Hutchison Paul: Education (Establishment of Universities of Technology) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Hutchison Paul: Education (Establishment of Universities of Technology) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:640;Page:10756] 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Port Waikato) 
: 
 Thank you for the opportunity to speak on this Education (Establishment of Universities of Technology) Amendment Bill. National will be supporting this bill going to the Education and Science Committee. We must say that we are looking forward to enjoying the debate within the select committee. 
This sector is particularly confusing right now with its eight universities its 26 polytechs its 42 industry training organisations and its 800 private training establishments and here the member is adding yet another category of university. I note that no one other than Unitec and the member has lobbied me to support this bill. Nevertheless the discussion in the Education and Science Committee hopefully will be an elevated and enlightened one and one where we can make progress on taking away the confusion that Labour has created in the tertiary education system and bring sense and rationality to it. 
I acknowledge Brian Donnelly for picking up this bill. But I also acknowledge John Webster the Chief Executive Officer of Unitec. He is a man who has shown extraordinary perseverance and dedication in trying to achieve university status for the institution he has worked so hard for for so long. I was shown around the campus by him a month or so ago and also taken over to the western side of Auckland where a new campus is expanding. I must say that he has developed a very very impressive diversity of courses despite the Labour Government. 
There certainly is an irony in Unitec wanting to become a university of technology. It insists that this is a different category from a university but when we look back to the history of the early 1990s when the Auckland Institute of Technology and Unitec both applied to the Government to become universities we see that of course only the Auckland Institute of Technology was chosen to be one—the Auckland University of Technology. Here we would have an even further confusing situation where Unitec would be a university of technology and we already have the Auckland University of Technology but they are supposed to be different. 
Here are some questions that the member has to let us know the answers to. How is this actually going to help students. Is it going to help students? Will it make them better off? Will it indeed ensure that the staircasing that he has been talking about will happen? 
I note that he says in the general policy statement: “By comparison with research-led universities their lower proportion of research post-graduate students and intensity of internationally published research will be offset by a particularly strong commitment to high level professional and vocational education establishment of close links with business and industry engagement in applied research and advanced practice delivery of appropriate sub-degree programmes and provision for pathways by which students can progress to higher levels of education and training as and when required to pursue their career goals.” 
I understand that Mr Donnelly and Unitec feel there is a great need to have parity of esteem. Yet one really wonders whether just conferring the title of “university of technology” will do this. If we look around the world we can immediately think of highly esteemed universities such as Oxford Cambridge and Johns Hopkins and on the other hand there is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—not a university but surely of hugely high esteem. It is an institution of only about 10000 students yet it does an enormous amount of research. That is another of the ironies relating to this particular bill. 
I remember several years ago also debating in this Chamber the question of how many universities we should have in this country and this bill may lead to many. The view that we in National had was that it really depended entirely on quality; the number did not matter so much. Of course all the Labour Government wanted to do was to control the number; it was not worried about quality. 
It is of interest to me that in the background of this bill the Education Act 1989 currently categorises institutions as universities polytechs colleges of education specialist colleges or wananga and there is a degree of flexibility but not enough. However since 1992 as we have learnt from Brian Donnelly polytechs have been allowed to confer degrees up to PhD. I note that Unitec does have that full spectrum of certificates and diplomas all the way to PhDs. 
I absolutely agree that technology and technology courses have changed dramatically since the 1990s. The example given of radiologists is absolutely pertinent; that technology has changed enormously during the time that I have been a practising obstetrician and gynaecologist. As the member said the whole range from simple X-rays to ultrasound to magnetic resonance imaging has happened in the last 15 to 20 years. It is important that nurses and radiographers etc. are able to staircase from diplomas to degrees then perhaps to go on to PhDs and do research. However the big question is whether a university of technology is needed to do this. 
I also note that there has been considerable discussion about what constitutes a university. I am sure Dr Cullen will have some erudite and woolly definition of it but  
The Concise Oxford Dictionary 
 defines a university as “a high-level educational institution in which students study for degrees and academic research is done.” It does not necessarily mean that it is research-led which is the situation or the understood preference of the eight universities in New Zealand. The Education Act 1989 which I think Brian Donnelly mentioned is a little vague on the definition of universities here but research rather than teaching is the vital focus. 
That brings up some curious scenarios of what might happen in the future if indeed this bill is allowed to go through. We have a situation in New Zealand where it looks as though three or four or five universities are getting the lion’s share of the Performance-based Research Fund. 
Debate interrupted.