Hipkins ChrisCHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): As long as my voice remains I intend to take my speech on this first reading of the Education (Tertiary Education and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. I want to say that I am very proud to stand here in defence of New Zealand's quality public education system against yet another attack by the current National Government. We used to have a public education system that all New Zealanders could be proud of. We could be proud of the fact that we had polytechs and universities that were world class particularly a network of polytechs—or nowadays we know them as Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics or ITPs—around New Zealand that we could be proud of and that were providing a quality education in our regions with a variety of subjects and options to ensure that all New Zealanders had access to the type of education that they needed to achieve their potential in life and to secure good employment as well. Unfortunately what we are seeing under the National Government is that that quality network of provision around the country is being eroded and this bill will serve only to exacerbate that problem.One of the things that this bill does is it removes any presumption that the Government would consider its ownership interest in tertiary education institutions in making funding decisions. I think that that is an abrogation of the notion that the Government has a responsibility to provide for a network of public tertiary education institutions throughout the country. This bill will serve only to harm our polytechnics and our institutes of technology even more than they already have been. The first real onslaught against them came with the idea that some parts of their funding would be thrown up for contestable funding rounds. That has seen a significant transfer of funding from public institutions to private institutions and now this will do them even further damage. There are many aspects of this bill that the Labour Party is very strongly in favour of but the provisions that relate to funding are ones that we are going to be strenuously opposed to.Public institutions should be able to receive a differentiated level of funding. They serve a different purpose to private training establishments (PTEs) in many cases because they are ensuring that there is a base level of educational provision in all parts of the country. A fully contestable market-driven model is not going to deliver those same outcomes. It is going to result in private providers being able to cherry-pick the aspects of tertiary education provision that are the most profitable leaving the polytechs and the institutes of technology with the least profitable parts and with no recourse back to Government to say that they need to have additional funding in order to continue to provide that education. The result of that is that the polytechs and the institutes of technology will continue to be financially crippled and the breadth and depth of educational provision in New Zealand's regions will continue to contract. New Zealanders will have less and less access to that education and that is what this bill is going to exacerbate. So we would oppose this legislation based on that factor alone because it is going to be such a fundamental change to the way our tertiary institutions are funded. We think that public funding for education should go towards education and towards supporting public educational institutions not be sucked out in the form of either capital accumulation by private businesses or dividend making by private businesses as this bill would allow to happen.There are some aspects of this bill that we are open to debate on and I suspect there is going to be good and lively debate on them. The renaming of private training establishments to a title that is more representative of the breadth of provision that exists within the sector is an appropriate thing to do. Whether the use of the word independent" tertiary education providers is the right one is something that I am yet to be convinced about because our public institutions—the universities and polytechs—are independent. In fact they are statutorily independent from the Government. So saying that PTEs are going to be regarded as independent would suggest that the public institutions are not which simply I think is a bit of a misnomer. So I am open to a more inclusive form of wording here. In Australia they make a differentiation between community-based or not-for-profit education providers and profit-driven education providers. If that was to be a differentiation that we were going to make within our law I would be certainly open to that debate and I think that that would be helpful. I think it is frustrating when some of the very very good community education providers are lumped into that PTE category and receive rather unfairly some of the criticism that goes with other parts of the PTE sector. So I would certainly like to see a different terminology that better embraces what it is that they do.We are open to the debate around wānanga being able to apply for the use of the term "university" which is a protected term at the moment but we want to have more debate and understanding about what that will mean. We have eight universities in New Zealand. We have not done what they did in the United Kingdom where they called all of their tertiary education providers universities including the ones that were dealing with predominantly sub-degree programmes. We did not go down that road in New Zealand. We kept the term "university" for institutions that are dealing predominantly with level 7 and above qualifications—so degree-level and above qualifications. If we are going to extend the term to wānanga I would want to have a bit more discussion around what that might mean and what type of wānanga provision might be able to be covered by that term. There are international expectations of what a university looks like and what the breadth of provision a university should provide should be and therefore we want to see those issues fully canvassed before we would agree to that particular provision.There are parts of the bill that we strongly support. Aligning the refund entitlements for domestic students involved in short courses at a PTE with those of international students—that makes a lot of sense. It seems wrong that an international student and a domestic student withdrawing from a course within the first few days are currently treated differently and the domestic students are the ones ultimately who are worse off there. We think that enabling State and State integrated schools to manage international student misconduct outside the school is a very welcome change—and one that I know the schools will welcome as well—including giving them the power to use stand down suspension exclusion and expulsion so that they can uphold their contractual duty and the duties they have under the code of pastoral care to ensure international students' health safety and well-being both in and out of school. We support extending the export education levy reimbursement provisions to cover private training establishments.We certainly support allowing tertiary education institutions to pool assets from a number of trusts to create a common trust for investment purposes. In a past life I was involved with the Victoria University foundation that manages a number of different scholarship funds. One frustration for the university was when the investments of those scholarship funds were unable to be managed in a rational and sensible way. I hope that this provision will allow for those sorts of issues to be dealt with. We also support the greater transparency around the compulsory student services fee. Of course the reason the compulsory student services fee is as high as it is is that the institutions are currently trying to provide—[Bell rung]The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Short-changed I know but you know.CHRIS HIPKINS: —that is all right—services that students associations used to provide a lot cheaper but students are paying more to get either less or the same as what they were getting before.We also support the provisions that allow for the modernising of council operations such as allowing councils to convene meetings via teleconference or other electronic means. I sat on a university council where it was somewhat frustrating. The council would meet maybe seven or eight times a year and there was no provision for that council to deal with more urgent matters of a restricted and confined nature between meetings so special meetings would need to be convened even if they were just to do something as minor as pass a single resolution. So the ability for a council to use other forms of convening meetings and other forms of communication to do that in a way that is sufficient is I think very welcome.The final thing I want to do is to actually provide a compliment to the Government around the process of this bill and that is that I think that the development and release of an exposure draft of the bill before it was introduced for first reading is a very very good practice. It is one that allows the sector to have its say and to actually make informed contributions to the drafting of legislation before it comes to the House rather than select committees trying to tidy up something after it has already been through its first reading.I think the issues here are going to be well canvassed because this has been a good process. There will be bits that we strongly disagree with; there will also be bits that we strongly agree with. We welcome the opportunity to have an informed debate on this bill and we commend the Government for a good process if not for everything that is in the bill."