King Colin: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee 
King Colin: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee 
[Volume:638;Page:8225] 
COLIN KING (National—Kaikoura) 
: 
 It is an honour to follow such a learned member as the Hon Lockwood Smith the architect of the student loan scheme who gave us those expressions of experience. 
In dealing with Part 1 of the Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 2) I will concentrate on a range of things: the repayment obligations from the point of view of an overseas-based borrower; the clarification of what the term “charities” refers to; the extension of exemptions as far as overseas education goes; the reduction in the penalty rates which were 2 percent and have now been reduced to 1.5 percent; the adjustments in respect of the collection of small amounts of money or “trivial” amounts as they are referred to; the circumstances for appealing to the Commissioner of Inland Revenue on the grounds of hardship; the responsibility of someone who has received exemption because of hardship to report when those circumstances change; and the situation where one sets up an arrangement but breaches the amnesty and the effects of that. 
What will probably draw most people’s attention to Part 1 is the holiday provision. From a pretty basic point of view this provision was required to allow the organisations involved to get the process into order. In actual fact the process has been running for some period of time. Now there will be an extension which will no doubt allow more people to try to get their house in order and set about repaying their student loan. 
I take this opportunity while we are referring to Part 1 to say to the member from the Green Party who constantly refers to people having their educations paid for them that from my position in life many many thousands of people in New Zealand left school and started working for a living paid a lot of money to do that and did not have the benefit of being able to access a student loan to get higher-level training. 
I strongly urge members of the public if they are listening at the moment to think very seriously about just which stream of education they take so that they do not end up having spent enormous amounts of money—which absolutely shocks me at times—for very little value. If there is one step that I would like us to take in terms of student loans it is to get better information to parents and children so that they can make better decisions. 
There are a lot of technical changes in Part 1 which I have referred to. Probably the most important change would be the repayment obligations of an overseas-based borrower. We see in new section 34(4) in Part 1 that if $15000 is owed the repayment obligation is $1000 “for each full tax year during which the borrower is overseas”. It goes up from there. There is no perfect model; as soon as someone is a bit over that $15000 the sum is $2000 and as soon as someone is over $30000 the sum goes up to $3000. I have no argument with that. I think it is clear and understandable; it needs just to be picked up and run with. 
I believe that it is very very important in the whole context of things that there is information sharing and that the Inland Revenue Department can receive information from the Customs Service because as has been pointed out a lot of people have been overseas.