Tanczos Nandor: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Tanczos Nandor: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:606;Page:3298] 
NANDOR TANCZOS (Green) 
: 
 There is a basic contradiction at the heart of this Government’s approach. For all of the Prime Minister’s talk in her speech about a commitment to participation and innovation we actually saw and see a fragmented and incoherent approach that seeks to ameliorate the problems caused by the right hand by trying to do some good things with the left hand. That is a fundamentally flawed approach to policy making. Our Co-Leader Jeanette Fitzsimons has already talked about the contradiction at the heart of the growth strategy and I would like to focus my speech on a couple of more specific areas.  
The first one is tertiary education because the Prime Minister said that making tertiary education more accessible was a priority for this Government. She talked about two ways of doing that. The first was capping or putting a maximum limit on student tuition fees using the mechanism of the fees maxima Supplementary Order Paper passed as part of the Tertiary Education Reform Bill last year. The Green Party supported that bill and of course we support capping student fees.  
The second thing is a review of student support. That is interesting because the review of student support is the same thing we hear from Steve Maharey every time he is questioned in this House about the lack of commitment to a universal student allowance by the Government. Maybe the Government is just stalling this promised review so that in election year it can pull out a plum to show for students and bolster up student votes. That is fair enough; it is the Government’s right to do that. But if we look at the wording in the speech it is quite telling. The Prime Minister talks about the review setting out fair rules for determining the contribution students make to the costs of their study. That reveals an ongoing and deep commitment to the student loan scheme and a refusal to question the basic assumptions at the heart of that scheme.  
It is interesting that yesterday it was mentioned in the  
New Zealand Herald  
that there was $71 million in arrears in the repayment of student loans. That is something that was predicted and was predictable. It is also interesting to note that last year student debt reached $4.75 billion and is projected to grow to $11 billion by 2010.  
So that debt is huge but the problem is the student loan scheme itself. The Government has to be prepared to question the wisdom of the student loan scheme in its entirety. The Green Party has been talking about pathways away from the student loan scheme since before the 1999 election. We talk about ending the student loan scheme and some of the proposals that we put forward have already been partially adopted by the Government and by other parties as well. We talked about capping student fees and as I said the fees maxima Supplementary Order Paper is a mechanism to do that and we fully support that. We talked about investigating bonding as an alternative to student loans or as an alternative mechanism to pay back student loans and I have seen other parties start to pick up that idea.  
But the one thing we have been talking about that has not been picked up is a universal student allowance and we think that that is probably the most significant thing that could be done to ease the hardship on students. It would clear up the dilemma faced by many young students and particularly by young women who when unable to find work on leaving school are faced with a real difficulty. Do they stay on a benefit and guarantee a regular income and support in order to survive and stay alive or do they go into massive debt to get an education with the prospect when they finish it that they still might be unemployed or in a kind of job in which they have no chance of paying back their student loans anyway?  
It is interesting that over half of that student debt is to pay for living costs. The Labour Government’s superannuation scheme has already put hundreds of millions of dollars into the Debt Management Office where it is paying less than the cost of the borrowings the Government is making and we will see over the next few decades billions invested in the overseas casino economy when a much wiser investment would be to invest in our young people in our education and in ourselves as a nation in order to be able to come through with the innovation and creativity that the Prime Minister is talking about.