Clendon David: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading[Sitting date: 13 February 2014. Volume:696;Page:15964. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green): I am pleased to have the opportunity to take a brief call on this Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 3) because essentially this bill seeks to make better a scheme that is fundamentally flawed. It seeks to meddle in a failed attempt to improve a scheme that at its heart is a failure. This scheme is the wrong model. The loan scheme is not the way to assure that we have a well-educated community and that people have access to tertiary education. We need to fundamentally rethink how we fund tertiary education. Meddling around the margins trying to criminalise people for failing to meet their debt obligations is not a great leap forward. It lacks vision it lacks humanity and the Greens clearly will oppose it.We heard from the member for North Shore Maggie Barry—and the people of North Shore I am sure do not deserve such a member—that the scheme needs to be sustainable. This fundamentally is not sustainable. Any definition of sustainability will involve social benefit economic well-being and good environmental outcomes and this scheme and this amendment to it would fail on all three of those measures. This scheme has created a massive debt burden. It has very high transaction costs: $13 billion of debt sits on the Government books as an asset. If you think that through this asset owned by the Government reflects the burden placed predominantly on our young people compromising their ability to begin their careers to start their families to build households and to purchase homes. Older people also are severely punished in a sense financially by entering into tertiary education under this model.The Greens understand as New Zealanders did for a very long time that there is a reciprocal relationship between free tertiary education—or close-to-free education—and social obligations. At one time we did have very close-to-free access to tertiary education and there are many people still in this House who benefited from that. Out of that came a sense of social obligation. People who enjoyed the privilege of an education predominantly funded by the taxpayer understood that that brought with it a level of obligation back to the community. I think that was respected for a very long time and we need to move back to something that recognises the more appropriate balance between private good and public good wrapped up in tertiary education.This Government has proven that it is no friend of the tertiary sector. There have been constant cuts demanding that the sector do more with less. Most recently there has been an attack on the governance model of our tertiary education institutions which will do no good and potentially a great deal of harm. This Government sees educationsimply as a commercial arrangement: a commodity is produced called education and consumers purchase it. That is obviously the wrong understanding of what education is about and it underpins this Government’s flawed policies around tertiary education and much else besides.The contribution from the New Zealand First member Tracey Martin actually rang some bells with me when she quite rightly pointed out that bureaucratic errors will certainly result in people being arrested at the border imposing who knows what cost on them. I did have a student loan—a relatively small loan. I studied as a mature student. I came out of that and at the completion of my degree I was fortunate to go into quite well-paid employment. What I remember vividly are the statements that one got regularly about the state of one’s student loan. They were works of fiction. They were incomprehensible. I have a reasonably strong background in and can read financial documents. I gave up trying to understand them. On one memorable occasion I received on one day two envelopes each with a statement purporting to be the state of my student loan. Those two figure sets had no relationship to each other. There will be people who fall foul of this and who suffer serious costs because of bureaucratic mistakes alone. That is unacceptable and who will bear the cost of that? I do wonder at that.Do we really want our police force which is working hard to change the culture of policing to genuinely go out and prevent crime and to make our community safe—do we want those officers reduced to the status of debt collectors for the Inland Revenue Department? Is that what New Zealanders want their police force to be doing? I suspect that is not the case at all. These are civil issues. These are civil matters. We are going to criminalise people who otherwise would not be criminalised. It is time we put this to rest. It is time for an intelligent and informed debate about funding tertiary education. This is doomed to fail. Thank you.