similar OECD countries.
Knowing how to manage household accounts is, undeniably, an important skill. But individual skills can’t necessarily overcome the hurdles within the broader economic and social context.
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The resources being used in the classroom also exclude any significant discussion of broader economic systems and policies. Much of what is currently available is created in partnership with banks and financial organisations such as ASB’s GetWise and BNZ’s SavY programmes. These focus on budgeting, saving, banking and paying off debt.
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Financial literacy will become a core element of the New Zealand social sciences curriculum for Year 1-10 students from 2027. But what is being proposed presents a limited picture of the factors influencing people’s financial wellbeing.
The specifics of the curriculum have yet to be released. However, the government’s announcement emphasised a focus on individual responsibility. Young people will be taught what they need to live within their means and how to accumulate enough wealth for retirement.
When announcing the new curriculum, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Scott Simpson said:
We are all consumers, and financial literacy can set young Kiwis up to be savvy consumers – whether it’s knowing how to invest wisely, choose the best loan at a bank, or even identify a scam.
However, as our research shows, focusing only on individual responsibility risks ignoring the economic systems – and inequities – that shape young people’s lives.
Inequality in New Zealand has risen significantly in the past three decades. And the richest New Zealanders pay less tax than in similar OECD countries.
Knowing how to manage household accounts is, undeniably, an important skill. But individual skills can’t necessarily overcome the hurdles within the broader economic and social context.
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Focus on managing money
Financial literacy – under the term “financial capability” – is only briefly mentioned in the current New Zealand curriculum. The topic is positioned as a potential outcome of learning across different subject areas, rather than taught as its own distinct class.
Classroom resources focus on individual actions. Students are taught to manage money, set goals and manage risks.
There is no real discussion of economic inequality in the curriculum. And even the few references there are have a strong focus on personal responsibility.
Teaching resources available for senior economics, for example, explore topics such as income, taxation, product costs and the scarcity of resources.
In senior business studies, references to economic inequality are indirect. For example, the “key concepts” page alludes to ideas such as “supply and demand” and “scarcity” that can loosely be associated with economic inequality. But it is not explicit.
The resources being used in the classroom also exclude any significant discussion of broader economic systems and policies. Much of what is currently available is created in partnership with banks and financial organisations such as ASB’s GetWise and BNZ’s SavY programmes. These focus on budgeting, saving, banking and paying off debt.
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Globally, there has been a growing emphasis on financial literacy education, partly because of the complexity of modern financial products. And, as one study observed, “the risks of, and responsibility for, financial decisions are being increasingly shifted from governments and employers onto individuals”.
As political economist Chris Clarke has noted, there is an “irreconcilable gap” between the aims of financial literacy education and people’s “actual success in securing their security and wellbeing through financial markets”.
Other economists have pointed out how issues of intergenerational wealth and entrenched socioeconomic disadvantage – the “racial wealth gap” – cannot be overlooked when talking about “poor financial choices and decision making”.
But another form of financial literacy education is possible. Young people could be taught to understand and analyse how governments make decisions for the financial wellbeing of their citizens. They could also learn the value of employment rights, labour and workplace safety laws, and the role of unions and other civic initiatives.
Rather than focusing on taxes and balancing household accounts, students could learn about their individual responsibilities within the economic systems they are part of.
Among the few thing that are clear until we see the final legislation is that there will be two digital euros: the offline and the online version.
With the offline digital euro, you will be able to bump up a digital wallet on your smartphone (or a smart card instead). The offline version’s key feature is that only you and the person who receives the payment will have access to the transaction data, while compliance checks are performed when you load up your wallet (or card) with your bank.
The offline version might have, however, anti-fraud features to prevent forgery. It is said that no private data will be used for these anti-fraud checks, but it is unclear yet how this will be done.
There is also a discussion to introduce a limit a citizen can hold ‘offline’ (this is largely to prevent money laundering, the latest number I read was a limit of EUR 3,000). As everyone can have multiple accounts and multiple wallets, it is also not clear yet how the central bank would link your multiple wallets to your identity to impose this limit without knowing your identity. For now the latest proposal by the central bank mentions “unique identifiers”, but it’s unclear yet how they’d work.
If you pay with the online digital euro, all transaction details will be logged, very much as it is done with current online payment systems. According to the proposal, however, the central bank would only see pseudonymous transaction data, it won’t see your identity. Only your bank has full access to both sets of information. (However, if just a single transaction links your account to your identity, all your transactions are exposed.)
There are a lot of issues to clarify until the final legislation, but as @burgerchurgarr@lemmus.org already said, it depends not in the least what we do in the future. As with everything else, as long as we live in a free society that holds up democratic values, it will likely be fine, but any future government with an autocratic stance could change the law.