Gilmore Aaron: Student Loan Scheme Bill — Second Reading In Committee 
Gilmore Aaron: Student Loan Scheme Bill — Second Reading In Committee 
[Volume:675;Page:20710] 
AARON GILMORE (National) 
: 
 It is a pleasure to stand and support the Student Loan Scheme Bill. I will start off by referring to the comments of the previous speaker Darien Fenton on the speech by Sir Roger Douglas. I actually agree with nearly everything Sir Roger said. He pointed out that in many situations one of the problems with the student loan system is the ability of those poor people out there to go into tertiary education. I grew up in a State house and no one paid for my education. But Darien Fenton claims that $100 a year will put people off getting a student loan and that they will not go into tertiary education. That will not happen. It will mean that the butcher in Otara and the factory worker in Aranui will not pay for the lawyer in Fendalton. I think that is a good thing as does this John Key - led Government. You see this bill is all about simplifying the student loan system to make it easier for those people to pay and to keep tabs on how much they owe and how much they are paying back and I think that is a good thing. 
In the first reading of the bill I spoke about my personal experiences of having a $12000 student loan. With paper-based systems it took months to send records back and forth and this sort of legislation removes that. Many of my friends now live overseas. I think only three out of the 14 people who were in my graduating class at university are still in New Zealand. Those people have all paid back their student loans but they all spoke of their experiences of paying back their student loans in terms of the annoyance involved in sending paper-based records back and forth from their home addresses. That caused a lot of problems for them and this bill will go towards solving that. 
No one has spoken on Supplementary Order Paper 200 which amends this bill. Given that it came in after the first reading I think that it is beholden on us to quickly touch on it. I think the Supplementary Order Paper is a very good one. It was brought forward by the Minister of Revenue. The Supplementary Order Paper means that the loans of those people who do not operate within the rules of the student loan scheme can be recalled. There have been some instances of this particularly with regard to those overseas borrowers who exit New Zealand with no intention of ever paying back their loan or of operating within the rules of the student loan scheme. The Supplementary Order Paper that has been introduced strengthens the power of the revenue authority to recall those loans. Those people will have to pay back their loans and that is a good step in the right direction. 
Finally we look forward to passing this bill hopefully in the next few days and in years to come we will look back and see that the National John Key - led Government will have spent more money on tertiary education than any other Government before it. We will see that the administration fee that we are putting in place will do only one thing: it will change the incentives so that people will help pay towards the cost of administrating their student loans. That will be a fairer scheme than the one we have today. Thank you.