Hipkins Chris: Student Loan Scheme (Repayment Bonus) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Student Loan Scheme (Repayment Bonus) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 05 May 2009. Volume:654;Page:2838. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):Let us be clear what the Student Loan Scheme (Repayment Bonus) Amendment Bill is about once and for all. This bill is a precursor to the abolition of interest-free student loans. The policy of interest-free student loans is one we know that National opposed and it is still opposed to it. John Key called it reckless and irresponsible. National never wanted to see it enacted in the first place and it is getting ready to do away with it. We know that National will use the economic downturn to simply turn round and say that the policy is not affordable any more and that the Government will get rid of it. We know that this bill is a precursor to that because the only way that this bill makes any sense whatsoever is if we do away with interest-free student loans. If that is not the case then there is absolutely no reason why anybody would want to take up the option in this bill. Why would students take up the repayment bonus when they are better off leaving the money in the bank earning interest and then making a lump-sum payment at the end? We know that this bill does not make any sense unless interest-free student loans are done away with.We know that the National Government wants to do that and it will just be yet another one in the long line of broken tertiary education promises by National Governments. Let us go back to 1990 when National broke its promise to students. National members went around the country saying National would abolish student tuition fees. What happened? National got into Government and tuition fees went up. The then Minister of Education who travelled the length and breadth of the country saying that he would resign if student tuition fees were not abolished put fees up. He went up and down the country signing pledges at every university campus that said he would resign if tuition fees were not abolished. What did he do? He put them up. Did he resign? No he did not.It gets worse. Not only did the National Government keep the tuition fees but it put up the parental means test for allowances so that fewer students got allowances. And it got worse.National increased the age for means testing from 20 to 25. None of this was in National’s manifesto. It was going the opposite way to what their manifesto said. Then we go to 1996 when National promised students a universal student living allowance. Did it deliver that? No! Thirteen years on students are still waiting for the universal student living allowance that they were promised. Instead of delivering that in the 1998 Budget the National Government changed the name of all funding for tertiary education—calling it the universal tuition allowance.Hon Annette King: What a hoax!CHRIS HIPKINS: What a hoax that was because students did not see one dollar of the money that the National Government promised them.This bill is yet another example. What about when Max Bradford went around the country in 1999 and said that the overall size of debt was not the issue because loans are an investment by the undergraduate? We know that that is what National thinks. Its members think that students should pay interest on that investment. Those members think that tertiary education is purely a private good therefore anybody undertaking it should be forced to pay interest not only when those students graduate but also while they are still studying. That was the position of the previous National Government.The Labour Government did away with interest on student loans while students are studying and then it did away with interest in loans altogether. It was a policy that John Key called “reckless” and “irresponsible”. We know that National wants to do away with interest-free student loans because those members never supported it in the first place. We are fully prepared for this to be yet another one of the National Party’s broken election promises. Its members went the length and breadth of the country during the last election making all sorts of promises that they just knew they were not going to keep. We have seen tax cuts go by the wayside in the last few days and keeping the interest-free student loans policy—implemented by the previous Labour Government—is likely to be the very next one to go.