Simmonds Penny; Rurawhe AdrianPENNY SIMMONDS (National—Invercargill): Thank you Mr Speaker. Well I'd like to say that last week I had the pleasure of being in the Education and Workforce Committee to review Te Pūkenga but it certainly brought no pleasure at all.Taking it back to 2018 the Minister of Education Mr Chris Hipkins started a review of the vocational education sector. Over a period of two years a façade of consultation took place which cost the taxpayers millions of dollars for him to make a decision that was exactly the same as what he had promoted two years prior.There are a number of things that the Minister said would happen when he merged the polytechnic sector and there were a number of things that I said would happen. So let's reveal who was right about what was going to come. So the Minister Minister Hipkins said that creating a head office for the vocational education sector would mean a very modest-sized head office. It would be small" "slim" "nimble" were the words that the Minister used. I predicted it would be bloated; a bureaucracy that was slow costly and cumbersome.So in the review I had the opportunity to question what size the head office was. Well sadly the chief executive who's paid over $600000 a year couldn't answer that question. He had to defer to one of his staff who was able to tell us that 139 fulltime-equivalent staff were now in the head office of Te Pūkenga at a cost of $11 million per year. Now I guess "modest" "small" "slim" is all relative and to a Minister that thinks nothing of seeing $12 billion of COVID money spent on things like wallaby constraining and cameras on fishing boats probably does see a head office of 139 people at a cost of $11 million as small and modest.He also said that it would be nimble. He didn't want it to be "administratively heavy" and "another layer of management". Well let's see how that worked out when the $25 million announcement for mental health in tertiary education came to be distributed out. The announcement in the middle of last year meant that in April this year Te Pūkenga signed up to an agreement to take some of that $25 million and distribute it out to their subsidiaries and to the students. So how's that going? Well now 18 months after it was announced two subsidiary companies have received some funding for mental health for students affected by COVID. Doesn't sound nimble to me.The Minister said he wanted the new head office to address viability issues in some of the subsidiaries. So I asked the chief executive how that was going. Sadly he couldn't tell me which subsidiaries had actually made a surplus or a deficit. When I asked him how he was going to manage the $11 million salary cost of his head office when the money ran out for setting up the institute—and to be clear the Minister has said the funding is to support the establishment $120 million to support the establishment. But the chief executive said "Oh he didn't think there'd be a problem there'd just be more money put into it." So what viability issues has he fixed up? None. None at all.We predicted that the successful Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics of New Zealand would subsidise those that weren't successful. So an internal treasury function has been set up where the reserves from one polytechnic get lent to another. So I asked where was the security for the lending institute? There is none; we're all one entity. So where is the incentive for that money to be paid back?What is the relevance of this? The relevance is we're facing three waters the asset grab and centralisation of our council-owned assets. We are facing mergers of DHBs and we should learn that actions speak much louder than words. It won't save money. It won't be nimble. It won't have any democratic community input. And it certainly—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member's time has expired."