Written By: - Date published: 4:18 pm, January 31st, 2008 - 78 comments
Categories: education, flip-flop, inoculation -
Tags: education, flip-flop, inoculation
National have just backed down on their opposition to interest free student loans.
Back in 2005 Key called this ‘a policy that tells young New Zealanders to go and borrow to the hilt What a cost to the country! What an unaffordable and irresponsible cost to the country! It is a sad day National members will be opposing this legislation with every bone in our bodies’
Now the interest free student loan policy is just the latest in a long series of John Key’s “policy inoculations”. From Colin Espiner’s blog:
Labour’s interest-free student loans policy was a big ‘dead rat’ to have to swallow, but John Key had no choice but to hold his nose and throw it down the hatch.
Labour will howl ‘policy theft’ and there will be more accusations of ‘me-tooism’ against National. And some might say fair enough. I reckon Key has engineered at least ten policy reversals since becoming leader (perhaps someone wants to count?). The biggies include income-related state rents, KiwiSaver MK1, Working for Families Mk1, and the Cullen super fund.
In his ongoing quest to clear the decks and remove the stench of the Brash years from National, it does appear at times as if Key is simply removing reasons not to vote National, rather than giving people reasons to vote for it.
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Scoopit!
Nah, I checked the standard’s details and it’s not being run off labour servers anymore and by the looks of it was only there for a short period of time. I’ve also got no problem with DPF being housed by National if he’s paying rent etc. I’m just interested is all…
Student Loans do have a return although there is no interest charged (Unless you leave the country). The return is in a more educated populace that can increase productivity making NZ wealthier overall. They will also be able to operate more effectively within the market and so make the market a freer place to do business allowing those gains to be consolidated and built upon.
This is the reason we ended up with ‘free’ education in the first place. For this reason I would like to see tertiary education become completely free (as long as you stayed in the country for a contract length). As society gets more complex the population needs a better education as such it is best if the community supplies access to educational facilities to provide it.
As it stands – still nobody on this thread has any better ideas than Key for how to address students not repaying their loans because it’s interest free.
Sorry Burt, I was in a hurry before and made a quick flippant reply, which seems to have caused you some confusion.
You are a fan of Mr Key’s 10% payment discount, you think it’s a great solution to the student loan repayment question, you challenged us to come up with something better. I flippantly replied that a 15% discount would be better.
Explain how a 15% early payment discount would work.
It would work exactly the same as Mr Key’s 10% discount, only it would be better.
But perhaps if you explain the idea rather than make jokes about 5 minute abs we could debate it.
It’s the same as Mr Key’s idea only better. Yes, ‘Sod is correct, the 5 minute abs thing is a joke (if you haven’t seen the movie “There’s something about Mary”, well – you should).
As it stands – still nobody on this thread has any better ideas than Key for how to address students not repaying their loans because it’s interest free.
The whole interest free thing is a red herring Burt. Many students were failing to repay their loans long before they were interest free. The real question, to my mind, is why we even have a system that lumbers young people with insane amounts of debt.
Another u-turn from the scumbag master of all flip-flops, ShonKey!
all_your_base
Quite a few comments have disappeared from the end of this thread? There was a debate between myself and Ancient Greek that was quite interesting – it’s gone !
rOb
It seems you have missed a few vital facts: See Average student now owes $28,838
But also what is very interesting from that link:
This just proves the importance of indexing tax rates/thresholds and benefit to keep pace with inflation. It’s just laughable that Labour hasn’t changed the weekly allowance in 8 years. It had remained the same for 7 years under the failed policies of the 90′s and it’s still unchanged after 8 years of Labour. I guess Labour don’t want to lift this amount or student debt would just go completely bananas as students borrowed enough to live on.
How much was $150/week in 1992 ? I reckon it was probably about 30 hours of minimum wage after tax, what is it now ? Come on Labour – get it together.
Speaking of indexing. Look at these figures in relation to the rich prick tax threshold.
Cullen Over-Taxing 352,000 Kiwis
Imagine what the threshold would be today if it should have been $79,000 as at the end of tax year 2006!
The 10% incentive is a fantastic idea, especially if you are like myself, living overseas with 2x the average loan to repay. You see some of us had to go overseas to actually find work with the plan to one day return home (might I add with a high skill level and international experience/contacts-better than being a shop girl). I’ve discussed this with many of the SL diaspora and have discovered that the ‘interest free’ debacle for kiwi residents has been a disincentive to pay our loans back. Lets just throw in the old ‘disenfranchisment’ after 3 yrs overseas and we don’t have a voice! Great election strategy Labour, John Keys may have come home but we’ve got the message loud & clear, so why pay it back!! And just a note for the message above about the irresponsible 30 somethings with large student loans, you need to look at the political and economic history to ascertain why the loan take up was so high during this period….do the words liberalisation mean anything to you! This is the generation that were left standing on their own, no interest cuts/rebates, Student Allowance rates were highly targeted and unemployment was strife. Yes, I take it the ‘interest free resident’ act wasn’t retrospective. This generation got done!!
My fault – I had a database glitch a while after moving the site, and some records were lost after the database checked and repaired itself. It appeared to be from a difference in the collation and charset in MySQL on the new server after I moved a recent MySql database into a 5.0x version and from win32 to linux. You will notice that some of the older pages have interesting characters in them.
I have the missing records in the hourly backup from 0200 just before the system went down, and I extracted the missing records from the backup database last weekend. I’ll insert the missing records at the same time. But that will be this weekend at the earliest.