Martin Tracey: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 3) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMartin Tracey: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee[Sitting date: 18 February 2014. Volume:696;Page:16042. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]TRACEY MARTIN (NZ First): Kia ora Mr Chair. I just acknowledge how great it is to have the author of the Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 3) in the chair next to you. Hopefully he will have seen my contribution earlier on Part 1 and the questions that I asked and perhaps the Minister of Revenue may actually rise to his feet during Part 2 and answer some of those questions.I also want to address in Part 2 the concept of fixing what was the bill from 2013 and the moving around of some of the parts inside the schedule there. I want to bring this conversation out of the 20 percent of our young people who go to university and actually talk about the 60 percent of our young people who are currently in the workforce or who are trying through education to gain employment. I want to talk about the fact that it actually costs a baker $5000 to do a pre-apprenticeship course and he or she has to gain that through StudyLink. I want to talk about the fact that it costs an animator $10000 a year to actually go and do that at a polytechnic. Let us just go to actually even doing an early childhood education qualification inside the workplace run by a wānanga or one run by another polytech organisation. That will cost you $1800 via StudyLink.What about inserting as we are working around schedule 3 in Part 2 some sort of responsibility on behalf of the lender Minister to make sure that the young people who go to StudyLink understand the repayment obligations? If you go to StudyLink now to the applications web page which I have here for you should you wish it will tell you every way under the sun how to gain a loan and gives not a single comment about your repayment responsibilities at all. There is not a single comment on that front page about the repayment responsibilities of any young New Zealander. It is no wonder we now have outstanding debt. As a debt collector as a Parliament we have put into place or are looking at legislation on loan sharking in South Auckland where we say that a loan shark a lender must make it clear inside the documentation the repayment obligations of any individual who is borrowing money from them. Where inside any of this legislation inside the rewrite of schedule 3 in Part 2 has this been made clear?I meet young people day in and day out in my town. I met a young person the other day who has an $18000 loan to study animation. He had no idea he could not leave the country. He had no idea that he did not have to start repaying his student loan until it was over a certain threshold. He had no idea it was interest-free. He had no idea that if he left the country after 1 year he would get interest on it and that he had to make contact with the Inland Revenue Department. Why did he have no idea? Because there is a multitude of people out there who are signing our young people up to debt and it would appear there is not a single requirement for those people to make sure they know how to repay it. It might be something that the Minister could work on so that it is clear before our young people sign up.I am tired of hearing about the 20 percent at the top. Certainly university students have loans. There is no doubt about it. But so do many of the other young New Zealanders in that 60 percent bracket. They are not the most vulnerable. They are not the ones receiving free support. They are the ones in the middle who are trying to find employment and who are doing what we have asked them to do. They are not getting a degree. They are not getting a Bachelor’s degree or whatever. They are doing a pre-apprenticeship course or whatever. It may be that the Finance and Expenditure Committee is not aware that if you have National Certificate of Educational Achievement level 1 and the majority of New Zealand students interestingly enough do have level 1—it is level 2 that is the target—you cannot gain entry to a Youth Guarantee course. So you must get a loan. You must go in. Only 1 percent of all the people involved in a Youth Guarantee course are allowed to already have level 1. The majority of the level 1 courses do not cover baking do not cover animation and do not cover other things.The reality—and this goes to new section 12A inserted by clause 17 put in in Part 2—is that that includes a car now being incorporated into the salary package of any worker. Again I believe that this provision has been written in there because there is a bias that all the people with these loans are university students or post-university—that they are all doctors and lawyers or whatever and that they are on $110000 a year plus a Mercedes. I brought the case before of a Department of Conservation ranger who I believe can expect to earn between $33000 and $47000 a year depending on approximately 5 years’ worth of experience. Often there is a car involved in that. I do not think anybody sitting in this Chamber is going to say that $33000 plus having a Range Rover or whatever those things are—a Land Rover or whatever it is—to use as you go out to make sure that all the bins in a regional park are clean or whatever makes you a wealthy person.New Zealand First has serious concerns that there has not been a practical eye cast over this bill. This has been written with a bias. It has been written with a bias and when it hits the ground it is once again going to disadvantage all those who are in that low or middle-income area. This is not going to target the people who somehow Mr Paul Goldsmith thinks are the people who need to be pursued like this. It may be that in Mr Goldsmith’s electorate—well not actually the electorate he is the MP for but the electorate that he lives in—they have all got $150000-a-year jobs and drive a company Mercedes. But I can tell Mr Goldsmith that where I live in Rodney which is 46 percent of the land mass of Auckland with social deprivation scores of 8 in two of our townships those young people are getting jobs as Department of Conservation rangers and they are getting jobs at $33000 a year. They have got a car placed at their disposal for them to do their job. They will be penalised further through this new section because it has not been well-thought-out like the majority of the rest of the bill.