Lees-Galloway Iain: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 3) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee[Sitting date: 18 February 2014. Volume:696;Page:16043. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): Earlier in the debate this evening Parliament was subjected to a tirade of very poor sloganeering by the member David Bennett. The thrust of his argument was essentially that Labour supports some intellectual elite—the group of people who actually study and go to university—and National supports somebody else. I am not quite sure who he was trying to say National supports. I do not know—he was trying to do some sort of framing around Labour as being intellectually elite. But I heard somewhere in his tirade something along the lines of: “They’re the real people who pay their taxes like people who work in agriculture.” Well Mr Bennett I want you to know that a large number of the people who live in my electorate in Palmerston North are people who are going to make their living working in agriculture. They are studying getting degrees getting Master’s degrees and doing postgraduate study at Massey University. So a lot of the people whom David Bennett decided to attack this evening—a lot of the people whom David decided to attack this evening—are people who are going to be working in the very industry that those members over there pretend to be the champions of.But do you know what? There is a group whom I want to talk about this evening who have been even more abused by the changes that National brought into the student loan scheme which Part 2 of the Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 3) attempts totinker around with—that is the eligibility for student allowances. Another group of people who study exclusively at Massey University are vet students. A veterinary degree takes 5 years to complete. That is somewhat more than the 200-week maximum that you can take a student allowance for. So right from the start anyone who embarks on a veterinary degree is not going to be eligible for a student allowance for the whole time that they are studying for a vet degree.But it is worse than that because not only do they have to do about 250 weeks of study or maybe slightly less than that but also they have to work over the summer doing placements that are credited towards their study. Those are absolutely compulsory. There is no way out of doing those placements over the summer. The good news for them is that they can get a student allowance whilst they are doing those placements over the summer but of course that eats into the 200 weeks. So for most vet students they are facing at least a year of their study without the student allowance.But it is even worse than that. These days because the competition to get on to that veterinary course is so intense—the places are so few—a large number of students have actually completed an entire qualification before they start their veterinary degree. So vet students in particular are very heavily penalised by the National Government’s decision to limit the availability of student allowances.Qualified veterinarians are absolutely vital to New Zealand’s primary industries. New Zealand’s agriculture—our dairy industry our beef industry our lamb industry our alpacas; anything you want to name that is an animal that is vital to our economy—absolutely depends on high-quality qualified veterinarians. Yet that is one of the groups that that National Government—of all parties to attack a group that is so important to the primary industries it is the National Party that has made it so difficult to go and get a veterinary qualification. Maybe—maybe—the National Party believes that only the sons and daughters of immensely rich people deserve to be vets. Maybe it believes that if you grow up in South Auckland you do not have a right to be a veterinarian. Maybe that is why it decided to put that barrier up to stop people being able to qualify as a veterinarian.I think that it is rich coming from a member like David Bennett who tries to throw slogans around about what one party or another actually believes when that party comes to Parliament day after day and says that it is the champion of agriculture. It says it is the champion of the primary industries and yet in so many ways it makes it more difficult for the people who are working day in day out on the front line in the primary industries.