Precautionary politics

Abstract

This chapter considers the types of politics New Zealand students preferred to engage with when they had a student loan. Many students actively adopted a more guarded and careful type of politics— memorably described by one student as applying the ‘precautionary principle’ from environmental management to their political participation. I suggest that to a limited extent student debt acted as a type of discipline for these students, encouraging a deliberately cautious type of political agency that tended to be uncontroversial in its approach and measured by what other actors external to the university considered acceptable. Yet neither were students entirely ‘robbed’ of their political imagination. Far from it. I make the case that in a context of debt New Zealand students are demonstrating considerable creativity in opening up new spaces for participation that pragmatically enable them to engage politically without compromising their future security.