Kaye NikkiHon NIKKI KAYE (National—Auckland Central): I'm very pleased to speak on this piece of legislation. At the outset can I just acknowledge the Education and Workforce Committee; the chair of the committee Sarah Dowie; our spokesperson on tertiary education matters the Hon Paul Goldsmith; and all of the members that have worked very hard on this bill. This is an education bill that has come before this House that this side is supporting. I know there'll be people listening who often think the role of the Opposition is to only criticise. Well actually there's a lot of work that happens in this House whereby members do work together. We work together to improve legislation to ensure that more young people get very good quality opportunities and that's what this bill is about. There are four or five key aspects to this bill that National will be supporting. At the heart of it is ensuring that we have better quality in terms of our tertiary education and also our international education sector but also that we ensure that our reputation on the world stage and also internally is very sound and solid. The export industry in terms of education is worth I understand about $4.28 billion to this country so it's a very important industry and it is at threat. We have to acknowledge in this House that the previous Opposition—some of their immigration policies and election commitments that they made are a major threat to that industry. So what this bill does is it also acknowledges the fact that we spend over $4 billion per year and about $1 billion of that is spent on very generous student support but that there do need to be changes. The first area of change is about greater flexibility in terms of funding. There was pretty unanimous agreement in this area in terms of the committee but the next area is about improving the accountability of some of these providers. There's a massive number of providers in this space. We know that this builds on the work of the last National Government to ensure that where we may have fraud or where we may have people getting false credits we build on the work and the provisions within this bill in this area.There was a bit of a disagreement in terms of having a level playing field around equal treatment of providers. We are very surprised that Labour's ideological opposition in committee has removed the clause in the bill that would have enabled public and private providers of tertiary education to be treated equally. We also do want to acknowledge that while we are supporting this bill it's very important to understand the wider education picture. We have seen extreme ideology rear its head from the other side with the scrapping of partnership schools with the scrapping of national standards with the changes around cohort entry and with a fees-free policy that is worth $2.8 billion that isn't targeted. But this is a bill whereby we can work together whether it's on the issues of compliance or whether it's on greater flexibility of funding.The final area that I want to talk about is very dear to my heart as a spokesperson that gets in and out of schools but also as the member of Parliament for Auckland Central. Some of the most heartbreaking constituency cases that I've had have been of people who have come to New Zealand—they may have been international students they may have been international students that might be 20 years old but they also may be younger in school—and they've had some bad incident. Now sometimes we know that the incident is not necessarily about them; it's things that have happened to them. But sometimes it is an issue of conduct. This is where I think the committee did great work. I want to acknowledge the members opposite. We delved very deeply into these issues of ensuring that our code of conduct that was recently brought into train really is meaningful. What it does and what this bill does—and it's very important—is it contains a proposal to amend the law to enable State and State-integrated schools to manage international student misconduct outside of school including through the use of stand down suspension exclusion and expulsion. This comes on the back of a court ruling. So I want to finish by saying look this is a bill that is supported by this side of the House. It is in the context of much wider education reforms that our Opposition does not support because they are ideological they haven't targeted funding properly and they've not helped vulnerable children when it comes to partnership schools. But we do support this bill because we think ultimately it's going to lift the quality of tertiary education that is provided it's going to lead to less compliance we think it's going to enable greater flexibility in terms of funding and it's going to help some of our most vulnerable students particularly where there may be a misconduct issue where it may involve international students. So I have no hesitation in supporting this bill to the House.