English Bill: Education (Tertiary Reforms) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
English Bill: Education (Tertiary Reforms) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:644;Page:13689] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 I would be very happy to explain to that member why National opposes this legislation but let me say first that when it comes to tertiary education reform never have so many people who thought they were so smart been so wrong for so long with so much of a waste of taxpayers’ money as the Labour Government in its 8 years of tertiary education reform. This Education (Tertiary Reforms) Amendment Bill is what the Labour Government said it would do in the year 2000. Here we are in the year 2007 before this Government has got around to getting the bill in— 
Nathan Guy 
: Under urgency. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: —under urgency at the end of the year to apply in 2008. We did some rough calculations on what this reform has cost: $400 million. The Labour Government has spent $400 million thinking about tertiary education reform. There have been a few fundamental flaws in that thinking. One has become apparent today and I would have expected the Government to explain its policy. Here is a simple question: does Labour believe in restricted entry to university? 
Hon Marian Hobbs 
: To medical schools to architecture schools to law schools? 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: No I ask whether Labour believes in restricted entry to all university courses as Auckland University is proposing. Well those members are caught on the horns of a dilemma because the direct implication of its funding system is that all universities will restrict entry to their courses. 
Hon Marian Hobbs 
: It’s a shame you just thought of it Bill. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: But of course the Government’s supporters are against that which is why that member is so concerned. What will Labour members say to the Maori and Pacific Island communities in Auckland? I ask how they will explain to those communities which have the same aspirations as everyone else in New Zealand for a high level of education for their children that entry to Auckland University courses across the board is now restricted. The big question is how it will be restricted. Well it will be restricted according to secondary school qualifications. That is obvious. 
Hon Marian Hobbs 
: Is it? 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: It is because how else could one do it? What it means is that if one did not do too well at National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) at secondary school which a lot of Maori and Pacific Island students do not then one will never get to go to university. That is determined by the time one is 15. If there was any more of a fundamental breach of Labour’s apparent crocodile tears about equity then that breaches it. 
Hon Marian Hobbs 
: You got it wrong again. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Where does the member think all the new university students have come from over the last 15 years? They did not come out of a huge increase in the number of secondary school students; they came out of an increase in the number of mature students. There are more secondary school students than there were but by far the biggest increase has been in the number of mature students. If we stand at the enrolment line at Auckland University with the mature students and ask them what they got for NCEA level 3 they will ask: “What is NCEA? I did School Certificate and I failed it. Here I am aged 30 realising that there is a second chance and I am going to university.” and many of those people succeed very well. 
Labour members have found that after 8 years of tertiary education reform $400 million worth of thinking about it and endless damage—particularly to the polytechnic sector—they have achieved one thing. It is the one thing that most of them do not want; that is restricted entry to university. We could argue for and against the merits of it and we will have that discussion. But the question is whether this is what Labour wanted and the answer is no. 
I will just take members through some of the history and my colleague Dr Lockwood Smith will agree with this. The “bums on seats” system that Labour members so roundly condemned was never as open-ended as they say it was. It had a series of controls under National. Half a dozen people sat around the desk with the Minister and they gave the institutions the opportunity to grow. But they had some fiscal control and they certainly had plenty of flexibility. They did not have a long complicated bill like this one that dictated all the processes. They did not have 400 bureaucrats—they had about six. Then what happened was that Steve Maharey got in. Well what a disaster that was. He took his eye off the ball and the tertiary institutions went crazy because while Labour was busy constructing this complex and elegant sociological model of tertiary education the institutions were flat-out breaking all the rules exploiting the loopholes and running up hundreds of millions of dollars of wasted taxpayers’ money. Not all of them did that but quite a few of them did that while Labour members faced the other way. Their whole theory about tertiary education was something they were in love with and they had no idea what was going on in the real world. 
I was pleased to be a spokesman who helped embarrass them about that: about the fact that they spent a billion dollars over 4 years on diploma-level courses that no student finished. It was the biggest single waste of public money ever that I have come across apart from maybe Think Big. A billion dollars was spent on diploma courses that no student finished and the Government did not know anything about it. So then the Government cracked down because it was such a political embarrassment. But when it cracked down it cracked down with the most complicated system one could ever come up with: there were charters profiles investment managers and 400 bureaucrats. I can recall reading a stack of documents; there used to be about a dozen different versions. I would read a stack of documents about the Government’s plans for tertiary education and do members know the one thing it left out in all those documents? 
Hon Member 
: Students. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Students never got mentioned. This was office-tower middle-class well-paid secure risk-averse New Zealand telling our 19 and 20-year-olds what their future was going to be. I conducted a few informal student surveys— 
Hon Marian Hobbs 
: You really cared about students! 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: The member should listen to this. I conducted a few informal surveys of students and I said to some students: “Have you read the statement of tertiary education priorities and do you know the eight principles of relevance equity blah-blah-blah and all that sort of rubbish and the strategic outlook”— 
Hon member 
: And they all said “Yes”. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: They all said: “Yes”. And then they all used four-letter words that indicated that they did not feel that the views taken by a bunch of middle-aged bureaucrats sitting in an office tower were very relevant to their decisions. 
Hon Marian Hobbs 
: They also used the same four-letter words about student fees. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Well this is the point. Who takes the risks about making a decision for tertiary education? I will tell members who takes the risks. One example is a 19-year-old student who does not really know what he wants to do who sees some programmes on TV that makes some occupations look attractive and who listens to his parents who make other occupations look attractive. His friends are all going in one direction his girlfriend is at the other end of the country and he has to make up his mind. He does and he manages to do it without Dr Cullen or the vet who thinks he can run the place. 
Another example of someone who takes the risks is the 34-year old woman with a husband in a low-paying job who has a couple of kids who has capabilities that she has never really explored and who decides she really wants to be back in the workforce. She is willing to live hard to work hard to look after her kids and to do her study to get a tertiary education. In this new world that Labour has planned she does not fit because she will not meet the criteria for restricted entry to university. The plan that was cooked up between some 27-year-old PhD graduate and a general manager at the polytech to try to get their negotiation sorted so they could get their cash happens to stop her course from running. 
So a group of people who have no idea about the real world are trying to write plans for the knowledge economy and I just say to the House that it will not work. It is too complicated it is too refined it is called “strategy” but it has none of the content of strategy and in the end it treats young New Zealanders as if they were mindless automatons willing to go shape their lives on the musings of people like those members opposite. Who would make life-changing decisions on the basis of what that rag-tag front bench says is important for New Zealand? Nobody! And that is why National is voting against his legislation.