Martin TraceyTRACEY MARTIN (NZ First): I am sure there is many a member of this House who is grateful for that extra 5 seconds for me!Iain Lees-Galloway: She's just used it.TRACEY MARTIN: Ha ha! I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to talk about the Education (Tertiary Education and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. New Zealand First will not be supporting the bill. It should not be a surprise to anybody—I am sure it is not a surprise. There are reasons why. Look there are pros and cons inside this bill. It is I suppose like every piece of legislation that the Government puts forward—there are some real pluses inside here. I think for example the strengthening of accountability and monitoring of tertiary education organisations—I mean that is a good one; who can argue with that? What we have seen with the several instances of tertiary education providers that have had to pay back money or have had investigations into them is that we need to tighten up in these areas. But we probably need to tighten up on the front end.I think that is where New Zealand First would like to see some more effort from the Government particularly around what we receive in our offices—I suppose you would call them whistleblower complaints. It is when people inside the institutions actually call us to say This is what is going on." and "This is not right." But in two instances where those people have contacted my offices the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) has been contacted and it has made some inquiry into the organisation—usually by phone which is interesting. NZQA usually calls the private training establishment (PTE) and says: "Hey this has been complained about. Is it true?". I have got the records showing that one particular PTE said: "Well yes. But we have changed our practice now so we promise not to do it again." The NZQA went back to the complainant and said: "Look they have said they won't do it again. So look it's fine. We're just going to leave it alone." The complainant has then been threatened with legal action by the PTE for taking the complaint through the appropriate channels. So there are some issues there around not only the strengthening of accountability and monitoring but—and we hope that part of that monitoring is responding to complaints that are legitimately put through the system. Everything should be investigated.I want to add to that that we are pleased to also see this one here about complaints being received in regard to international students. That goes to what we are hoping we are going to see which is some more accountability from those labour inspectors and others who are supposed to be protecting those educational visitors to our country from the exploitation that is taking place. And we know it is taking place—we have got case after case after case. What we are hearing from the PTEs is that they are ringing up to again inform the appropriate Government body that this exploitation is taking place but nobody shows up. Nobody follows up. So if this bill goes through what we are hoping to see and what we would love to see from this Government is actually recognition that there are holes in the accountability problem and that we need to front-end them. This Government has done a good job—and you can see that I am trying to be conciliatory—on increasing the penalties once we catch individuals at the other end but we are not as a nation following up at the front end. We need to be responding to these complaints both for our international education reputation beyond these shores so that these young people are not exploited but also because there is money involved here and it is New Zealand taxpayers' money.What we cannot support is the extension basically to charter schools that is inside this piece of legislation. That is where tertiary providers can then become a charter school sponsor. There are some interesting bits and pieces about separating these people out and so on and so forth and the way that they would report downstream and what would be public and what would be private information because they would be a going concern etc. etc. We just cannot support it—the concept of charter schools does not work. Public money should not be provided to private assets of a private business. This bill takes public institutions which are our universities and gives them the capacity to create a private arm and become a sponsor of a charter school. We cannot support the widening of that concept.It is worth mentioning too that there is no conversation in here—even if those tertiary providers were able to start charter schools—of any of the network mapping around provision. That is what we are seeing and this Government is having to deal with the downstream effects such as that on say Ara Institute of Canterbury and so on where private providers have opened up businesses to directly compete with the public provision—and it is all with taxpayers' dollars. That is the worst part of this concept—70 percent of the course costs that are being paid into both the public provision and the PTE sector are from the taxpayer. So taxpayers are competing with themselves across a network over which there is no oversight. Do we need any more provision in that network? And if tertiary providers were there we would now even have public provision competing with public provision. It does not make sense to us. We would not be supporting that.There are a couple of other things here. There is the allowance for integrated schools and charter schools to bring international students under the discipline process out of school hours. Now again with Mahurangi College we have dealt with that before through the contracts that we have had with agents and with the students themselves. But obviously there has been a hole because the courts have ruled on this. Now you cannot argue with that.I do have a problem and I am asking: why are charter schools looking at international students? If we listen to the rhetoric of why charter schools were originally set up how is it that charter schools need this protection for international students when according to the Government and the whole of its logic and the whole of its rhetoric charter schools were set up for New Zealand students who were underachieving? So are we going to now ask for international students who are underachieving to come into charter schools? Is this a worldwide hunt for indigenous peoples who are underachieving? Originally charter schools were for Māori and Pasifika students who were underachieving here. So we do not understand why a charter school would need this provision for international students. We get it around integrated schools but we do not get it around charter schools.There are several other little bits and pieces that concern us but I am not going to take the whole of my call because I am really looking forward to hearing from the National members whom I hope we will work with constructively in the Education and Science Committee with a respectful interaction and an open-minded environment as we move forward towards the 2017 election."