English Bill: Education (Export Education Levy) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
English Bill: Education (Export Education Levy) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:619;Page:14749] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 This legislation is another Mallard mess mop-up. As far as I am aware the Minister has been in charge of the education portfolio for about 5 years. He has some remarkable achievements in his name. For instance each time he goes to China to talk about international education in New Zealand student numbers here drop. I recommend that he stay at home and do his job properly. 
We would not need Part 1 if the Minister had done his job properly. He has a public agency the New Zealand Qualifications Authority whose express function is to ensure the security of funds paid by overseas students and it simply has failed in that function and I might say it has failed in it for quite a long time. Going back to the 1990s the authority did not do that job well and as far as we can see it is still not doing that job well. The other agency that has failed for which failure every other private training establishment will pay the price is the Tertiary Education Commission. The most prominent collapse of recent times which involved Carich and international students was in circumstances known in detail for many months by the Tertiary Education Commission. In fact the decisions it made over how to handle that organisation were directly related to its collapse. So the Minister should stay home he should not go overseas and frighten off our potential customers he should not be bullied by the Chinese Government into picking on one form of institution—that is private training providers—and he should get public agencies to do properly the job they are meant to do. 
Along with the ACT party I share a concern about the way in which this legislation picks on private training establishments. In the Government’s mind they are marginal organisations that should not really exist and that do all sorts of dodgy things. If the Minister has not noticed he needs to know that public organisations in education are doing much more damage to the reputation of this country and his policy than private training establishments are at the moment. Christchurch Polytechnic is just one of half a dozen New Zealand polytechnics all of which have foreign fee-paying students that have indulged in the worst sort of unprofessional and ruthless exploitation of the Government’s slack policies and weak education Ministers. 
And those polytechnics are doing it without any punishment. That is the odd thing that is going on. The private training establishments are all being punished because of the actions of one and they will all have to pay their levies but in the polytechs the offenders are getting away with it and all the polytechs that have kept the rules are getting punished. So at least that is consistent: whether one is in the public sector or the private sector with this Government if one does the wrong thing nothing happens but if one does the right thing one gets it in the neck—and in the case of the polytechs to the tune of millions of dollars. I would like the Minister to explain that. 
I am very pleased that the select committee dropped out clause 5—another defeat for the Minister and one of any number that he has had to deal with. He is a Minister who usually overreaches with his policy then gets a whack on the nose and has to pull back. Part 1 originally set out to levy private training establishments for just the year 2004 in a way that was grossly unfair bad public policy and unsustainable. I want the Minister to tell me how it ever got into the legislation. How did it ever get through the officials process past a Cabinet committee and into this legislation when it was so demonstrably unacceptable? It met almost no criteria of good public policy. One can only assume that once again the mighty pair of Mallard and Maharey sat in their offices one night and thought: “How can we really hit someone we don’t like?”.