Hughes Gareth: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hughes Gareth: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 20 September 2012. Volume:684;Page:5554. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
GARETH HUGHES (Green) 
: 
 Kia ora Mr Speaker. Nga mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I rise to take a call on this bill the Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 2). Talk about fiddling while Rome burns. Talk about the punitive tinkering approach we see from this Government which is epitomised in this bill. At a time when we are facing huge economic challenges when huge numbers of Kiwis are going across the Ditch and around the world to get a brighter future presumably offshore when the student loan debt is topping $12 billion and when we know that New Zealanders are starting their families later and they are not getting into homes—there are a huge number of problems—this Government’s solution is to tinker around the edges. 
I want to take a quick call on this bill but the Green Party will not be supporting it. It is tinkering while Rome burns while that $12 billion student loan millstone is wrapped round more than 600000 Kiwis’ necks. 
Dr Cam Calder 
: Pay it all back. 
GARETH HUGHES 
: I have paid mine back. 
Hon Chris Tremain 
: And now you’re saying you wouldn’t tinker with it? 
GARETH HUGHES 
: We would tinker with it; we would improve it. What we would actually do is we would focus on carrots. We would focus on incentives. This Government’s approach is all about sticks. Where are the carrots? The context of this bill—and there are some common-sense initiatives in it like giving the Commissioner of Inland Revenue discretion on whether a debt is greater than $20 and whether that should be gotten back by the Inland Revenue Department. There is common-sense stuff like that but when you put it in the context of all the changes this Government has made around education what we know is that what it has done is make it less affordable and less accessible and in many cases it has literally closed the door to thousands of students who want to study in New Zealand. 
 Let us just run through the list of what this Government has done—a bit of context for where this Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 2) comes from. What we have seen is limited access for postgraduate students. We have seen that the Government has blocked—blocked entirely—access for students over 55 years old to student loans. The Government has increased the repayment rate. It has frozen the parental threshold rate. It has shortened the loan repayment holiday for those Kiwis who do go overseas presumably because we do not want them to come back. We have seen new fees introduced on the student loan scheme. The problem is of course that the Government wants to introduce interest but it is so unpopular amongst New Zealanders that it could not do it so it has had to introduce interest by stealth. There have been a whole bunch of new fees. The Government has egregiously as Megan Woods pointed out retrospectively applied pass rate changes—retrospectively of course—again shutting the door to hundreds of students who wanted to study. We are seeing this Government not students decide how students should organise themselves with the voluntary student membership bill. 
I want to touch now on the point made by Jami-Lee Ross who was playing with the figures—talk about spin; spin like Shane Warne—when he was talking about the percentage of money spent by the Government on student support services. It is not fair to describe it like that. We actually spend more than other countries if you use that measurement because we pay for their fees through the student loan scheme. If you compare apples with apples what we know is that we actually spend $3000 less per student than the OECD average. So it is unfair—and I do not believe that it is true—to be comparing those figures in that way and when you do compare apples with apples we are spending less. 
When you add it all up and when you see this tinkering on the fringes but the whole range of very negative changes this Government has introduced which has made it less affordable less accessible and in many cases downright impossible to be a student you have got to question the Government’s motivation. We want New Zealanders apparently to have a brighter future we want to keep our Kiwis in New Zealand and we want a high-value high-wage innovative economy. But instead what this Government wants to do is send our Kiwis overseas. It is all sticks and no carrots. It does not make sense. It is not the high-wage high-value economy we want to see focusing on education. 
I guess the big difference is that those on the Government benches see education simply as a cost. On this side of the House we see education as an investment—we see it as an investment—and that is why we would put more carrots in place not this list of changes that make it less affordable less accessible and downright impossible to be a student in New Zealand. It is unfair and that is why we will not be voting for this bill this evening. Kia ora.