Hipkins ChrisHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): Thank you Madam Chairperson Tolley. I'd like to reply to a couple of the points that have been raised so far and I'll start with a point raised by the Hon Paul Goldsmith just prior to the dinner break. He was speaking on Part 1 but he was actually making points relevant to Part 2. So I will respond to the concerns that he raised about Part 2 even though he was speaking on Part 1 at the time. The allegation that he made was that the Government have made a number of changes to Part 2 without sending them to a select committee. In fact I'm surprised by that because he is a member of the select committee and the changes that we are debating in this bill have all been proposed by the select committee. This is not as a result of a substantive Supplementary Order Paper being tabled in this House as Mr Goldsmith proposed. In fact these are changes made by the select committee in response to submissions.The concern that he had was that we were progressing these changes without the public having had a chance to have their say on it; that's simply not the case. In fact the changes that the select committee made were very much in line with the concerns that the public raised during the select committee process. So we could get into a very circular argument about this—that if every time a select committee made a change to a bill it had to reconsult you would get to the point where the committee could never actually report the bill back to the House. So the committee made changes in accordance with the public submissions and has reported back to the House so I think Mr Goldsmith needs to worry a little less about the democracy there.But the wider substantive point that's been raised in relation to his Supplementary Order Paper is around the equal treatment provisions regarding funding for tertiary institutions and I want to refer members to new section 159NA in clause 12 which is the deleted part of the bill. The provisions previously proposed by Mr Goldsmith—because this was his bill—have been deleted by the select committee. If I turn particularly to clause 4 For the purposes of this section" it says "(a) activities are directly comparable if the proposed outcomes in relation to the activities are the same or substantially the same; and (b) approved programmes or training schemes are directly comparable if the qualifications resulting from their successful completion are the same or substantially the same." I just want the committee to consider for a moment the potential implications of that principle that we are putting in here. We currently fund degree-level programmes differently based on the type of institution they are delivered by. A degree-level programme at a polytechnic may not receive the same level of funding as a comparable degree-level programme being delivered by a university. Is the National Party seriously saying that that should change? I'd like to hear their contribution on that.The other point that I'd like to hear their contribution on is the position that they have left our regional polytechnics in because this is a very real issue that this Government will face and this is where this does come into play. We are going to have to put additional money into our regional polytechnics if they are not going to go broke. Tai Poutini Polytechnic for example today—we will be announcing very soon some additional funding for them. They are going to have to have that or they're going to be completely broke. In fact they're barely solvent now. The previous Government employed effectively a commissioner to go in and run that institution because it was in such dire financial straits. Is the previous Government now the National Opposition seriously saying that the Government should not put any additional funding into the public institutions unless they are willing to put a corresponding amount into private institutions as well?They're very quiet suddenly but I would very much like to hear from them about that because this is the very real issue that this Government has been confronted with. We have a network of regional institutions—public institutions owned by the Crown—that are in serious financial difficulty and this Government is not going to let them go broke. The previous Government was quite happy to let them fall over because of their ideology—the ideology that underpins this amendment that says that actually it doesn't matter whether an institution is public or private. It's fine for the private providers to come in and hoover up the profitable bits leave the unprofitable bits with the public institutions let them fall over and then let the regions lose their regional polytech provision. That was the approach taken by the previous Government and it is not the approach that is going to be taken by this Government."