Manawatu Exhibition: Student Action
Manawatu Photographs
Massey university students organised a boycott of classes and marched at lunchtime to the Square on 26 March 1975 to show their opposition to the government’s inaction on bursaries. In a telegram to the prime minister and the ministers of Education and Finance, they called on the government to implement, without delay, a Standard Tertiary Bursary as promised in the 1972 Labour Party election manifesto
Several hundred students attended a mock funeral and burial at the Palmerston North Teachers’ College campus on 11 June 1975. They were marking the end of the NZ Education Department, as represented by the ‘Honourable Philla Compost’ (a play on the name of Minister of Education, Phil Amos). They saw the end of three-year teacher training as the death of egalitarian education and of any hope for the education of the nation’s children.