Turei Metiria: Urgent Debates — Te Wananga o Aotearoa—Dissolution of Council 
Turei Metiria: Urgent Debates — Te Wananga o Aotearoa—Dissolution of Council 
[Volume:625;Page:20380] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 Typically Te Wananga o Aotearoa is suffering a much greater level of scrutiny that any other similar institution would in similar circumstances. It is absolutely no surprise that the ACT members have attached themselves to this issue. Te Wananaga o Aotearoa is after all a Maori institution that provides a critical and an enormously successful service to Maori communities and Maori students across the country—a service that all other providers have effectively failed to provide with anywhere near the success that this one has. 
We do not have requests from ACT for urgent debates about the millions of dollars that universities spend on advertising for example. Although student fees are still increasing and tertiary staff are finding it more and more difficult to get the pay rises they need to do their work the universities are spending millions of dollars every year on advertising to attract people in our small country. We do not have urgent debates about what is happening with regard to the Taranaki Polytechnic which has had a $7.5 million bail-out. Te Wananga o Aotearoa is a huge institution worth hundreds of millions of dollars; in comparison with its size $20 million is a reasonable amount of money in the circumstances. Yet we do not have the same claims of mismanagement and terrible foul play against Taranaki Polytechnic that we are hearing from ACT about Te Wananga o Aotearoa. Nor do we hear the same complaints against the Modern Age Institute of Learning a private provider that also received assistance from the Government. This is clearly a race-based attack in my view. 
It is really important that we do not lose sight of the purpose of Te Wananga o Aotearoa which is to provide education services to Maori communities—communities that have missed out and been failed by the State system of tertiary education provision and indeed by the State system of compulsory education. Te Wananga o Aotearoa has massively increased Maori involvement in tertiary education—much more successfully than anyone else has been able to do. One of its real successes has been the establishment of small outposts in far-flung parts of our country so that small communities of Maori and other people who live there as well can get access to tertiary services they would otherwise never have had access to. The institution has been committed to providing and supporting whanau into tertiary education. That is an enormous success and it must not be underplayed. The institution has made tertiary education accessible where other providers have failed to do so. 
In fact the real scandal here is actually that Maori adults are now having to get student loans and go into debt in order to obtain the education they should have got for free when they were young. Part of the increase in Maori student numbers is the increase in adult students: people returning for second-chance learning for basic literacy and numeracy education and to do the training they should have had when they were still in school. The State system completely failed to meet their needs at that time and now they are going back to tertiary institutions to get that education and having to pay fees—and sometimes enormous fees. One of the real successes of the wananga is that it has provided a number of courses for free making sure Maori are not doubly penalised in their desire to obtain the education they were entitled to in the first place. 
There is no doubt that the wananga has made some mistakes. Part of that was due to massive expansion; it is always difficult for a provider like that to expand so quickly. But the Hon Brian Donnelly is completely right: the wananga has done all that within the rules and the frameworks provided for it by the Government. If there is a problem here it is with the Government policy that has not done anything about the equivalent full-time student system that allowed this situation to happen from the beginning—partly I guess because the Government wanted the wananga to be a little flagship for its education policies. Now that the Government is losing support in the Maori community perhaps it is letting the wananga go. Maybe it is quite justified to make that accusation against the Government. But either way it is the Government’s responsibility to have in place policies and frameworks to ensure these problems do not happen to State-funded institutions. 
But that said a $20 million blowout is comparatively speaking not as bad as the $800 million blowout by Air New Zealand all those years ago. That was a huge amount of money going to what was effectively a private institution that provided services for a very limited number of New Zealanders. Yet here we have quibbling over $20 million for an institution that provides services to people and to communities that otherwise miss out completely. 
In terms of the wananga the Greens believe that it should be supported and assisted to provide the services it is designed to provide that it does a fantastic job of providing those services to Maori communities and that the scrutiny it is suffering is a race-based scrutiny. We do not shy away from the fact that mistakes have been made. It is not a particular surprise that there are financial difficulties in an organisation of the wananga’s size and with the level of expansion it is undergoing. We urge the Government to continue to support this institution not to let it flag and to remember it provides a critical service that this Government’s other institutions have not been able to provide. We should not let Maori communities suffer for this Government’s failed policies.