Kerre Woodham: Taxman on bludgers' scent

For some student borrowers living overseas, coming home to face up to debt is not an option. Photo / Martin Sykes

Beware, loan dodgers: the debt collector may soon be after you.

Following on from my recent column about people with student loans skiving off overseas, I see the Government is looking at using debt collectors to recover more dosh from the bludgers.

As Revenue Minister Peter Dunne says, it's a fairness issue. Why should New Zealand-based debtors repay on time if those living offshore can get away with thumbing their nose at a legal contract?

So, full marks to the Government for taking a rigorous approach to chasing up money owed to the rest of the country.

And God knows we could do with it, given that we've given away $1.6 billion this week, the cost of cleaning up the South Canterbury Finance mess.

Oh, and before I finish with the students, I do wish they'd stop their whining that people who enjoyed free tertiary education are depriving them of the same opportunity.

Yes, tertiary education used to be free. But there were nowhere near as many institutions as there are now, nowhere near as many spurious diplomas and degrees and nowhere near as many people accepted into university.

In 1980, 2224 graduated from the University of Auckland. By 2000 that had risen to 6000 people. So there's thousands more studying and they still get subsidies.

Rather than grizzling, today's graduates should be grateful that many of them are getting accepted into university when they wouldn't have had a dog's show in years past.

Back in the 80s, when I did my journalism diploma, there were rigorous pre-entry tests before you got through the doors of the polytech. You spent a day sitting an exam and going through an interview process and after that only the top 60 applicants from about 300 were selected.

The same was true of many courses. Between Auckland and Wellington polytechs, 110 journalists were trained every year and most of us went straight into jobs. Now, every Doris who wants to get her face on the telly is doing a communications course and moaning that she can't get work.

And there are plenty of young Kiwis lured into glamorous fields of study who end up with a huge loan and no chance of a job. The bums-on-seats model has been a costly disaster.