Turei Metiria: Education (Polytechnics) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Turei Metiria: Education (Polytechnics) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:656;Page:5949] 
METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 Tertiary education is part of the wide-ranging educational opportunities that help all New Zealanders fulfil their potential and deepen their understanding of the world we inhabit. The Green Party wants an education sector that builds a foundation of wisdom in this country and helps us to develop as a sustainable nation. 
The Green Party wants a tertiary education sector that is well resourced vibrant innovative and responsive to the needs of students and our society. We want a tertiary education sector that is preparing and prepared for the challenges of the 21st century. To this end we must have a sector that is well resourced to meet the diverse needs of a diverse community. We need to have community sector commitment to these institutions where the institution and its community work together to fulfil both local and national needs. 
In this respect polytechs have a great advantage because polytechs incorporate a broader range of educational levels. They can readily move people along the educational pathway especially those who were missed out in the schooling system. Those people can be moved along to great educational success. Because of the stepped programme option polytechs are so much more accessible to many in our community and because polytechs deal with both research and the practical application of that research they are flexible and able to meet the quickly changing circumstances of the community of our ecology and of our economy. 
The Green Party is always very pleased to see legislation that will assist polytechs to achieve even more. What a shame that instead we have been dealt this garbage from the Minister for Tertiary Education! This legislation is a gross waste of our time here in Parliament tonight. It shows a complete misunderstanding of—and really a contempt for—those institutions which have proved to be so valuable and worthwhile to our communities across the sector. We have a piece of garbage to debate tonight presented to the House by Anne Tolley. 
The asserted aims of this bill are to improve the governance capability of polytech councils and allow the Crown to intervene more effectively in their performance. Well it certainly does that. It certainly provides for the highest possible level of intervention by the State in these institutions which provide such a great service to our community. 
The bill achieves this intervention by slashing the number of community representatives on the councils. I have heard the comments of my colleagues in the Labour Party and I agree wholeheartedly with their concerns. The bill is slashing the number of community representatives allowed on the councils. It gives the chief executive of the Tertiary Education Commission the power to intervene. It gives the Minister extraordinary powers to intervene in the management and governance of polytechs. It allows the Minister to have a say over who is on the council and even to say who the chair and deputy chair of the council should be. That is an unprecedented level of intervention in polytechnics. 
The bill also allows for an amalgamated council to manage multiple institutions which is something we are seeing in the compulsory schooling sector as well. The bill will sever the incredibly important governance links between polytech institutions and the communities they belong to and serve. The Government claims that poor governance poses a risk to the Crown but there is no evidence whatsoever that that is a serious risk. Even if there were a case to answer the bill is very clearly heavy-handed State interference to fix what is likely to be a non-existent problem. 
We have spent many years listening to National members blather on about nanny State interference. The bill is an absolute classic example of excessive State interference in educational institutions that by and large are doing an excellent job serving the communities they are designed to serve. The polytechnic councils are committed to community engagement but the Government has decided that that is not good enough. The Government does not want community engagement; it wants absolute control over these institutions. The legislation is an attempt to create that situation. 
The result of this bill will be that polytechs will be under the strict control of ministerially appointed business people and Anne Tolley who presented this garbage to the House will be the person who appoints those business people. Community and academic interests on the councils will be sidelined by the design of the bill and communities will no longer have the high-quality relationships with council boards that they currently have. That will mean that polytechs will not be able to be as responsive to the needs of their communities as they have been. It means that polytechs will not have the freedom to innovate as they currently do. 
In short the bill imposes Government and corporate control over the polytechs just as National is doing as I said earlier to schools with education legislation that is currently before the Education and Science Committee. There is provision in that legislation for corporate management of school boards and the ability for one corporate-managed school board to be able to manage a variety of different schools. We talked about that issue some time at the end of last year and about whether it is one of the steps towards the privatisation of the public school system. The bill is just another obvious example of the corporatisation by the National Government of polytechnics. 
The Green Party values the concept of an institution that elevates trades and vocational education and bridges the gap between the practical needs of a trade and the opportunity for research and advanced skills. Technological changes and the developing needs of our society are driving that change so we must have a tertiary sector that is able to readily meet those opportunities. That is especially important when we consider the nature of the global environment and the changes in it particularly the increasing recognition of peak oil and the need for energy alternatives the impact of climate change on all aspects of our society and the need to be prepared for the changes that are inevitably coming our way. The Government is driving for a tertiary polytechnic sector built on the principles of State control and a 19th century level of investment. The Green Party opposes this garbage.