Clendon David: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 April 2014. Volume:697;Page:16951. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green):I am pleased to make a few comments on what could have been a very good bill and a bill that the Green Party actually supported at its first reading to the Education and Science Committee because we saw some good things in it. Unfortunately there are two deal-breakers in the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill for us and I think we share the concerns of the Labour Party.I was interested to hear just now from the Minister in the chair the Minister of Conservation. He seems to be conflating opposition to this bill with opposition to the private provision of education science and much else. That is clearly nonsense. I mean yes most certainly we support the public tertiary sector. We also see a very legitimate place for private training establishments and the Cawthron Institute an organisation with a splendid history and hopefully an equally splendid future. What we push back against is the unnecessary privatisation of services that are better located within the public sector meaning you get an unreasonable level an unfair level of competition. We are seeing this with the push to contract out the provision of education such as we have seen at Unitec and we are now seeing in action at Lincoln University.To return more specifically to this piece of legislation as I said we would have been happy to support it but for these two issues that have been identified one of them being the removal of the skills leadership function. It is interesting to note that the 30-odd submissions to this legislation were for the most part supportive but were almost universally opposed to the notion that skills leadership should be left to who knows whom. There seems to be a pious hope embedded in this legislation that somebody somewhere will pick up the ball and indeed in some industries that may be the case.The Building and Construction Industry Training Organisation was very strong on the issue. It made the very valid point that within its industry within building and construction something like 90 percent of apprentices are trained by companies with fewer than 20 employees and in many cases fewer than 10. It is simply disingenuous to think that companies and businesses of that size of that scale are somehow going to collaborate to provide skills leadership in any sort of meaningful way. It is actually going to make the task of the Government and all of those various groups that collectively want to direct and ensure that we have a good sense of what skills are required in the future—what are the best training programmes and mechanisms to put in place—much more difficult if they are not to have that reliable feedback.Initially as I said when we first saw the bill we thought: “Oh that’s interesting. They want to take skills leadership away from the industry training organisations.” We thought that it would be interesting to see which agency which mechanism and by what means the Government was seeking to improve leadership. Sadly disappointed we were when we discovered that in fact no—it was just being left to somebody out there. As I said there is this pious hope that somebody some organisation will both be willing and critically be able to provide leadership within whichever industry it may be at the moment.The other issue of course is the matter of public funding being directed to single companies to single organisations. The point has been made that even Business New Zealand which is typically quite pro-business and quite pro the private sector gave very very qualified support—qualified to the extent that it asked the very sensible question: “Well if not the industry training organisations then who?”. That question has clearly not been answered in this legislation; nor has it been answered I would hazard to suggest by the Minister in the chair’s last contribution.There is Supplementary Order Paper 426 in my name which would seek to remedy the two issues that the Greens have with this legislation and that I believe our Labour colleagues share. It would seek to reinsert the provisions that assign skills leadership responsibility to the industry training organisations where it ought to rest and it would delete the section that allows public funding to go to private entities. Even with the best will in the world a private organisation—a company producing whatever goods or service—would inevitably tailor the training and the education it provided to the needs of its specific activity. It is the nature of business—it is human nature indeed—to be a little bit self-interested and it is difficult to imagine a situation where a private provider of that sort could actually be relied upon to deliver the breadth and depth of skills awareness information ability and so on that is really required of people coming into the trades.