Coddington Deborah: Education (Export Education Levy) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Coddington Deborah: Education (Export Education Levy) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:614;Page:10683] 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT) 
: 
 I will continue the ACT party’s opposition to this amendment bill which brings in an education levy. It is being brought in to punish all private providers of English language education all private providers of tertiary education. Why has the Government seen fit to bring it in? It is mainly because of two organisations that failed the Modern Age Institute of Learning and latterly Carich New Zealand. If we look at the Modern Age Institute of Learning to see why it failed we see that it did not fail because of all the other private providers; they had absolutely nothing to do with the failure of those two institutions yet they will now be forced to take responsibility for them and for any other private institution that fails. 
The New Zealand Qualifications Authority had already identified that the Modern Age Institute of Learning had serious problems but the Qualifications Authority did nothing. It just sat on its hands and let it carry on. It saw that courses were being run without Qualifications Authority approval and it did nothing. It saw that trust accounts were not being operated properly and it did nothing until it was too late. Then it decided that the institute’s failure was a good excuse to bring in another tax—and this Government calls a tax a levy. The Qualifications Authority requirements were not met and the Serious Fraud Office has now been asked to investigate. It did not need to get to that stage; the Minister could have called the Qualifications Authority officials into his office and asked them what on earth was going on and why the situation was allowed to continue. 
To compound the situation and make it even worse when the Modern Age Institute of Learning failed the Minister of Education immediately decided that he would bail out the students. He was about to depart for China on a spin-doctoring damage control mission and wanted to take good news with him. He did not have to do that; the State did not have to step in bail out those students then recover the amount from the private sector because an insurance company had covered those students and would have bailed them out. The State stepped in and let the company off the hook. It just shows the folly of Government interfering in the private sector and how clumsy it is. The Government is now trying to redress that situation but it should not have acted so precipitously. Other private providers acting out of goodwill moved to look after those students. No one wanted them out on the street if their home-stays kicked them out but that never was in danger of happening. 
On that note I notice that New Zealand First spoke against this bill. I would suggest that party which has been fanning the anti-Asian sentiment has to take some responsibility for what has been happening with these private providers of English language training. I just take an example of a Vietnamese home-stay girl whom I had a student who came home one day and said: “What is meant by this word ‘bleeping Asians’?”. I suggest that if there were English students crowding up and down Queen Street people would not even notice or they would say how wonderful it was. The anti-Asian racist sentiment is contributing to a dip in our export education. 
This levy goes on all private providers to cover up for the unscrupulous behaviour of a few. There is no equivalent levy being placed on public providers to cover situations when their English language schools or their general operations run into financial difficulties. The cost was $40 million for one polytechnic and altogether $100 million of taxpayers’ money has been used to bail out polytechnics. This measure is sending a message of similar morality to the private providers.