Hughes GarethGARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou kia ora. I just want to say after nine long years of voting against all the terrible National legislation in tertiary education from reducing access to education to increasing the amount of money people were spending on their student loans and when National removed people aged over 55 from accessing the student allowance. In fact I used to carry around a giant list of all the negative changes where National had made studying less affordable less accessible and in some cases down right impossible for thousands of students. So boy it's great to be in this Chamber tonight voting for positive tertiary education that's going to make it more affordable more accessible and see more people educated—it's a wonderful thing.Now I heard the last member say this was an ideological piece of legislation; this is simply unwinding National's ideological legislation. This original bill as introduced by National was to protect private interests and private profit in the tertiary education space. Previous Governments of both hues have made sure there was a differential in the funding between public and private for-profit providers. What National wanted to do in their ideological bill was to lock future Governments into giving what they called equality which in fact was paying extra for private profit in the tertiary education space.I'm proud to be voting for good tertiary education. I'm proud of all those hundreds of thousands of Kiwis who voted to change the Government because they wanted to see more progressive policy. They wanted to see smarter evidence-based policy; they didn't want to see the taxpayer ripped off which is what would have happened under National's existing legislation—it would have locked future Governments in.I just want to acknowledge the fantastic work of the Tertiary Education Union (TEU) and the thousands of academics who turned up to the select committee who protested who wrote letters signed things online did all they could to protect their public education system. Now this is one of the great taonga of our history: that we do have a wonderful tertiary education system and we inherit the system built by previous generations. The way National had introduced the bill would have eroded that for private profit—that was the ideological position taken not this side.So look we're really proud to be voting for this legislation because it fundamentally changes the Education (Tertiary Education and Other Matters) Amendment Bill as originally introduced under the Hon Paul Goldsmith.Now when we're talking about the ideological nature of legislation let's also not forget how they were trying to change the framing and language. What we know is that that is an incredible part of the political discourse—how you name and the words you use in the discourse. So what they tried to do was change private tertiary establishments to independent tertiary establishments trying to actually remove the fact that these were private companies for profit. Now look I don't want to come across that I'm giving them a bad rap. Private providers do some tremendous work in our communities but it's not the same as a public education system and this is why I was standing with the TEU. Our public education system must be protected because what we would have quite simply seen is an erosion of public standards. You would've seen cherry-picking of the most high-value low-cost courses. In fact what you had seen over the last nine years was that polytechs were underfunded. They had to outsource some of the courses to private providers. The private providers then for limited rental actually went back to those training institutes—the polytechs—and used their facilities and made a profit on top of it. So changing the language was all about changing their ideological nature to present them as independent as not-for-profit.I'll give the Government credit because while language matters they have managed to refine some of the terminology in the sector. So now we're introducing a new sub-type of private training establishment which is a community tertiary education provider. Look we shouldn't be seeing games with language for political point-scoring; we should make sure that language in fact reflects what truly is occurring. Calling something a community tertiary education provider when it's a non-profit private provider is an entirely reasonable and accurate description. This is simply what the legislation does—introduces accurate terms.I won't talk for long but after nine long years of an erosion of our tertiary education sector of these ideological policies which have made it harder to study harder for our academics significantly underfunded it's great to be able to reverse some of those changes. This is an entirely reasonable step to make sure that that existing and previous funding differential which previous Governments had enumerated was simply because the taxpayer shouldn't be subsidising the capital asset base of private providers. There is a role for the State to be providing a subsidy for education if a private provider is using it but something National members never in the House never in the select committee could answer was why the taxpayer should be providing that capital asset base for public providers building future greater profits from. That's not the role of the taxpayer to subsidise private providers' long-term profits; it was to subsidise the actual courses being provided because it was in the public interest. This is why I'm so proud to be part of the Government with the tertiary education Minister the Hon Chris Hipkins. It's putting the public back into public education. It's a good day for New Zealand. Kia ora koutou Mr Assistant Speaker.