Nash Stuart: Student Loan Scheme (Repayment Bonus) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Nash Stuart: Student Loan Scheme (Repayment Bonus) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:657;Page:6609] 
STUART NASH (Labour) 
: 
 I stand up to speak in support of the Student Loan Scheme (Repayment Bonus) Amendment Bill in its Committee stage. I spoke against the bill it in its first and second readings but with the sensible acceptance of the Hon Trevor Mallard’s amendments I do not oppose it. 
I am actually pretty ambivalent about the bill to tell the truth. It is a bit of a nothing bill that will help very little and achieve not much at all. Let us be honest about this: as outlined in the executive summary in the regulatory impact statement of the bill this bill is just another one of National’s election promises that is targeted primarily at those who are in the upper income bracket—like the National tax cuts the super-city legislation and the 90-day “Fire at Will Act”. 
This bill does nothing for students who have elected to take courses that result in a salary that leaves very little discretionary income once the bills are paid at the end of each week. This of course does not mean that these professions are any less valuable to society than those professions paying significantly higher; in fact the case may be quite the opposite. I tell members that if I was dying I would rather have a nurse than a financier look after me and if I was after quality education for my children I would much prefer to have a teacher than a financier. Yet the health and education sectors under this Government after only 9 long tortuous months have taken a huge hit under Ministers Ryall and Tolley. 
As I was saying as I made my way through the regulatory impact statement I was hit more by what is not here than by what is. Never once does the statement outline predict or forecast how many students this bill will help—never once. I wonder why that is. I suspect it is because when the numbers were done—and they do exist because there is a very light financial analysis; in fact it is surprisingly light for a taxation bill—some key assumptions must have been made around the actual student numbers. However the Minister in charge of this bill the Hon Peter Dunne was too embarrassed to include them in the regulatory impact statement because he realised that very few students will take advantage of this scheme. That is why I say that this bill is a little bit of a nothing bill. 
Hon Member 
: That’s right. 
STUART NASH 
: It is. 
The regulatory impact statement also states: “Inland Revenue and the Ministry of Education officials will continue to monitor repayment trends over the next few years to assess the impact of the voluntary repayment bonus policy. The student loan integrated data set will enable officials to get an understanding of the debt income and demographic characteristics of those making additional student loan repayments. It will take several years however for a sufficient time-series to emerge to enable good outcome data to be collected.” 
I can tell officials that the data will say one of two things. It will say either that those earning large salaries from high socio-economic backgrounds with professional degrees in careers like accountancy law engineering commerce finance medicine dentistry etc. will pay off their loans noticeably quicker than those in less well-paying professions or that the numbers in those areas will continue to stagnate or drop as those students understand that there is actually no huge financial advantage of early repayment. It is not the Inland Revenue Department and education officials who should be monitoring progress in this scheme; it is the sociologists and the Treasury officials who should look at the data that comes out of this early repayment option in an effort to understand the level of financial literacy amongst our graduates and/or understand the reason why graduates would pay back an interest-free loan early when there would be very little financial benefit to them at all. 
These data are the ones that the Minister should be interested in and I hope he uses them wisely for future development of any student loan repayment scheme. In fact he probably will not get the chance because in 2 years and 3 months there will be a Labour Minister of Revenue and a Labour Minister of Education and they will have the ability to view these data and put them to good use. Thank you.