Luxton Jo; Rurawhe AdrianJO LUXTON (Labour): I'm really rapt to be able to stand and take a call on this the Education (Tertiary Education and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. This is the first bill that I've had the opportunity to be a part of in select committee and have it come through to the House. The Education and Workforce Committee worked really well together. It was really collegial working with the members of the Opposition on this bill. It's something I really enjoyed and there were only a few minor things in my view that we didn't quite agree on completely.So the purpose of this bill as we've established today is to strengthen the accountability in the tertiary education sector. It's to provide for consistent treatment of tertiary education organisations and to broaden student protection arrangements. Now I wasn't part of the process when the committee received submissions but there were over 2000 submissions and the vast majority of them opposed new section 159NA. I'd just like to if I may read one that particularly stood out for me—well actually there's two here but one was made by Laura Molles. It reads: Public tertiary institutions provide the breadth and depth of educational opportunities that allow thousands of individual students to pursue their interests and they are necessary to ensure that New Zealand continues to benefit from a diverse innovative workforce. Some areas of study and research may not be highly profitable in a monetary sense but provide social scientific or artistic payoffs that enrich our lives and drive progress. Public institutions already chronically underfunded should not be required to compete on equal terms with private profit-driven companies for government funding. If a tertiary provider aims to benefit private owners rather than the public good then it should be required to do so under its own power."So we are very very proud of our public institutions here in New Zealand and our universities are ranked among the top 500 around the world. Our polytechnics meet the needs of our communities by providing education often in our smaller regions. So with the removal of new section 159NA(1) which stated that "Every funding mechanism must be consistent with the principle that an activity or approved programme or training scheme is to be funded at the same rate as … directly comparable activity or directly comparable approved programme or training scheme regardless of the identities of the tertiary education providers concerned." Now we removed that in the select committee and that's because we are very proud of our public institutions and believe that they should be funded so.The other thing I wanted to mention was repealing the definition of "private training establishment". We again removed this from the bill because we feel that it was just purely wanting to be able to trade on the standing of our public tertiary institutions. It's important that we maintain the distinction between our public institutions and those of the private training providers that are run for profit. Also in the past there's been questionable behaviour from providers and this amended bill addresses ongoing concerns in this area.Taxpayers' money is used to fund these providers and as such they must be able to be held accountable for questionable behaviour—and by questionable behaviour I mean falsifying student records. So what this bill does is it makes amendments to strengthen the offence provision and increase the penalty for falsifying student records from $10000 to up to $50000. This is going to encourage providers to act honestly and ensure that they maintain student records accurately.In closing I want to thank all those that took the time to submit on this bill. It's great when people participate in our democratic processes. And again I really want to thank all previous and current committee members for their work on this bill. I commend this bill to the House.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Five-minute call—I call Lawrence Yule."