Robertson Grant: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 3) — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRobertson Grant: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 3) — First Reading[Sitting date: 27 August 2013. Volume:693;Page:13028. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Deputy Leader—Labour): I just want to make sure the people of New Zealand know that John Hayes wants to cancel your passport. That is what he just said. He said that if you are someone who has borrowed from the student loan scheme and you might be having some trouble paying it back John Hayes is going to cancel your passport. And while he is at it he is going to pay his builder 20 bucks a year—$20 a year is what he said. We are debating the Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 3) and what Mr Hayes does not understand is that the whole point of supporting tertiary education is so that the children of John Hayes’ builder can go on and get a degree become an astrophysicist and earn a lot more than 20 bucks a year from John Hayes. That is why we support people in tertiary education Mr Hayes. It is to give them opportunity. We want to see all New Zealanders get that chance.What we have got today is the first ever tertiary education Minister who has made it his business to take away opportunity from New Zealanders. The very first thing Steven Joyce said when he became tertiary education Minister was that his goal was to dampen demand for tertiary education. He said he wanted to dampen demand. In real people’s language that means taking away opportunity from young New Zealanders. Step by step little by little Mr Joyce is taking away opportunity from young New Zealanders. That is because he does not want to face up to the fact that he hates the interest-free student loan scheme. He does not want the interest-free student loan scheme to exist.In that he is consistent with his leader John Key who stood up in this House when Labour brought in the interest-free student loan scheme and he said: “I will oppose this bill with every bone in my body.” Well the Prime Minister—or as he shall now be known the jellyfish—has failed to oppose it at all. He decided that he had better grab it because it was popular but his party and Steven Joyce his Minister have never supported an interest-free student loan scheme. What has National done in the time it has been in office? It has systematically undermined New Zealand students’ access to education taking away postgraduate student allowances and preventing people aged 55 years and over—this is for you Mr Mallard—from borrowing under the student loan scheme.I have had in my office someone laid off from the Public Service; a single woman who knows that she will be in the workforce for at least another 10 or 12 years. She wants to go back and retrain but Mr Joyce Mr Key and the National Party say that that person is not worthy of that opportunity and that she is not going to be supported to take that on. That is wrong. And then in this Budget the Government said that it was going to lower that down. It was not satisfied just with taking to people in Mr Mallard’s agegroup. The National Government said that people over the age of 40 are limited to 3 years of allowances—that is it. They are not allowed to go on and retrain and go on to postgraduate study. Far be it from us to have more people in postgraduate study. This Government’s small-minded taking away of opportunity for New Zealanders is shameful.And then we come to the student loan scheme. We come to the student loan scheme where just to make sure that the Government could reach another few people it increased the repayment rate from 10c in the dollar to 12c in the dollar. That might not seem like much to Mr Joyce but if you are a young couple starting out both with loans trying to set yourself into your first home that extra payment—Hon Trevor Mallard: With kids.GRANT ROBERTSON: —with kids—limits your opportunities. That is the problem for Mr Joyce. He is taking away from young families the opportunity to get ahead in life so he comes to this House—or Todd McClay on his behalf—with a bill that is just purely and simply a gimmick. That is all it is. The police have asked how on earth they are going to look after this. Kris Faafoi the police spokesperson for the Labour Party has brought up in this House time and time again the fact that under AnneTolley’s watch the number of police on the beat is going down. Well here are Steven Joyce and Todd McClay saying that we should have police at the airport chasing people who have not paid their student loan. Is that the best use of police resources Mr Joyce? No it is not. It is not the best use of police resources and the police themselves have told the Government that it is not the best use of their resources.Nobody has costed out what this measure will mean in terms of cost to the courts because this bill is just a gimmick. It is quite simply a gimmick from a Government that does not want young New Zealanders to get the opportunities they should have. The Government simply wants to make sure that tertiary education stays as the preserve of the privileged over there. John Hayes stood up in this House tonight. Did he get a free education? Was the taxpayer paying for John Hayes to go to Lincoln University? Was the taxpayer paying for that? He is very quiet. He is very quiet because he knows that he is taking from a future generation what he had. He is not offering to this generation the opportunity that he had and that is wrong.We need to invest in tertiary education. We need to make sure that all New Zealanders who are able and capable can take on a tertiary qualification. That might be at a university or it might be in a trade or it might be in a polytech or it might be in awānanga but this National Party has said that only those who can really afford it are the ones who should go there. Well we on the Labour Party side of the House say that tertiary education is an investment. The student loan scheme is interest-free because of Labour and we will not support a bill that is quite simply just a gimmick. We want to see legislation that means that all young people are supported into tertiary education that those who need to retrain are given that opportunity and that we invest in postgraduate study to get the scientists and to get the researchers who are going to lift our economy. This Government has no vision for tertiary education. This bill is a weak weak gimmick and we on this side of the House will strongly oppose it.