Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to the Education (Vocational Education and Training Reform) Amendment Bill and I want to record the party's position and the reasons for it.We have an education system at the tertiary level that centres on the student—not the institution on the student. The reason for that is intuitive to most people that education is about investment in students ensuring that this country and those individuals have the skills and abilities to navigate a better tomorrow. That much should be simple.An unfortunate thing but a number of the institutions in the polytech and institutes of technology and polytechnic sector were failing the students. The problem was that the students who have their whole lives ahead of them and understand what is in their best interests were trying to send those institutions a message: we don't want to give you our money; we think you should go broke. That's what was happening to those institutions. They were failing because they failed the students. What a logical system.Anybody who's ever been in business will know that if your customers aren't giving you their money unfortunately they're trying to tell you something. You either adapt and start giving your customers what they want or you go under. That should have been the reality for these failing institutions.What are the priorities of this Government? Is it to ensure the welfare of the student? No. We see in this legislation that this Government wants to protect the institution. This Government thinks it's more important to save failing institutions by merging them into an even bigger bureaucracy that is just as likely to fail as the ones it replaces instead of giving the students options.What were the options for those students? Well actually they have many because outside of this mega merged polytechnic are a range of innovative private training enterprises of real businesses that actually have to attract a student's dollar to make a buck who are now going to be marginalised because when they were succeeding when their competitors were failing the Government has come along and tips the playing field away from them and towards the institutions that were failing the students.So here's what we have from this Government: in a situation where we had failure and students voting with their feet and going places that were better for their future this Government has decided to put the institution before the student to put centralisation before choice and to put a much bigger bureaucracy before entrepreneurship creativity and the rights of New Zealanders to make a better tomorrow for themselves.Let me finish by making a prediction. This bureaucracy that this Government is creating with the passage of this bill today—unless some members on the Government side come to their senses before the vote—will be no more successful than the bureaucracy it replaces because it has all the same problems. Fundamentally it will be driven by politics rather than the individual choice of the students who know what's best for them and their future.When this bureaucracy fails we or at least some of us who are still here in this Parliament will find ourselves back here once again trying to reform a failed bureaucratic system. What this Government should have done is say the funding for education belongs to the student. They can take it to the institution of their choice and if the institution can't make a buck and it's closing down maybe that's what should happen. Thank you Madam Speaker.