Simmonds PennyPENNY SIMMONDS (National—Invercargill): Thank you Madam Speaker. It should come as no surprise that I use this opportunity to voice my concerns about the credibility of the new Prime Minister having watched his inept performance as the Minister of Education over the past five years where he's overseen the abysmal decline of attendance and achievement in our compulsory sector and created an unmitigated disaster with his pet project the centralisation of the polytechnic and industry training sector Te Pūkenga.I'd like to go through the four areas where this has been—Hon Andrew Little: What? What's the subject of this speech?ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! I'm sure members on my right are going to have a chance to make a speech later on. Can we please give this chance to Penny Simmonds.PENNY SIMMONDS: Thank you Madam Speaker. Let's look at it financially for a start. The Minister was trying to fix what was a $40 million problem. So far he's spent $200 million getting to where he is today and in an undisclosed business case that was submitted back in October but hasn't been made available to anyone else yet it looks like there's another $500 million needed over the next five years to make it operational. At the same time it is running a deficit of somewhere between $60 million and $100 million. The trouble is when we talk about hundreds of millions of dollars it becomes so eye-watering that we can't actually understand how bad it is. But I can assure you as someone who sat through a budget process every year for 23 years running a tertiary institution where you played with trying to shift $2000 out of here into $5000 there and make things work it is absolutely sickening to see hundreds of millions of dollars being wasted.So financially it's an unmitigated disaster but equally as important is the impact that it is having on people: on the students and on the staff and with the ripple effect into the families of staff. I have seen the anxiety and the concern across staff not knowing whether they will have jobs or not and they are right to be concerned about whether they have jobs or not. In just four months last year to November 122 academics and 73 other staff either lost their jobs resigned or weren't replaced. The business case that we have not had made available to us formally yet shows that another 487 staff are going to have to lose their jobs by the end of 2026—104 of those by the end of this year. So the impact on staff is real the ripple effect on to the staff members' families is real and the impact on students who are not getting the delivery and the services they should be getting is real and the complaints are flowing freely.The other matter I want to talk about is the impact on innovation in the sector. Distracted people do not innovate; they are in survival mode. They cannot innovate and where innovation has survived head office has stamped on it with a very heavy foot. Let me give you the example of international education which we desperately need to get back on its foils here and get our students back to fill our skills shortages. The head office has decided that the same fees should be charged by everyone all across the country. Do they not know when we are out in the world marketing for international students we're competing against Australia and Canada and the US and the UK not each other? We don't have to have the same fees. If we can do something innovative in our own communities that should be encouraged not stamped on.The fourth area is the lack of understanding of the basics of restructuring and change management. Form does not come before function and that is what this Minister who is now our Prime Minister does not understand. The media have tried to characterise him as Mr Fix-it"; he is not. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The next call is a split call. I call on Dr Tracey McLellan for 5 minutes."