Clark David: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Clark David: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 19 March 2013. Volume:688;Page:8667. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North) 
: 
 I will not take more than a couple of further calls at this point. With your indulgence I turn to where I was at when the Minister of Revenue took a call—and I am glad that he did because I have to say it is very good to have a Minister responding from the chair. We do not always get it in this Chamber. When we have questions it is good for the Committee to debate them fully so I commend the Minister for engaging in the debate. 
Where I was getting to before was to point out just how humiliating this bill the Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 2) really is for the Government. It does achieve some good things and we will be supporting it for the fact that it is an attempt to make sure that the collection of student loans is fairer. It is an attempt to make sure that those struggling to pay off their student debt in New Zealand are aware that those overseas are equally obliged to pay off their debt as Mr Dunne has made clear. 
But what the bill also does is smuggle through a range of changes that are actually back-downs on previous policy. This Government deemed that to be policy that was good enough to take up the House’s time to be debated fully and then to be implemented. At that point the Government then realised that it was incapable of actually implementing it. 
This is a problem that has become a theme at the Inland Revenue Department. We know that the computer system there is over 20 years old. The computer system at the department existed well before Facebook—10 years before Facebook came into existence—and well before Google. In fact it existed well before the internet as we know it today. This Government has failed to upgrade that system. The current Minister of Revenue has been the Minister in that role for I think more than 7 years and we have a computer system that is not up to the task of delivering the policy that this Government would want to implement to make sure the student loan scheme was fairer and that is a disgrace—that is a disgrace. 
Part of what we have to debate here today is withdrawing things that this Government has deemed would make the scheme fairer peeling back those steps forward. It is using the Committee’s time to debate those issues again and to try to argue that they are no longer as important as they once were now we have realised just how ruined—I was going to use another less polite word—the Inland Revenue Department’s scheme is. 
We know for example that that is illustrated in the 70000 phone calls that went unanswered in the GST filing period in July last year. That shows a department under stress. There are over 1 million unprocessed returns. There is over $7 billion in outstanding tax to be collected. We know that the Inland Revenue Department is a department under pressure. We know that the computer system is struggling and yet we have seen no credible plan from this Government to address that issue. We have seen no credible timeline no credible plan for building a replacement system. It has spent tens of millions of dollars on consultants—Capgemini lead amongst them—and this means that we should expect to wait to be able to implement this legislation. 
I have grave concerns that the data matching as outlined in this bill will not be able to be implemented by this Government. I have serious concerns. Perhaps the Minister in the chair may take another call to outline a credible plan for making sure this happens. The Government has I have to say put a little clause in there which we have opposed that would give it free rein to withdraw any further things and to change the details of how things are implemented or the time frames. It has put in what is commonly known as a “Henry VIII clause”. This is cover for future humiliating back-downs and it may be the case that everything we are debating here today is unable to be implemented by this Government. That is a ridiculous position to be in. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: What’s Parliament for? 
Dr DAVID CLARK 
: We wonder what Parliament is for at that point if it is not to debate the changes that are going to be made to all of our public services over time. We are here debating these but we have no idea whether they can be implemented and the historical evidence is that in the past they have not been able to be implemented. 
So I would like the Minister in the chair in a future call to stand up and to explain a credible time line for repairing the tax system. We know that the tax take dropped 4 percent during the previous terms of this Government—only 1.5 percent of that was estimated to be from the global financial crisis and a great chunk of it was from policy changes by this Government the tax cuts for the wealthy—and since then the Government has been revising down its tax forecasts. It has a problem. It has a tax hole problem—