English Bill: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
English Bill: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:617;Page:13254] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 I invite the Minister to take a call to explain the activities and the purpose of the Tertiary Education Commission. As this House has been made aware in the last couple of months the tertiary education strategy itself has totally failed. We have ended up with by far the biggest growth in expenditure in the least strategic courses and if there is any other way the Minister thinks the commission’s strategy should be measured he can get up and tell members. But it would seem to me that if the lowest priority eats up the most new money then there is something pretty wrong with the strategy and he may have been better off without one. 
That raises the question of what the commission actually does. One thing it does do is get offside with every other Government department. It has just published a document about the different roles that different institutions might take. The document looks like it has been written by probably a second-year policy analyst who no doubt has sat at the Minister’s knee listened to all the jargon and gone off to put it in the word processor. It is full of all sorts of odd expressions but that covers up a fundamental strategic contradiction within that document and also within the commission. 
In practice no one in the tertiary sector takes much notice of the commission. The tertiary sector used to be hopeful that somehow this steering strategy would amount to something but it has now become hopeless because it found the commission is hopeless. The commission talks and talks and talks and when it has finished talking it reports and reports and reports. I think there have been 11 or 12 reports in the last 4 or 5 years. 
I understand that what the commission is trying to do is decide what direction tertiary education should take. Government departments have some interesting comments on it. I want to quote Te PuniKokiri which is not a department that everyone in Parliament takes a lot of notice of but it made this comment: “It seems to us that when students are making decisions about what course of study to undertake it is unlikely that aligning it with the tertiary education strategy will be uppermost in their mind.” 
Well I could not have put it better myself. The Minister is trying to devise a machine that I call “the revenge of the middle-management”. If people who have been in big organisations who then get into Parliament have been middle-management in those organisations they believe that the boss always got it wrong. So they invent some machine that will make all the right decisions and prove that they were right. This is about tens of thousands of young New Zealanders making decisions and they are not making decisions willy-nilly but decisions for which they pay tens of thousands of dollars. 
Why would the Tertiary Education Commission know better? The answer is that it does not. It does not matter how much data the commission collects how detailed the profiles are or how much it signals facilitates and relationship-builds—which I gather is its function; that is what one does when one has no authority and no control—it will never be able to get the right answer. That is because tertiary education these days is so dynamic so changeable and so much driven—as it should be—by generally young people’s choices that by the time the commission catches up with what has happened it is too late because it cannot change it. 
The community funding is exactly the best example of that. By the time the commission caught up the $80 million blowout was out of the bag. It was too late. The fraudulent enrolments had already happened the conflicts of interest had already conflicted and the commission still cannot do much about it. What it does is ring up the culprits to ask whether they have done anything wrong which is like asking burglars whether they have burgled a house and they say they have not. The commission rings up the culprits who say that it is not right and that they did not do any of those nasty things and the Minister goes away reassured. 
So what is the strategy all about? Well it has crumbled. It has lost credibility in the sector. The Minister has lost credibility and I want to know what he will do about that. He has spent hundreds of millions of public dollars on this strategy over 5 years—for nothing. Was it for this document that has come out which was meant to be the  
Landscape 
 document but is something else? It has been roundly criticised by every Government department and we need some answers.