student loans in NZ are non-transferable - the debt dies with you as it were, so no, neither partners nor children are responsible for paying it off

it's so frustrating as the evidence is all there!! There is LOADS of evidence based policy around what works, and these folk are WILFULLY ignoring the lot! It is expensive to send people to prison, doesn't address any underlying issues, and shifting the issue to the suburbs achieves nothing

Idk what your plan is Luxon, but your ministers are the ones who have actively made homelessness worse AND have undermined known solutions. Repeatedly.

I didn't even get to that-was literally just asking a very basic, how did they work this out and what measures were used!

I thought, surely there must be some clear workings out...more fool me!!

Or, alternatively, we make tertiary education FREE ONCE MORE and cap fees while adequately funding tertiary providers. Just like NZ used to (until the wealthy boomer generation decided they didn't want to fund future generations from taxes like their parents did)

There is literally NO REASON why this debt cannot be forgiven once a person reaches 65. It isn't even "real" money, its literally an accounting entry and could easily be wiped - if the govt wanted to!

Exactly!! Forgive the debt ffs!!

It could just as easily be me - I went back to study while pregnant with child #3.

I left with a PhD - and a student loan over $70k. The only reason it wasn't more is because I secured scholarships along the way AND the husband had a secure income to meet the household expenses.

100%!! Plus there are many ways to do this AND it's not like staff are twiddling their thumbs in the downtime! Most use the time to catch up on paperwork and do other jobs, so they're hardly being 'unproductive'!

At any rate, I wish more folk were deeply suspicious of productivity reports on public health by privately-funded lobby groups and stopped taking them at their work and treating them like they are objective or unbiased. Gah. Grump.

I've read the TPU report and while they do bang on about the fiscal cost of missed health appointments, they don't show their workings out - they do have some lovely graphs and a great press release and a very nice looking report about productivity...and somehow this has been enough?

In reality, Oceania (which includes but is not limited to NZ) has one of the lowest rates (13.2%) of nonattendance at hospital outpatients clinics - something the TPU conveniently fails to mention:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29482948/