Hipkins Chris: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hipkins Chris: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 03 April 2012. Volume:679;Page:1614. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 When Maggie Barry started speaking I thought I had entered a parallel universe in which all of the legislation to do with student loans was considered by the Local Government and Environment Committee. I am not entirely sure what is going on over there. As far as I know the Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill has never been to the Local Government and Environment Committee. Perhaps they have a little bit too much Roundup going on over there.  
I think that the language Maggie Barry was using was quite revealing. When National members start talking about education as a privilege I think they start to reveal their true colours and what they really believe about education which is that it is a privilege. That is what National is all about. National is the party of privilege. It is the party that stands for those who can afford things and for those who have the money but not for those who are trying to work their way up the ladder of opportunity. In fact this Government is all about pulling the ladder up. Once it has got to the top it will pull the ladder up and rob those who come behind it of that opportunity.  
This student loan scheme is incredibly important in the sense that it offers many people who would not otherwise be able to participate in tertiary education the opportunity to do so. It means that cost is not a barrier. However we should never forget that the student loan scheme was put in place ultimately because an intergenerational compact was broken down whereby previous generations who had their tertiary education for free decided to start charging future generations for that. Under the last Labour Government we saw a lot of progress towards turning that clock back a little bit. We saw the interest-free student loans coming in we saw an increase in student allowances and we saw a cap on tertiary tuition fees—a number of things all designed to reduce the overall cost of participating in tertiary education.  
If we want students—graduates—repaying their loans faster which this bill purports to do one of the things we should be thinking about is how we stop them borrowing so much in the first place. Unfortunately under this Government they are going the other way. We saw just this week the Government announcing that it is not going to increase the parental income thresholds for student allowances in line with inflation. It is an arbitrary cut to the number of students who can get a student allowance. We are going to see more of that under this National Government. That is going to result in more borrowing. It is not going to result in less borrowing; it is going to result in more borrowing. If we want less student loan debt and students repaying their loans faster then avoiding their borrowing money in the first place is a really important way of doing that and unfortunately this Government does not want to go anywhere near that.  
There are some sensible provisions in this bill that the Labour Party supports and we canvassed those in the Committee stage. I am going to focus only on the area where we really disagree with the Government and that is to do with the repayment holiday for those who travel overseas. I think the ground has been well covered on this particular issue. It was a very sensible decision to introduce a repayment holiday when interest-free student loans were introduced in the first place to allow people who were travelling overseas doing their OE to not have to make repayments on their loans. What we saw over a period of time was people travelling overseas racking up huge penalties on their loans while they were away which acted as a huge disincentive for them to return home. Initially that repayment holiday was set at 1 year. Some actually argued that that was probably too much and that in fact it should have been shorter than that.  
I know there was a lot of internal debate within the then Labour Government about what the appropriate time frame was. Michael Cullen who was the Minister in charge of implementing the scheme at the time set the repayment holiday at 1 year. He was right to set it at 1 year at the time. In fact it probably was not long enough; therefore a pragmatic decision was made to increase it to 3 years. We know it was a pragmatic decision because “Mr Pragmatic” himself Mr Peter Dunne argued in favour of that as the Minister of Revenue. In fact I think he sponsored the bill to increase the repayment holiday from 1 year to 3 years. He waxed lyrical about how he was all about pragmatism and how this was such a good thing yet now here we are with another bill sponsored by Peter Dunne that actually reverses it which I think just goes to illustrate that Peter Dunne’s view of pragmatism is whatever it takes to keep him his ministerial job. It was pragmatic for him to support this amendment today because pragmatically that is what he has to do to remain a Minister in this Government. Common sense is basically what is required in order for Peter Dunne to stay a Minister. That seems to be the acid test for Peter Dunne these days: “Will I still get to keep my ministerial job if I vote for it? Yes I will. Oh gosh that must be common sense. I’m going to vote in favour of it even if it was common sense when I voted against it last time.”  
It is a bad provision in the bill and that is the reason why the Labour Party is going to be voting against this piece of legislation.