Lubeck MarjaMARJA LUBECK (Labour): I'm rising to take this call on the Education (Tertiary Education and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. Yes I agree with the previous speakers that this bill started its life as a Government bill in the 51st Parliament. But the Government of the 52nd Parliament definitely has made significant improvements to it and made it a lot better and I'll talk about that a little bit later on.First of all I want to mention that in general this bill has quite a few aspects to it that show a strengthening of the tertiary education system by addressing accountability in the system and increasing student protection. Something that this bill is adding as an improvement is that it tidies up a loophole with regard to falsely awarding credits on a student's record of achievement. This issue a while ago received quite a bit of publicity when the International Academy of New Zealand was closed and students were not receiving correct assessments of their studies. So while it was already an offence to issue false qualifications there was a loophole with regard to falsifying credits or marks for students' assignments.So as my colleague Jo Luxton mentioned before the increases to the penalty for falsification on student records has increased significantly from $10000 to $50000 so that makes it comparable to similar offences. But what the increase also does is it increases the timeline that this offence can be prosecuted and it extends it from one to five years. That's important because it can actually take up to four years before reviews or routine checks show up that there has been an offence. So as a result of this change the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) can prosecute persons who falsify components of a qualification and who when they do that are undermining the confidence that the public can have in the integrity of our NZQA system.Now as I said before I'd like to talk a little bit about the importance of the deletion of some of these proposed clauses because in fact the changes that this Government has made to this bill go to the core of how we are fundamentally different. This Government bill started out as a bill that puts profit first; we put people first. So this is not about creating a level playing field as the Hon Nikki Kaye mentioned and—unlike the member Tim Macindoe said—this is not about punishment of private providers. I'm not sure actually if the honourable member Tim Macindoe was part of the previous select committee or not but I know that the previous Minister of Education the Hon Nikki Kaye should be aware of the thousands of submissions that were put forward to that particular select committee at the time—the vast majority as my colleague Jamie Strange pointed out not supporting the change at all.What the provisions proposed by the previous Government would have done is they would have provided the same funding rate across the board whether that education provider was a public or a private entity. Now that's not right. As I said before during the select committee there was an overwhelming number of submitters pointing out that public money should not be spent on what is a private business. The majority of submitters were opposed to the clauses that would put in a law that public and private providers should receive the same rate of funding. The majority of submitters were clear on the fact that they saw public providers committed to the communities they serve and they work in and that legislation to provide private for-profit providers with the same funding would ultimately undermine these public institutions. It was submitted that using public funding to subsidise for-profit providers would create unacceptable competition for public providers and the main focus should not be on what the economic return will be. Again that is where we are so fundamentally different from the other side of this House: people first.As private training establishments are not accountable to the Government for the quality of programmes they teach it would give them an unfair advantage if they had the same funding because they could cherry-pick the courses that would give them the greatest return on investment rather than putting the focus as public institutions do on what is best for the community. So really it would have been going as far away as we can think of from a level playing field. So what this new bill has done from this Government is it has removed those clauses and has left the situation to be determined as it is now in funding policy. What we also have deleted listening to the thousands of submitters is the proposal to change the name of private training establishment" to "independent tertiary establishment". There were over 1900 people and institutions that were submitting on this point to the select committee; every single one opposed the change. There was not one person or institution that supported it. It makes you think that the previous Government was kind of out of touch with the people. It was widely felt that the word "independent" would imply that public institutions were not independent and that both the terms "public" and "private" education are used all over the world are well recognised everywhere as well as here in New Zealand and there's absolutely no confusion that would have warranted a change in law to somehow tidy that up.This version of the bill also removes the provision for councils to discuss topics by email and eventually after their emails make decisions by email. That would have had the effect that council meetings would not be open to the public which is against the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act. This particular Act stipulates the very important requirement of the need for public access to meetings. So this bill has very good tidy-ups and it's closing the loopholes that pose a significant risk to our education system.Now we talked about the over 2000 submissions. There's also one that was quite significant from the Otago University Students' Association. It talks again about the wording of "independent" and it states that they don't support the amendment to the bill: "We understand the wide ranging nature of the PTE sector however we believe the change to 'independent tertiary establishment' may in fact obscure the true nature of these organisations it providing a return to shareholders. We believe it is important to be able to clearly distinguish between public and private tertiary education providers. We believe this would serve students in better understanding the nature of their training providers."The same Otago University Students' Association also wrote a very good paragraph on the removal of new section 159NA the equal funding for private training providers and public institutions. It states "[The] Public tertiary education providers have an important responsibility to society. They have a duty to education those of any background to protect intellectual freedom and provide quality research that will take this country forward. Private providers however are not required or held accountable to be of any service to society. They can if they please serve only their shareholders in increasing wealth. This duty to increase shareholders wealth can also leave these private education providers 'cherry picking' those courses [to] provide the greatest return on investment instead of [focusing on the] greater good for the community. Private education providers can also be motivated by increasing shareholders wealth to shift away from communities that need education providers into larger populated areas in an attempt to increase market share. For these reasons [the] OUSA strongly opposes equal funding for these private training providers." That actually puts it really eloquently—the fact that we have been talking about not creating a level playing field at all but in fairness actually creating a very unlevel playing field by having unfair competition and giving private providers a huge advantage to use the funding the way they see fit and that is taking money out of the taxpayers' pockets.So coming to the end of my spiel I also would like to thank the members of the previous select committee the Education and Science Committee for the work they did when they passed it on to us the Education and Workforce Committee. We enjoyed making some changes to it and making it a more enjoyable bill thereby now supporting it and commending it to the House. Thank you."