Street Maryan: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Street Maryan: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:661;Page:9491] 
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 I differ from my colleague Trevor Mallard in one respect: I rise to speak to the financial review of the Ministry of Education both in sadness and in anger. When I look at tertiary education I see that the characterisation of this Government’s work in tertiary education has been cuts cuts and more cuts. Yes I am sad about it but also I am angry. It is an ignorant approach to education to continually and routinely under-invest and cut just at the moment when other countries around the world are increasing their investment in tertiary education because they know that the way to sustained economic recovery is through investment in tertiary education and not through cutting it. 
Worse than that level of ignorance which is almost unfathomable is the deliberate policy that this Government is demonstrating in tertiary education of narrowing access to tertiary education opportunities. The Government is not broadening the access but narrowing it. We are talking about the period of appropriation when the Hon Anne Tolley was in charge of the tertiary education portfolio. We saw from the outset a Government beginning the way it meant to go on. It cut adult and community education funding by some 80 percent taking out $13 million from a $16 million budget and leaving $3 million behind. It reduced the number of high schools around New Zealand that ran adult and community education classes from 212 to 24 with a few others added on as clusters of schools led by one lead school out of those 24. 
That was the first effort at narrowing the basis of access to post - compulsory education opportunities for New Zealanders. It is one area where New Zealanders have been able to step back into education in an accessible non-threatening low-cost environment that allows them to revisit what may have been a previously unsuccessful educational career and to begin to build the foundations that they need in order to excel. 
Last year I went to about 17 or 18 public meetings. Sometimes there were 60 people at those public meetings protesting against the cuts to adult and community education; sometimes there were 500 people. Time and again I saw at each of those meetings the level of anger and the level of loss that people felt for not only those things that the Minister does not count as necessary such as social cohesion and strong communities but also a loss of opportunity to learn which those cuts represented. It was felt very acutely by people right across every community even communities that one would imagine that the National Government would be keen to protect such as rural communities where post - compulsory education opportunities are few and far between. The National Government took no notice because the hallmark of the previous Minister’s tenure in the tertiary education portfolio was obstinacy ignorance and just plain stubbornness. 
That was the first of the cuts but let us see what else happened under that Minister’s tenure. I have to say that the new Minister for Tertiary Education Steven Joyce is not proving to be any better in that his approach to tertiary education is evidencing even more cuts. We will come to that shortly. In the year under consideration the Government cut $98 million from tertiary scholarships with the bonded merit scholarship scheme the Step Up Scholarships and the Top Achiever Doctoral Scholarship ceasing from June 2009. So the efforts that the previous Labour Government put in place during its 9 years in office to allow people to access advanced tertiary education have been cut by this Government; $98 million was taken out. 
Let us look at the CPI adjustments from 2009. For industry training Modern Apprenticeships and adult and community education elsewhere the CPI adjustments were cut. That is another $172 million shortfall in funding to those programmes over the next 4 years. Cuts cuts and more cuts.