Walker Holly: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 3) — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWalker Holly: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 3) — Third Reading[Sitting date: 06 March 2014. Volume:696;Page:16440. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]HOLLY WALKER (Green): The Green Party takes tertiary education seriously. We see it primarily as a public good and we consider that all New Zealanders benefit from having a highly skilled and highly educated population. We think that tertiary education should be affordable and accessible to all and we think that every student including those aged over 40 and those doing postgraduate study deserves access to student support in the form of student loans and allowances. We think we need a fundamental review and rewrite of the student loan scheme with the principles of access and affordability at its heart. Sadly this Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 3) is not that. In fact it is one of a series of bills tinkering around the edges of the student loan scheme which is fundamentally broken and from which this National Government is trying to wring every last dollar without looking at the bigger picture of how we fund tertiary education and why we fund it. The Green Party in Government would step back and we would take stock of how we fund tertiary education and student support to implement a better smarter fairer system that reflects the public good inherent in an educated population.John Hayes: Why didn’t you bring it to the committee?HOLLY WALKER: Because I was on maternity leave Mr Hayes. It is time to stop tinkering with the system and putting even more strain on the Inland Revenue Department’s broken computer system with bills like this.It is timely that this bill should come up this week when thousands of students around the country are heading for their first or second week of lectures. Many of them will not yet be thinking about how they are going to repay their student loans or whether they are going to live in New Zealand or overseas after they graduate. They are probably not aware that this bill will have a real impact on those decisions in the future. This House has a tendency to deal in stereotypes and the “lazy” student borrowing from the “generous” student loan scheme to fund an education that will primarily deliver them personal benefit in the form of high wages is one stereotype that we hear all the time. National MPs like this stereotype because it means that they can pass punitive little bills like this one without thinking too hard or feeling too bad about whom they are affecting—never mind the fact that these so-called lazy students are the same ones whom John Key was busy takingderp-facedSelfies with up at Victoria University yesterday. I guess that they are good for just a laugh and a political photo opportunity but are not worthy of serious policy consideration.But actually although this bill will impact the future decisions of current students the people it primarily affects right away are not current students so the GovernmentMPs cannot hide behind that “lazy” stereotype this time. The changes in this bill to crack down on overseas borrowers by increasing their repayment responsibilities and allowing them to be arrested at the border—that is very disproportionate right there—will primarily affect graduates. Graduates do not fit that stereotype of the lazy student. They are people like the family who emailed me when the changes were announced in last year’s Budget. This family lives in the United States so that the husband can pursue his academic career. He earns US$41000—a fairly moderate income. His wife is also a PhD graduate. She is currently caring for their two small children. They both have student loans in New Zealand which they are fully committed to repaying. Because of the changes in this bill their minimum annual repayments will go up from $6000 a year to $9000 a year with no means testing and no accounting for the fact that only one of them is in paid work and that they have two dependants. At the current rate of exchange that means they will be paying approximately 19 percent of their income back towards their student loan debts—19 percent of their income.This family has a strong intention of returning to New Zealand. They fully intend to repay their loans and they are currently compliant with all of their student loan obligations. But these new payment obligations are totally unaffordable for this family and they cannot see a way to meet them that will not break their budget. If they default on them because they simply cannot afford to meet their repayments they now face being arrested at the border if and when they return to New Zealand. Is this fair? Is this proportionate? Is it a good use of time and resources to chase up families like this? Of course it is not. But this is how this Government chooses to spend its legislative resource.I have lived and studied overseas and I can confirm that it is quite difficult to keep up with student loan repayments while you are overseas. Information is hard to come by. Making voluntary repayments is complicated. Communicating with the Inland Revenue Department from overseas is difficult. Negotiating a repayment holiday or an interest exemption is unnecessarily complicated. Many New Zealanders living or studying overseas simply give up and resolve to deal with the problem when they return to New Zealand. Should they give up? No. Should we make it easier for people in this situation to meet their repayment obligations? Absolutely we should. But is the way to do that to whack them with non - means-tested repayment increases and arrest them at the border if they fail to comply? Absolutely not. This bill actually makes it more difficult for people in this situation to come home and sort out their student loans. That is what we should be incentivising them to do. What it does is whack them with a massive disincentive to ever come home because they will potentially face arrest and criminal conviction.It is madness I would contend for New Zealand to be introducing laws and policies that make it less likely for our tertiary graduates living overseas to come home when we have huge numbers of New Zealanders leaving every year and not coming back. We need policies that encourage them to come back to New Zealand and to stay in New Zealand. In Government the Green Party would introduce a debt write-off scheme for graduates to encourage them to stay and contribute in New Zealand because the Green Party would invest in their future. This bill is disproportionate. It is not likely to be particularly effective as we have heard from all of the advice that was given to the Finance and Expenditure Committee. It creates yet more incentives for graduates like this to never return to New Zealand. It is symptomatic of a Government that does not value tertiary education as a public good a Government that sees student support as a political nuisance and a Government that sees the student loan scheme and amendment bills like this as opportunities to put the screws on graduates and squeeze more and more students out of eligibility for student support. We have the opportunity in NewZealand to design a modern smart and fair tertiary student support system. The Green Party in Government would grasp this opportunity with both hands and invest in our future by investing in our students.