Peachey Allan: Education (Tertiary Reforms) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Peachey Allan: Education (Tertiary Reforms) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:639;Page:9083] 
ALLAN PEACHEY (National—Tamaki) 
: 
 Before I address the particulars of the Education (Tertiary Reforms) Amendment Bill I will pick up on an admission made by the Minister for Tertiary Education Dr Michael Cullen who also happens to be the Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister in his opening remarks with regard to the bill. He told this House that he was a former university lecturer. He also told the House that the Prime Minister was a former university lecturer and what is more that the Minister of Education himself was a former university lecturer. 
Two things occurred to me. One is that that is a pretty thin base of life experience around which to build a Government. The second thing is that it sort of confirmed for me what the good working people of the Panmure and Glen Innes communities of my own electorate of Tamaki tell me when I catch up with them at the weekend. They tell me that the problem is that those Labour jokers in Wellington have lost touch with the working man and that they do not know what it is like to get a bit of dirt under their fingernails. Maybe that is the problem. The Education (Tertiary Reforms) Amendment Bill is wrongly named. It might perhaps more aptly have been called the “Education (Create More Bureaucracy) Bill” or even more accurately perhaps the “Michael Cullen Has No Idea (Once Again) How To Clean Up The Mess Bill”. That is what the Government is trying to do with this legislation—to clean up a mess that its own former university lecturers have created in the tertiary sector. 
The National Party on whose behalf I am speaking is opposed to the bill just as it is opposed to any extension of bureaucracy in any form whatsoever. We are certainly opposed to the further bureaucratisation of our universities and of our tertiary sector in general. We know from history the impact that meddling by left-wing Governments has: it is one of mediocrity. That will be the downstream effect of this Government’s continuing interference in our tertiary education system—further Government-encouraged mediocrity. 
The Minister in his first reading speech made a number of big claims about what this bill will do. Those claims have been supported by subsequent Government speakers. But a couple of questions have not been addressed. For example how does creating more bureaucracy as this bill does improve academic standards? How does creating more bureaucracy as this bill does protect and ensure the academic freedom of our universities? For 8 years now we have had a Government whose policy in the tertiary education field has been marked by confusion by unwise expenditure of taxpayers’ money and worst of all by waste. That of course is the problem with left-wing Governments: they waste other people’s money. They spend and tax like there is no tomorrow and they squander the money of their fellow New Zealanders. 
Members should be in no doubt: the big expanded bureaucracy that this bill will create and perpetuate will be expensive it will be cumbersome and it will be lethargic. The bureaucracy that has been created will be too cumbersome to be responsive to New Zealand’s changing economic environment and it will be too lethargic to respond to the changing economic environment in which we find ourselves. 
 I wonder what happened to those simple times when New Zealand tertiary education policy could be run perfectly competently by half a dozen people sitting around the table and making simple common-sense decisions. Let me tell the House what has happened. This bill is the work of a Minister appointed after the last general election to clean up the mess left behind by the previous Minister. That of course has become the shape of this Government. The Prime Minister reshuffled the deckchairs and it has fallen to Dr Cullen to clean up the mess left behind by his fellow former university lecturer Mr Maharey. Talk about a hospital pass! But at least there is some justice in this world. Dr Cullen cleans up after Mr Maharey and Mr Maharey finds himself cleaning up in education after the mess left behind by Mr Mallard. It is all a bit of a circus really. Just as Dr Cullen has demonstrated that he has lost control over finance policy and that he has little understanding of the real nature of the New Zealand economy so he is now demonstrating that he does not know what to do in tertiary education. He actually does not know how to fix up the mess inherited from his predecessor. 
So what does he do? Given that he has no idea how to clean up the mess he falls back on that good old left-wing stand-by: create and expand the bureaucracy. That is how it is for the Government. Look at its history over 8 years—appoint a Minister create a mess and then appoint another Minister to clean up the mess. That means an even bigger mess that has to be cleaned up. There is more bureaucracy there are more bureaucrats and most worrying of all in terms of tertiary education there is more threat to academic freedom and standards and no addressing of the real issues that surround tertiary education in New Zealand today. 
How will the huge bureaucratic machine that is being created by this bill produce more of the type of graduates that New Zealand needs? The last Government speaker touched on that. How will this bill help to produce more of the world-class scientists that this country needs if its economy is to grow? How will this enhanced bureaucracy create more of the engineers that we need? Just as important how will this bill stop youngsters being lured into tertiary courses that sound exciting to them at the moment but for whom there are insufficient sustainable career opportunities on graduation. This is an expensive waste of an opportunity for those youngsters. It is an expensive waste of an opportunity for our economy and if there is one thing that we know it is that increasing and expanding bureaucracy and the lethargy that that creates in no way will address those fundamental imbalances. 
That is something that this Government just does not understand. How will the proposed massive expansion of bureaucracy that this bill proposes produce world-class universities for New Zealand students? How will the massive expansion of bureaucracy that the bill proposes produce the higher-quality research-based teaching that our students need if they are to be the best in the world and if they are to create the sort of economy that New Zealand will need in order to retain the best and the brightest in the world in this country? 
So let us be very very clear. This is a process of untidy Government. The Education and Science Committee will face a major challenge in working its way through what is really quite a complex complicated approach to a relatively simple straightforward challenge. I am looking forward to working on that committee and to receiving submissions and I live in hope that the quality of submissions that the committee receives and the rigour of thought that members of that committee will bring to that process will produce a bill back here that will be far more significant and straightforward than what is being proposed at the moment. As this bill stands it will not work and the National Party opposes it.