King Colin: Education (Tertiary Reforms) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
King Colin: Education (Tertiary Reforms) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:643;Page:13170] 
COLIN KING (National—Kaikoura) 
: 
 The bill we have in front of us was certainly a challenge to the Education and Science Committee and we must acknowledge during this Committee stage the wisdom and advice we had from submitters. When we stop to think about tertiary education we realise that it covers an enormous range of provision right through from our Gateway programmes to university courses at the other end of course like PhDs and suchlike. 
But in the middle we have such things as the Tertiary Advisory Monitoring Unit and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and it is on that basis that when we look at this Education (Tertiary Reforms) Amendment Bill we start to understand that a bill of this particular nature will not change an awful lot. In actual fact when we put it up and measure it against the performance of what we have had to endure in tertiary education over the last 8 years we start to realise that it will take a lot of work to get the tertiary education programme back on track. 
Part 1 of the bill deals with a whole range of situations. As the previous speaker Ashraf Choudhary alluded to it is meant to change the efficiency and productivity of tertiary education and increase the return to the Government and taxpayers of the money invested in it which is some $3 billion. However to put it bluntly the Labour Government has completely butchered this sector time and time again. In actual fact when we come to look at the productivity gains inside New Zealand against those of OECD countries we find that our productivity gains have been very very poor. 
The purpose of this bill to unravel the complexities but unfortunately the opposite is the case. When we look at what the  
Education Review 
—which is quite a laudable publication that keeps us all up to date—says about the growth of tertiary education we see as my colleague Paul Hutchison has told us here in the debating chamber that the Tertiary Education Commission has grown to comprise some 340 members. The  
Education Review 
 gives reasons for this being the case and states: “The Tertiary Education Commission Communications Manager Andrew Bristol said that the number of the staff paid more than $100000”—which incidentally has increased from some 20 to over 50—“increased because the commission had a far different role to play compared to when it was first set up. The new method of investing in tertiary education requires the appointment of more senior people with specific skill levels.” Unfortunately we have seen a proliferation in the number of those members. That has had another effect on the other side when we look at the structure of it all because the institutions themselves have become bogged down in it. 
Inside all of this we have the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. That is dealt with in Part 1. The authority is to set up a quality assurance programme yet we find it working at a snail’s pace. In actual fact I was disappointed to learn today that after the debacle and fiasco around the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board and the industry training organisation stand-off in the Hazel Armstrong inquiry the new qualifications have not been approved. It is hoped they will be approved in January 2008. That is an indication of what we are working with here and I do not think that a bill of this nature which came to us with very draconian wording in it will address this issue whatsoever. 
One of the major issues we really are confronted with in legislation of this nature as laid out in Part 1 is that it will stifle quality. What we saw down in Christchurch with the Southern Institute of Technology—a very very successful model of what a polytech should be doing and accomplishing—was that that institute lost $8 million worth of equivalent full-time student funding because of being more competitive more efficient and in fact having more people coming to it for quality education than the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology. What we are actually seeing unfortunately is that this bill is stifling initiative. It is stifling quality of education and that is not good for the tertiary education sector.