Cunliffe David: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Cunliffe David: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 28 March 2013. Volume:688;Page:9086. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn) 
: 
 I take a short call to support the third reading of the Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 2). It provides an opportunity to respond to David Bennett the member who has just resumed his seat who has just presented the House with what could only be described as a relatively incoherent diatribe even for him. He has alleged—[ 
Interruption 
] They do not like it. They do not like it. They can give it but they cannot take it. He spent most of his speech abusing— 
David Bennett 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. Maybe this member would like to return to his normal seat in this House. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch) 
: No no. Look that is not a point of order. 
Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE 
: Speaking to the point of order you probably do not need to explain to the public that giving a speech is not the same as an interjection and therefore that was not a valid point of order. The member has alleged that New Zealand spends more per capita on tertiary education than Australia does. That is I am assured by quick research by my staff incorrect both in absolute dollar terms and as a percentage of GDP. Clearly he was being defensive against the perception that the Government’s measures today are a funding cut and the irony is that he need not have been so defensive because this bill really trims only $7.5 million over 5 years. Really the big lesson of this bill is that it does virtually nothing at all. It does no harm and the measures are measures we can support but in the face of a $2670 million student debt it tidies up about $1 million a year. 
So Mr Bennett I would say you need not worry and you probably should not have resorted to that last attack on the Green Party which was to accuse it of promising young people free tertiary education. That will surely drive them into the arms of National in droves—political genius from the member for Hamilton! 
However he was trumped by the elephant in the room the previous National speaker Mr Hayes who gave a stunning example of the generation gap really—the intergenerational inequity to which this bill really refers. He said—and it was a piece of sterling wisdom acquired over a lifetime of experience around the world—“Money does not come out of trees; it comes out of workers’ pockets.” This is clearly what National members think. Like some latter-day Robin Hood in reverse they will take the money from the poor and give it to the rich like they did in the tax switch. They will take the money from the young and give it to the old like Mr Hayes or the Hon Peter Dunne. 
 The problem with it is that it begs the obvious question: how did the money get into the workers’ pockets in the first place? Is it a kind of fungus that just grows there or might it be that people earn it—that they might earn it hour by hour through wages or salary or perhaps unit by unit through a retirement home development? I do not know but it is certainly not always a living wage and that is part of the problem. But when you learn—not you Mr Assistant Speaker but when the generic young person learns they tend later to earn. We learn then we can earn. Therefore we invest in tertiary education; we do not just spend on it. But enough about the Government’s A-team. 
Let us go back to the bill. What the bill does do is two small things. It is a typical bill from the “Minister for Small Things”. It broadens the definition of income to include income from trusts companies and superannuation funds. It is obviously sensible to get a real picture on that income. It provides information sharing between the Customs Service and the Inland Revenue Department so that people who are grossly overdue on their student loan repayments when they are overseas can be more effectively traced. Although there are civil liberties issues at the margin we believe that measure is warranted. 
But this bill is most interesting to the public for what it does not do and does not say. Here is a short list. It does not address the yawning and growing intergenerational equity gap between today’s young generation who acquire a mortgage during their tertiary education who cannot buy a home because of the rapid escalation of the housing crisis and who are saddled with debt from day one in their careers and older generations. That is not an issue that faced the “Minister for Small Things”—Mr Dunne—or many members of this House when they were acquiring their tertiary education but it sure as heck is an issue for our young people today. That is unfair because we are asking them to pay the escalating superannuation and health care costs that are going to support the baby boomers while taxing our young people more and more heavily. That is not fair. That is why a generation of them are leaving our shores. 
The bill does not promote access to tertiary education. By National’s own numbers 25000 young people have been excluded from tertiary education due to its last round of cuts—25000 young New Zealanders have been excluded from the tertiary education system by National’s previous round of cuts. Postgraduates are finding it almost impossible to survive in the tertiary education system because among those cuts the current Government has limited student loans to a cap of 5 years of education. But a PhD takes with a Master’s degree 2 years or with an honours degree 3 years. That is 7 years and people are struggling to get through. Many are giving up and many are going to Australia. Export education has become the export of the educated. That is not a profit-making solution for New Zealand. 
This bill obviously does nothing to reverse the Kiwi brain drain. We have lost 54000 New Zealanders in net outgoing migration in the last 12 months. We would have had 8.4 percent unemployment. The Government has the worst economic management record in 51 years and that is what Bill English himself described as a safety valve. We are exporting our smartest young people as a “safety valve” to keep the unemployment numbers down and stop the Government being embarrassed. This country is in decline. It is in decline. We are depopulating. We are losing hope. We are losing steam. We are losing identity. We are losing a vision for our future. 
In the face of all of those problems what does this bill do? It does two tinkering little changes—unobjectionable though they may be—which should have occupied about one page of a proper bill on tertiary education and not have taken up the whole time of the House doing tinkering little changes that are frankly wasting Parliament’s time. That is not because they are wrong but because they are so minuscule in the face of the challenges that this country has. The Government and the Minister should be embarrassed to take up the time of the House on them. 
The changes in this bill do not even make the student loan scheme sustainable. They save as I said earlier $7.5 million at best over 5 years which is a little over $1 million a year. In the face of a $2670 million debt mountain with over half of all overdue borrowers overseas—ironically there are 54000 at last count which is equal almost exactly to 1 year of the brain drain. There is $400 million of overdue debt—$409 million to be precise. This bill solves at best $7 million of that over 5 years. It is inadequate. It is desolate. It is devoid of ideas. It is devoid of vision. It is as one commentator said of the Prime Minister like a map with no compass—a map with no compass. It does not serve this House well that we take a whole session of House time to debate what is essentially a bill of two substantive clauses. 
Is this Government so run out of ideas that this is the best it can do for tertiary education or for revenue? Is this the best it can come up with? I would warrant that officials if given the encouragement could come up with way more than this. There are so many gaps in the tax system that it looks more like a Swiss cheese than a revenue—like a Swiss cheese it has got so many holes—or a motorway system because you could drive buses through it. 
In the face of that we get tinkering nit-picking little bills like this or measures like last week’s debacle of the car-park tax and the iPad tax which no sooner had gone into the public domain than the Government flip-flopped and rolled over because they were patently absurd. It is not just that they are bad it is not just that they are inadequate but it is that this country is going to rack and ruin because of the Government’s inaction. We want vision. We want a future. We do not need just this petty—although relatively unobjectionable—little bill.