Hutchison Paul: Education (Tertiary Reforms) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Hutchison Paul: Education (Tertiary Reforms) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:639;Page:9066] 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Port Waikato) 
: 
 Thank you for the opportunity to speak on this very important bill the Education (Tertiary Reforms) Amendment Bill. I must say that I am pleased to hear that the mismatch that Dr Cullen was talking about will be addressed by this bill given that he the Minister of Education—Steve Maharey—and the Prime Minister are former university lecturers. I myself was a lecturer in medicine at the University of London at one stage of events but I have also spent 25 years doing a practical tangible job in surgery which helps give the perspective— 
Lindsay Tisch 
: The edge. 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON 
: —or the edge that would be the appropriate end point. 
There is no doubt that our tertiary education system is fundamentally important for the optimal growth of social environmental and economic outcomes of New Zealand—as is suggested in the explanatory note of the bill. But we hear from Dr Cullen that the Government is committed to an education system that delivers quality education and relevance—in fact I think he goes on to say quality education relevance and value for money. Sadly the legacy we have seen over the last 7 years has not been that. We have seen literally hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on courses that have not been relevant and that have not shown quality—hence the need for a change. Whether this bill and the reforms that this Government is proposing will achieve it is highly questionable. 
If we look at what the Government has done over the last 7 years we can see that it has created a bureaucratic monster—the so-called Tertiary Education Commission. The commission did a job earlier through the Ministry of Education with probably 20 or 30 people. It has now expanded to a bureaucracy of something like 320 people managing these reforms—and it will grow. As Dr Cullen has pointed out in the many many publications that have been produced over the preceding few months all sorts of people will be involved in these changes. He has said we will be investing in a planned approach at the very centre of these reforms with central control. 
This is a typical Labour Party Pavlovian dog approach to reforms. It says let us get it organised from the centre and let us grow the bureaucracy. I can see Dr Cullen clasping and steepling over there but this is the fact: we have seen a massive bureaucracy arise under Labour through the Tertiary Education Commission over the last few years. We have seen massive poor-quality spending. What guarantees have we got that the end points of relevance quality and value for money might occur? 
I think it is worthwhile to look back a little to what Dr Cullen’s predecessor Maharey said about education reform in 2001. He said there were problems with the equivalent full-time students system that there was a need for responsiveness to economic and social needs and that the quality of teaching and research must be taken into account in the future. Of course they must. The Government has had 7 years to do that and it has clearly failed despite working on it over these years. I think that point had better be made right now. Maharey said in 2001 that the Government was going to form a Tertiary Education Commission that charters would be extended to all publicly funded providers and that: “Government has agreed to all of these with the sole exception of the functional classifications which I believe the Charters and Profiles Working-Party is advising against.” 
So Maharey was saying: “Yep this is what we’ll do.” and the working party has advised against charters and profiles. This was back in 2001. But within about 24 months Maharey was suddenly extolling the virtues of charters and profiles and saying they would form the centre of these great new reforms that the Government was planning at the time. Minister Maharey said at the time: “These reforms give the wider community considerable say over how a tertiary education system meets their needs. Their active involvement will be crucial to the success of the reforms … These reforms represent the culmination of the government’s promise to overhaul our tertiary education and training systems.” That was back in 2002. Again quite some time ago Maharey said that the Tertiary Education Commission will begin “clear strategic direction to the system as a whole.” When was that again? That was in 2003—4 years ago. 
We have had a fair bit of time for it and it is somewhat ironic that here we have Minister Cullen now realising that he has to fix up the chronic mess and bureaucracy created by his predecessor Steve Maharey. What did the Hon Steve Maharey say in July 2003? He said: “Charters along with profiles are the tools that will bring the tertiary education strategy alive and bring about much needed changes in the tertiary education system.” When I look at the Minister’s bill I see that the main components of this new system are as follows. He states that “a tertiary education organisation prepares a plan”. As I understand it the charters and profiles are going to wither on the vine and be subsumed by the new plan of Dr Cullen. I hope that Dr Cullen’s new plan will be a hang of a lot more successful than the profiles and charters of the previous Minister of Tertiary Education Steve Maharey’s which clearly were dismally unsuccessful. Dr Cullen goes on to say that the reforms are rewarding and encouraging tertiary education organisations to go out and create cooperative links with their stakeholders. They are now planning to do the very thing that Dr Cullen was saying this time with these new tertiary education reforms he is proposing. 
Dr Cullen has kept the Tertiary Education Commission—that big labyrinth of bureaucratic tangle that is really destined to continue to ensure that inefficiency will reign within the sector when we want every scarce tertiary education dollar spent well. It is a great worry because we have seen the Tertiary Education Commission not only decide to reorganise itself after 3 years at the cost of something like $8 million but bring in a whole army a cohort of new people to manage these reforms. We do not know what these people—the investment managers—are going to be like. Where are they coming from? How much will they be paid? How will they get on with the various tertiary education organisations? Are they going to control them? Are they going to put vetoes on them that affect the traditional autonomy that many tertiary education institutions—particularly the universities—wish to have to a certain degree? 
I accept that there must be a balance between academic autonomy and freedom and the fact that the Government is a major funder but here in Dr Cullen’s plan and the bill we see a system whereby he has unashamedly said there will be clear central control. These investment managers will go in and ultimately work out whether courses can go ahead. This is of fundamental importance to our university system. 
Dr Cullen says that he wants clearer boundaries between tertiary education providers—the universities institutes of technology and polytechnics private training establishments industry training organisations wananga etc.—and that this is not about limiting access to tertiary education. Well first of all in terms of the boundaries we agree that it is important for there to be boundaries. The Education Act indeed provides fairly clear rules about research-led institutions teacher-led institutions polytechnics etc. But over the last little while we have had some merging of these. We have had a bill from the Hon Brian Donnelly that may well make it even more complicated. I agree that this is one area where clearer definition is important. But Dr Cullen says this is not about limiting access to tertiary education. I would certainly hope that to be the case because we have seen in the last 15 years an enormous increase in access to education in New Zealand. But what we need is quality relevance and value for money and I do not believe that this Labour Government bill will achieve those.