Reti ShaneDr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): Thank you Madam Chair. I want to talk to something completely different in this bill which hasn't been raised to date. We've been able to understand the polytechnic positions and some of our colleagues have been able to express the industry position. I want to talk to a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) in my name. Well first of all I want to address what Chlöe Swarbrick was saying about collaboration. I'm more than happy to collaborate but she also could have picked up the phone and reached out. We heard nothing. I heard nothing. So this is a two-way path in the first instance.Secondly nothing's secret here. We've been working on the committee of the whole House for several weeks and communicated with the clerks weeks ago to get some guidance as to how this might look. In fact just yesterday we flagged with the Clerk exactly what our plan was. His initial response was You don't need to tell me your plan." My response was "Well it's a good thing. Surely the more shared knowledge is good for all of us and the committee of the whole House will go well." So from a collaboration perspective how much more clear can we be? Nothing's secret here at all.I want to talk to the part of the bill that talks about the reporting period which hasn't been discussed to date—the reporting period for the New Zealand Institute of Skills and Technology (NZIST). SOP 436 in my name makes the recommendation that the NZIST produce a report every six months and I say that taking on board advice from the Office of the Auditor-General (OAG) who have been very concerned with the time frames very concerned that this is hurried. This is such a tumultuous sort of transition with all these entities that I'm not convinced that the reporting as it's stated in the bill is enough. I think that there needs to be shorter periods so that we can look at what's happening here so that we can monitor things more closely and make changes if we're going to. So this presumes that we're going down this path to destruction if you like—call it what you may—but at least let's give ourselves the opportunity to fix it or pull it back if we see that things aren't going as we'd planned.So what I'm proposing here is that the NZIST produce a report every six months because I am concerned that the monitoring is not enough. I think this will also talk to even though this SOP doesn't specifically reporting of the subsidiaries. We're concerned—certainly I'm concerned—with the subsidiaries. I will allude to it in other parts of this discussion but very concerned with the three months—January February March—of reporting and then the nine months. That is that we revalue all polytechnics at the end of March and then we start a new financial year. Everyone has been concerned with that.The polytechnics are concerned. How do you do a mid-year—it's not quite mid-year but a third of the year—revaluation? That is hard. That takes time. There is a cost to doing that. That is going to be very complex and very hard so we have concerns with that. Then you're going to add in or we're anticipating adding in the other nine months of the reporting year. What a mess. How challenging is that going to be? And we already put into the second reading the words of the OAG that if we talk about a conversion to a subsidiary it will be much harder under the Public Finance Act to do this amalgamation across reporting periods. We understand that if you use the words "transfer" it's much more likely to be able to be consistent with the Public Finance Act but I see nothing in here or in the new SOP 428 which the Government has tabled that addresses that concern. So we're just going to find out when it happens when we find out that in fact we can't do—we'll call it mid-year—this mid-year amalgamation of financial reporting.So while I'm talking specifically about improving the reporting period for when the NZIST is established these same arguments could equally apply for when the subsidiaries are established. It's going to be a substantial upheaval. Why would we not want to look closer so we can fix things if they look like they're broken on the way? I think that's the question I'd like the Minister of Education to address: how much harm can there be? If he has concerns—he's mentioned the risks that are put up in the programme business case and how he's mitigated them. Surely this would seem to be a sensible mitigation as well to look more closely at the reporting period. I'm suggesting for the NZIST but I'd also suggest for the subsidiaries.So this is a new piece of thinking in this part of the bill. I'm also interested to know if the Minister is anticipating speaking to the SOP that the Government's putting forward which we've seen for the first time today or is there nothing there that's going to be talked to? We'd be interested if you do that. We'd like to talk to that as well. That will certainly be new information. I challenge the Minister to give some thinking on that. Thank you Madam Chair."