The Real Story Behind Seymour’s Attendance Data

By Rebecca Thomas

How tidy numbers hide the children we stopped counting

Attendance is up, youth are lazy,

The government wants you to believe the classrooms are full again.

Seymour waves his stats, Luxon preaches self-reliance, and somewhere in the boardroom light, Erica Stanford smiles.

But this is not a story of recovery — it’s a story of erasure.

What the public sees is performance — Seymour front and centre, waving rising figures that gleam with promise, declaring the system cured by his hand. He casts himself as reformer, helmsman, redeemer of classrooms. But beneath that show runs an undertow no one measures — the quiet current of displacement. 

Rates rise only because those most disengaged have vanished.

Once a fifteen-year-old slips quietly from the roll, they are gone from the equation, invisible to the story. In that blind spot lives the NEET reality — Not in Education, Employment, or Training — the truer mirror of who has been left behind.

The darker the shade, the deeper the disconnection.

Luxon’s sermons about our youth — their so-called “drift,” their PlayStations, their laziness, their “welfare dependency” — turn invisibility into fault, painting poverty as idleness and absence as moral failure.

Imagine how that sounds to a young person already trying to find their footing — to hear their struggle reduced to laziness.

Imagine how our young people feel, hearing adults talk about them that way.

Imagine what it does to a young person’s hope, to be spoken about instead of spoken with.

And through it all, Erica remains immaculate and still — her silence almost strategic — while Seymour’s shadow stretches further across the education portfolio. Together, they choreograph a neat fiction, one that rewards obedience and edits out the heartbreak humming beneath the headline.

This week has played out like theatre in three acts — the stage lights swinging from Seymour’s self-assurance, to Luxon’s managerial sermon, and finally to the haka that shook Parliament’s walls.

It began with Seymour, ever the showman of statistics, unveiling his latest triumph — improved figures, the illusion of recovery. He spoke as if redemption had arrived through data alone, as if belonging could be measured by percentage, while beneath that confident grin lurked subtraction disguised as progress: the fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-year-olds quietly missing from his narrative. Then came Luxon, behind a lectern of moral authority, preaching about ending youth “drift” and insisting the world owes them nothing. His policy will cut support for more than 4,000 young people — many already caught in NEET’s grip, stranded between lost schooling and absent opportunity. From Tai Tokerau to South Auckland, they’re told to stand taller while the floor is pulled from beneath them — the same old script that turns inequality into personal failure and calls it leadership.

And then, as if to answer them both, came the haka. After Oriini Kaipara’s maiden speech — that tender, powerful declaration from a woman who once told stories and now stands to change them — the chamber erupted. From the gallery came the roar of whakapapa, rhythm, defiance. The Speaker called for calm, but calm was never the point. The haka was not disruption; it was reclamation. It was a people saying: you may count us out of your policies, but we are still here — loud, unbent, alive.

You can feel it, can’t you? The air shifting — as truth seeps back through the cracks of power.

Together, these moments form the real story of Aotearoa this week.

The government may script the data, but the people — are writing the heart.

What they don’t want us looking at are the shadows behind their own spotlight. While Seymour parades his stats salvation, they hope we won’t ask who’s been erased to make those numbers gleam. While Luxon scolds young people for surviving on welfare, they rely on us ignoring the transport deserts, the hunger, the trauma that keep them from opportunity, or allowed them to fail school. They distract us, the real story isn’t in the numbers they show, but in the lives they refuse to count.

Northland’s truth runs higher than the nation’s averages.

The data they don’t shout about — is where the missing live, the NEET data.

It measures every young person, not just those still enrolled, exposing the chasm between political fantasy and lived reality. In Tai Tokerau, the numbers ache; in South Auckland, they hum with the same ache — the sound of futures left waiting. While Luxon talks about punishing those with less from his line of privilege and Seymour claims to be rescuing the absent, the NEET data whispers back: you are celebrating while others are being dropped.

You can feel the tension rippling through Aotearoa. 

In Parliament, a haka breaks the power. 

In public, youth are cut down by adults they should be able to trust. 

In policy rooms, attendance becomes a weapon. 

The government’s chorus grows louder: 

Luxon commanding youth to carry themselves, 

Seymour rearranging numbers, 

Erica preserving her silence. 

Yet the haka, the NEET figures, the absented fifteen-year-olds — they rise like a counter-melody.

So when they say attendance is improving, ask: for whom?

When they speak of responsibility, ask: whose shoulders bear the weight?

Our rangatahi are the nations pulse, presence, potential.

And as Oriini’s haka reminded the House — stories are not owned by those who count them, but by those who rise to speak them.

The government counts.

The people remember.

And the people rise.