Delahunty Catherine: Education (Polytechnics) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Delahunty Catherine: Education (Polytechnics) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:659;Page:8606] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tena koutou katoa. I will start by recognising the officials who worked on the Education (Polytechnics) Amendment Bill the chair of the Education and Science Committee and all the members of the select committee. I think it was a fair process even if there was not a constructive outcome. As a part-time member of the select committee it took me a while to grasp what this bill was all about. I thought it was about improving education but eventually I grasped that it was about extending control and facilitating business governance. Thus I came to agree with some of the other speakers in the Committee stage yesterday who said that the bill had been misnamed. The bill could be more accurately described as the “Gut the Polytech Councils Bill” or the “Desirable in Principle Retro-racism Bill” or perhaps the “Yes Minister You Choose Bill”. What does the bill have to do with improving tertiary education? We do not know. The Government was certainly not able to explain it at the select committee. 
I do agree with Maryan Street’s comments on the speech the Minister has just made to explain it but it has not really helped. It seems like one of those weird niche ideas that someone has dreamt up in response to a challenging educational environment. Maybe if we severely cut the numbers of people on councils everything will magically be more efficient. Sometimes I think if I hear the word “efficiency” in education again I will have a tiny breakdown. What is so efficient about reducing tangata whenua community union and employer representation on a polytech council? What test of efficiency are we using? What is so efficient about reducing councils to eight seats and then ensuring the Minister selects half of them? Who will be efficiently marginalised? 
This bill is built on a number of bad marginalising concepts. Bad idea No. 1 is to get rid of any Maori representation as of right. The Maori Party put up perfectly good amendments on this issue and Maryan Street also attempted to get the bill back on some kind of fairness track. The Maori Party described positive working models whereby mana whenua and polytechs are now working together on councils to ensure that the interests of the many Maori students are well looked after. The Minister just implied in her speech that the problem with this kind of representation is that it represents a particular interest group not the interest of the polytech as a whole. This ignores the fact that some parts of the community get systematically forgotten unless their interests are actually at the table. It ignores the fact that although we can work for the good of the whole from our different places we cannot speak for each other. I cannot speak for Maori student needs even though I have spent many years teaching Maori students in polytechnics. That is why we need Maori and students at the table to make sure that the invisible is made visible. 
It is a bit like Parliament: who would want only one culture one gender one class or one age group making all the decisions in this place? Who is made invisible in that process? Then there is the small matter of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the articles that relate to governance of tauiwi and rangatiratanga of tangata whenua. Without giving members a 3-hour lecture on the articles of the Treaty I would like to point out that the relationship— 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: We would like the 3 hours. 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY 
: I know that members opposite would love it; I could do it brilliantly. I would like to point out that the relationship was established in 1840 and the opportunities to make that relationship vibrant and effective exist through arrangements between mana whenua and Pakeha institutions now. To deliberately reduce Maori representation at the same time as endorsing a Maori flag is a deep contradiction that the Government needs to explain. This issue is important not just for Waiariki Institute of Technology or Tairawhiti Polytechnic but for the southern campuses and city campuses as well. Honouring Te Tiriti is not just about the number of Maori students on campus. It is about the right of mana whenua to assert the issues associated with the whenua whanau hapu and iwi where the polytechnic is situated and from a mana whenua perspective. Why would we step back from that relationship and write a bill that reduces rights of representation to the phrase “desirable in principle”? 
Student representation is very important on polytech boards. It is very hard to get student representation as polytechnics are traditionally less organised and unionised especially in the smaller regions. A student representative plays a vital role in grounding the council decisions in the reality of the experiences of the student body. A teacher or an administrator or a ministerial appointment cannot see the world through the eyes of the student who is living with the debts the workload the campus infrastructure and the social challenges of that particular environment. To meet the student needs a council needs to hear a student voice not as a lobby group at a meeting but as an equal with a place at the table as of right. The staff or union representative is also important because the teaching staff live with the consequences of all council decisions and have a unique perspective. 
There are many community people who should be at the table presenting their views and knowledge not just one person alone amongst a group of insiders. How well the group of at least 10 people serve their polytech really depends on a good process on trust and on good leadership within the group. So why would the Minister be the one appointing the chair and the deputy chair? The Government tells us that a council can appoint any configuration of eight people. We can choose which representatives one’s particularly community requires. But the Government is saying that with four ministerial appointments we can choose only four from either the former statutory appointees or from our community. We cannot have both as of right. 
As I said in the Committee the issues facing polytechnics are very challenging. They include financial survival in a difficult economic environment and walking the line between being a community education provider and user-pays pressures which successive Governments have ratcheted ever upwards. Polytechnics are required to be in touch with the needs of local employers—now without necessarily being able to include those employers on their councils. They are supposed to provide for cultural and educational diversity often in communities where people have very little money and no extra resources. 
I am speaking from experience having worked in the Bay of Plenty at Tairawhiti at Waiariki and in Wairoa in various outposts of polytechnics. I know firsthand the struggle to resource and meet the needs of students in these environments. It is not about reducing the governance input. In order to keep up the growth in financial expansion that polytechs are expected to do they have to keep inventing courses and getting students signed up. In some cases the courses are severely undersubscribed and on the brink of being unsustainable. The solution is not necessarily to cut the governance or cut the courses but to actually invest in education. The pool of suitably qualified tutors can be very small and small-town pressures to graduate students can be very real. We need to be resourcing these institutions. On top of this those polytech councils will now be 50 percent externally appointed by people who are not necessarily connected to those communities in any way. 
Therefore we say that this bill is not helpful. If polytechnics are to flourish the issues they have brought to the select committee need to be respected. Although I was only one of the Green members who sat on that committee I heard a lot of the submitters and I read all of the submissions. It is simply not true to say that there was enthusiasm for this bill or respect for the proposal around governance. Instead we have this very very strange law which nobody seems excited about or proud of or wants to speak very long upon yet it will pass. No one will be better off and the real challenges in tertiary education have not been addressed. The Green Party is very aware of those challenges. We think that we should be addressing those challenges through legislation and through the select committee consideration. But those challenges have not even been discussed because they are not on the table through this legislation. I have to say that this is a bad end to a sad year for education. We will not be supporting this bill. Kia ora.