Cunliffe DavidHon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): Labour opposes this bill. It is bad in conception it is bad in detail and it sets up what is already a very very dodgy system in the tertiary sector to infect our secondary sector through its tertiary provisions. That is what I want to focus on today. The background to this is that the tertiary education's private training establishments have had a sorry litany of woe over the last year and the Tertiary Education Commission is having to pedal very fast to catch up. The Labour Opposition has blown the lid off scandals that have required paybacks and in several cases the closure of institutions at places like the Western Institute of Technology at Taranaki Tai Poutini Polytechnic Taratahi Agricultural Training Centre Agribusiness Training Ltd the Intueri Education Group Quantum Education Group and Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi. That is just some of them and there are plenty of others under investigation. In fact 19 others are under investigation according to the Minister for Tertiary Education Skills and Employment. Against that background which has been driven by the Government's virtual starvation of tertiary education with yet another real-terms funding cut and the insistence that the sector goes private to get more foreign students and become more innovative in the market place now it is handing that fox the door to the chicken coop in terms of charter schools. That is another disaster area of the application of market ideology to what should be a State-provided service—quality education for all our children based on ability and common standards not money and the ability to pay. That is what is fundamentally wrong with this. In the detail it gets worse. Tertiary education institutions have a change of definition so that they become a sponsoring body of charter schools. That then enables several things to happen. The first is that they get an exemption from the Official Information Act in the same way that charter schools do. But hang on—this is public money that is being invested in these godforsaken market experiments. The second thing is that they are exempted from the provisions of the State Sector Act the Act that normally provides governance and fiduciary constraints on State sector organisations. Thirdly they are exempt from the full provisions of the Ombudsmen Act. Taken together these three exemptions continue what is a very clear trend by the current Government to shrink the purview and the resourcing of the independent watchdogs of the State and commercial business and to hand power to investors in this case blurring the line in a very unfortunate way between tertiary institutions and the failed charter school experiment. Our education spokesperson Chris Hipkins has asked the obvious question: why? What evidence is there to suggest that one jot of this is going to be good for our students and our children? The answer is that that has never been the point. This legislation is designed to suit the investors—the National Party's donors. Hon Hekia Parata: Ha ha!Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: That is the group whom this education seeks to serve. The Minister laughs with apparent innocence but when one sees time and time again the running down of the watchdogs of the State the gradual ringbarking of those institutions and in this case the deliberate removal of the protections of the Official Information Act the Ombudsmen Act and the State Sector Act from any sponsoring tertiary institution that gets into a sponsorship deal with a charter school either it is naivety in the extreme or it is the deliberate application of market ideology to an area that should be for the benefit of all our children. Politics is a tipping game—we all know that—and this crazy neo-liberal experiment has been trundling on and on and on. But you know what it is very rapidly approaching a cliff—a cliff based on the housing crisis and the dislocation in the market which this Government is very soon to fall off. If this bill does pass it will not be long before we are back in the House repealing it and putting right what should be a fundamental obligation of the State to ensure the good education of every New Zealand child.