English Bill: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations  and State Enterprises — In Committee 
English Bill: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations  and State Enterprises — In Committee 
[Volume:626;Page:21321] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 One of the entities we are talking about tonight is the Tertiary Education Commission and I would like the Minister—now that he is in charge of tertiary education—to explain just where the Tertiary Education Commission fits in. It is my hope on behalf of 2.5 million taxpayers that he will do a better job than his predecessor the Hon Steve Maharey. I think that any history of public administration in New Zealand will record that member’s efforts as among the worst of any Minister—[ 
Interruption 
]—and it is laughable that the member for Otaki is probably going to vote for him when Labour eventually changes its leadership. In fact I think that Mr Maharey’s tenure as the Minister in charge of tertiary education should have put paid to any leadership prospects he had. 
Darren Hughes 
: Give us a tutorial now. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Just settle down. 
I want the Minister to tell us now what is going on with the Tertiary Education Commission. Mr Mallard is getting headlines again as in the Christchurch  
Press 
 today with talk of redundancies at Christchurch Polytechnic. Mr Mallard is wandering into the polytech sector like a bull in a china shop and he is causing a great deal of strife by proposing changes that he will have to back off from. In fact if he has not been told to back off by the Prime Minister already then she will probably do that before the end of this week when her media-monitoring unit counts the polytech headlines around the country. 
What has happened is that the Minister has made a number of aggressive and irritable speeches saying that he is going to cut back a number of course types. Now on the face of it that looks like a reasonable thing to do—except that a couple of months ago he announced a whole series of reviews of courses in tertiary institutions. And that sounds as if it would not be too unreasonable except that prior to that the Government made an agreement with those polytechs about how they would handle the community education allocations in particular. That would have made some sense except that before that the polytechs had done their charters and profiles in great detail for the next 3 years and they had been signed off by the Government. 
So people are trying to run a polytech and provide skills for an economy that needs them and there have now been four different interventions from the Minister and the Tertiary Education Commission. I do not necessarily sympathise with the sector generally but I have to say that that is just grossly negligent public management. It is a case of ministerial whim; every time Ministers feel a bit of pressure they go out and say they will do something else—whatever it is. So the chief executive and the council are sitting there trying to work out which plan the Government will carry out—because all those plans came from the Government. 
Well can the Minister tell us what he will do? Will he stick with the original agreements about charters and profiles or will he stick with the next agreement his predecessor made about community education? Or will he throw both of those over in favour of pursuing the raft of reviews that are being done by former corrections officers and people with PhDs—people who have never had a job but are reviewing our tertiary institutions? Or will he follow the statements he has made recently that he is sending a package off to Cabinet that will involve taking tens of millions of dollars out of the polytechs? I would like him to tell me that. 
The other thing I would like him to tell me is just what he is doing about the viability of those institutions. Will he go around the same circle that Steve Maharey did where everyone stands around collaborates and wrings their hands? He coughed up money for the polytechs just because he could not stand not being nice to them. So he bailed them out. Then 3 years later they were all back in financial difficulty again. Clearly the Government has failed to get to the nub of the problem in relation to the viability of polytechs and I want to know why the Minister will not take a sensible and measured approach to the matter. Why does he feel that he has to go out there and aggressively strut in front of the sector to show that he means business?