English Bill: Urgent Debates — Te Wananga o Aotearoa—Dissolution of Council 
English Bill: Urgent Debates — Te Wananga o Aotearoa—Dissolution of Council 
[Volume:625;Page:20376] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 Well that speech fizzled out with a whimper as it should from a guilty man. What does that Minister think the public make of the Government coughing up $20 million more for the wananga when last year it gave it $234 million? Trevor Mallard is the man who is mainly responsible for the problems that the wananga has. I think all parties agree that the wananga is an institution that has done some real good in a community. It is an institution that has had some issues and some problems but Trevor Mallard is the Minister who has been too lazy and too complacent to do anything about the vast amount of information that he has been given over the last 2 years whereby he could have avoided spending $20 million this week to keep the wananga afloat. Twenty million dollars is a lot of money. Twenty million dollars would solve a whole lot of problems for special-needs children. It would double the increase that schools received in their operations grant last year. Any member could think of any other priority and this House needs to know that there is only one reason that the Government has to cough up this $20 million and that is Trevor Mallard. 
I have asked the Government for the official information about just what interaction it has had with the wananga over the last 2 years. Well I got about 2 inches of paper from the Government setting out an enormous range of interactions between the Government and the wananga and Trevor Mallard and his smarmy mate the hopeless Steve Maharey were there at just about every one of them. Their fingerprints are on dozens and dozens of documents and briefings over the last 2 years about the wananga. The ACT member is right—the only reason that anything happened about the wananga this year is that it is an election year and Labour was caught out having done nothing when it knew everything. The other reason of course is that it wanted Pakeha voters to see that Labour could kick something Maori and it is just going to keep kicking till it goes down. Rongo Wetere got a bit too big for his boots in Maori politics and the Government is going to nail him no matter what. Even if it has to jack it up it is going to nail him. So this is a combination of mismanagement from Trevor Mallard and the problems the Maori Party is causing the Labour Party. That is why Mr Mallard’s response was so pathetic. So what has been happening? Well star Maori candidate Shane Jones was on the audit and risk subcommittee of the wananga committee for the last 2 years. 
Hon Parekura Horomia 
: What’s wrong with Shane Jones? 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Let us say there is nothing wrong with him and that he is as competent as Labour thinks he is; that means he would have been telling Trevor Mallard and his good mate Helen Clark about every second week how big the problems were. So if he was competent Trevor Mallard must have known about all the problems in the wananga and if he was incompetent well that must be how he got so high on the Labour list. 
Mr Graeme McNally is one of the most experienced tertiary consultants in New Zealand. He has overseen the financial unviability of many institutions. Wherever there is trouble he is there. He is up in Taranaki now. That institution has gone broke. He has been there for a year; it has gone broke. He was at Te Wananga o Aotearoa for 2 years; it has gone broke. The Government spent $120000 paying Graeme McNally to watch the wananga go broke. He knew what was going on. He was telling Trevor Mallard all the time what was happening. But Trevor Mallard did nothing. Maybe the Government is going to use the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) excuse. Maybe it is going to say: “Well yes there was information around but it wasn’t flagged; it didn’t have a red alert on it. They didn’t tell us precisely what was wrong.” Well they did. For a period of about 6 months Trevor Mallard and Steve Maharey were briefed weekly—weekly. I can tell the House that Ministers get briefed weekly only about things that really really matter. 
The chief executives of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority the Ministry of Education and the Tertiary Education Commission met fortnightly for 2 years to discuss the wananga—and the wananga only. But nothing happened. Nothing was done. I shall quote the comment of one official: “I am tired of going to large meetings which are drawn out and everyone agrees but no action comes at all.” That sums it up. Here is the question that the House needs an answer to: why did two of the most competent amazing Ministers the New Zealand Parliament has ever seen—Trevor Mallard and Steve Maharey—knowing everything they knew about the wananga do nothing? The reason is that they were scared to do anything and they lack the competence to do it. It is in the Official Information Act paper; they state that officials were telling Ministers that if they did anything relationships with iwi would be affected and that they should not shut down outpost enrolments because that would affect relationships with iwi. They knew that Te Wananga o Aotearoa was popular among Maori. They knew that the Maori Party was getting up and going and getting some traction. They knew that if they laid a finger on the wananga it would give the Maori Party just the kind of rocket boost it needed. 
Well what happened was that the ACT party laid a finger on the wananga and then the Minister decided to do something and then the Maori Party did get the rocket boost it deserved. So this is a Labour nightmare because now it is seen by the Pakeha voters to be pouring good money in after bad and it is seen by Maori voters as having kicked the institution that drove Labour’s unemployment figures down—by putting 30000 of them on the roll. It is lose lose lose. The man who has overseen it all the man they call “Runner” because he does Helen Clark’s errands is Trevor Mallard. He has made a political botch of this that will cost Labour the Maori vote and he has made a financial botch of it that has cost the taxpayer millions and millions of dollars. 
The problem lies with the Minister—Trevor Mallard. He knew everything that was going on. He knew for instance that the retention and completion rates quoted were wrong. The Ministry of Education has these retention and completion rates. The only way one can show that one has not completed a course—in any tertiary institution actually—is by lodging a formal withdrawal. If someone just drifts off and never finishes a course then the person is counted as “completing”. Unless those people officially withdraw they are still in the course. We know that tens of thousands of students just walk and not just from wananga courses but from a whole lot of other courses. That is just one little example of the mess in tertiary education. 
I think the wananga is to some extent the author of its own problems. But to a significant extent it is the victim of a lazy incompetent Government that has left a trial of wreckage through tertiary education. The snooty smarmy Steve Maharey who had the nice word for everyone blew hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars—that he never expected to be spending—on a tertiary system churning out qualifications for students who were sucked in by what they thought was a State guarantee of quality. But it was no guarantee of quality while this Government was in charge. This is yet another example in education alongside NCEA where this Labour Government with its arrogance has trashed the aspirations of thousands of New Zealanders and it is Trevor Mallard’s fault.