Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (Minister for Tertiary Education Skills and Employment): It is a great pleasure to take a call in this Estimates debate and talk about the considerable and ongoing investment that this Government makes in the tertiary education sector particularly. This Budget totals nearly $3 billion a year that we invest in the tertiary sector plus another billion or so for support for students.We do that because of the powerful powerful contribution that higher education makes to the lives of New Zealanders partly in terms of equipping them with the skills and the knowledge that they need in order to get a good job and contribute to our economy and our country and to better understand the world in which they live and in which their families live. We also contribute to tertiary education because we can see the thought leadership and innovation that is developed out of our university sector particularly but also across the tertiary sector. That can contribute to making our companies more internationally competitive—yes—but also to better delivering evidence upon which we in Government and the broader community can make evidence-based decisions and also to finding solutions to many of the challenges we face. Many of the university researchers are deeply involved in the National Science Challenges in many of those areas in which we as a Government continue to invest heavily.When I look at the tertiary sector as a whole I see it sort of broken down into four parts. Part of it is all around a lot of the investment we make at that foundation level which is trying to find that spark of inspiration for young people who have not come out of the schooling system connected yet and really trying to reconnect them with education so that they can get back into learning and into a job.We have got a number of programmes that we fund such as Youth Guarantee the student achievement component level 1 and 2 funding the Māori and Pasifika Trades Training Initiative—a whole bunch of schemes that are designed to try to reconnect those kids. Our focus over the next little while will be continuing to evaluate them. Some of them work very well some work brilliantly in one part of the country—in Gisborne—but not so well in the South Island and others will work well in other areas. The focus is on the effectiveness of those regimes and we are very determined to make sure that they work effectively to try to reduce that group.The next is the broader skills category and we are looking at the Productivity Commission report which we will be delivering our response to shortly. It is all really about trying to ensure that the system is generating the skills that we need as an economy right here right now. We are in a situation where more than 11000 jobs are being created every month. There is a real call out for skills in so many areas and our tertiary sector is capable of delivering those skills. We want to ensure that it continues to do that over the next years that it is responsive and innovative and that students have the information available to them to make wise choices about the courses that they take. There is a lot of work going on in that area and that is why this Budget that we are talking about has increased the overall funding for tuition rates across the board.Another two areas are around ensuring that we maintain real world-class international-level universities so that New Zealanders have access to that and that is why we continue to put extra resources into the Performance-based Research Fund which responds to and reflects the higher-quality research side of what universities do. We continue to invest and have consistently invested in that area as we have in the broader science factor in which a significant amount of our science funding—$1.5 billion a year—is channelled through the tertiary sector as well.I just want to touch on the international side. The Budget has got extra resources for Education New Zealand. This is a $4.5 billion industry—very important—which employs upwards of 30000 New Zealanders. We do not take the view that some other parties do—that you should just slash the whole industry in half. We think it is an important industry. It is about diversifying the New Zealand economy and the focus should be on dealing with the poor performance that there undoubtedly is in areas of that sector. We have got the regulators working very hard in that area to rein in poor performance. Overall it is a very important sector and we continue to support it.