Street Maryan: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Street Maryan: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:660;Page:8751] 
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 We came back yesterday to a new year and to the Prime Minister’s statement where he asserted that he was looking for a step change in the New Zealand economy. What did we get in that statement that would lead us to believe that those words are at all realisable? We got nothing. We got no plan. We got the usual National Party mantra its only mantra for the last 20 years of lower taxes for the rich and an increase in GST to be paid for largely by the poor. The dropping of the tax rates for the wealthy is meant to try to give us a step change in the economy. Where will we get a step change in this economy if there is no investment into tertiary education? I will make that one of my particular themes today because in the absence of a plan we are left with threats and veiled threats over tertiary education that do not augur well for the future of this country. 
First of all I pick up on a comment yesterday from Bernard Hickey. National has been trying to dismiss Bernard Hickey’s commentary but usually they like to hug him to death. Bernard Hickey is no particular friend of mine or of the Labour Party but he has said in his commentary: “John Key has just sent Generations X and Y a clear message: Leave the country now. … He is saying all those too poor to own a home now will never be able to own their own home. He is accepting the poverty and the hopelessness that is often attached to the working poor in rental accommodation. He is saying tough. My backers own property. We won. You lost. Eat that.” The same thing could be extrapolated from Mr Key’s comments about tertiary education. Where this Government appears to be taking tertiary education will not lead to the kind of economic improvement and the productivity that is required if everybody’s aspirations including the Prime Minister’s are to be met. John Key will never get us anywhere near Australia if he does not invest in tertiary education or young people in the way that Australia has. 
Another long-time commentator has asked John Key to prove the Reserve Bank governor wrong. He has challenged him to say that Alan Bollard is wrong in his assessment of our ability to catch up with Australia. The future the Prime Minister mapped out yesterday in his statement will in fact prove Alan Bollard right. But this is not about personalities. This is not about Key versus Bollard. This is about ideas. This is about plans. This is about the imagination and the courage to invest in young people so that they might acquire the skills they need to achieve the high-income-earning jobs they aspire to and continue to contribute to New Zealand’s productivity. 
Mr Key said that the Government intended to “take a careful look at the policy settings around student support …”. Now what on earth does that mean? We are left to fill the gap ourselves because clearly the Prime Minister either did not know what to say or was not prepared to say it. For example will students be able to access student allowances only if they pass all their subjects? What if they need more support to pass not doors being closed on them? Who will decide if students have made a genuine effort and have not simply chosen the wrong course initially and changed their mind about their course of study? It seems to me that when Mr Key talked about those people “who refuse to take their tertiary studies seriously” he was probably only talking about rich kids because it seems to me that only rich kids can afford not to take their studies seriously. The reality is that most students whether they are enrolled in a polytech or a university are working hard and juggling challenging study with part-time work—usually on low rates of pay—to support themselves and supplement their allowances. 
Those young people are about to be clobbered with an increase in GST. They are not the ones who will benefit from tax cuts for the rich. They will only get the other part which is the increase to GST. They are not superannuitants; they will not get any imagined compensation from the Government. They are not beneficiaries; they will not get any imagined compensation from the Government for increased GST. They are simply students. They are the ones on whom our future depends. They will be clobbered with an increase in GST with no tax cuts for them and I anticipate greater difficulty in accessing loans and allowances. The Government is clearly—whether by intention or ignorance I have not yet discerned—setting up tertiary education to once more become the domain of the well-off few not the less well-off many. 
The step change that needs to occur in the economy in this country is absolutely dependent upon raising the skills of everybody. So when we talk about trades training in schools and we look at what the Government is proposing it has outlined a plan for five trades academies around the country. One needs to look for another policy but one where it talks about the few rather than the many. It will be hard to find one. Our policy in Government was Schools Plus. It extended trades training and flexible high school programmes to every school in the country not simply to five selected trades academies. The investment that needs to be made in education beyond the school gate will be the thing that makes the difference. That will be the thing that causes New Zealand to prosper. 
For mature students with families or for redundant workers trying to upskill for another job this double whammy of higher GST and harder-to-get loans and allowances will be especially difficult. In addition to that another gap in the Prime Minister’s speech that we are left to fill is the veiled threat of the raising of the fee maxima cap at tertiary institutions. If fees are raised if increased GST is added to all necessary consumer goods and services and if access to loans and allowances is made harder what is to become of our world-standard education system? The Government clearly wishes to create an increasingly elitist tertiary education system for its rich friends. We know what has happened to its view of the underclass in New Zealand; it does not like listening to stories about the underclass any more. 
From the Prime Minister’s statement yesterday it is entirely apparent that any investment in a step change in the economy will result in a wider gap between the skilled and the unskilled than we currently have. That means there will be a system of tertiary education that is accessible to the few and not to the many.