Lubeck MarjaMARJA LUBECK (Labour): Thank you. Tēnā koe Madam Assistant Speaker. It's a great pleasure to take a call on the Education (Tertiary Education and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. I'm sorry to the previous speaker Tim Macindoe: I'm going to cause a little bit more pain because I too at the risk of overkill will pay my respects to Sarah Dowie. It was my very first time on the select committee and I think she did an absolutely fantastic job in sometimes challenging circumstances to be a fair and neutral chair. So I thank her for that. I hope her successor is going to be just as good.So this is the first time I'm speaking to a bill going through all the stages in the House. This bill has been before the Education and Workforce Committee but of course it started its life with the Education and Science Committee that the previous speaker referred to. I believe they received and considered over 2000 submissions from organisations and individuals and heard oral evidence from 49 here in Wellington. Now it is important that we do mention those submissions because the 2054 submissions on this bill had a vast majority that did not support the equity of funding treatment that the member for Taupō earlier mentioned and other members subsequently picked up on. So really why the other side of the House keeps going on about this particular issue is a mystery to me. The vast majority of submitters thought it was not a good idea. It was widely felt that spending public money on what is essentially a private business was incorrect and would give those private businesses an unfair competitive advantage. Also I think during the committee of the whole House Minister Hipkins made another excellent point in that regard: namely that if the Government were not able to put extra funding into our public institutions without also having to put it into private ones there would be a whole network of regional public institutions at serious risk of falling over because the previous Government put them into serious financial difficulty and this Government will have to fix that.So what this bill does is it does strengthen the tertiary education system in several ways and it does that in two parts to the bill. We have already spoken at length about the clauses where international students are now better managed because schools will be able to control misconduct outside of school hours and that will be welcomed we know by many of the schools as a way for them to uphold their obligations and ensure the welfare and well-being of those international students. That was pretty much Part 1.In Part 2 there are quite a number of significant changes. We have mentioned the loophole with regard to falsely awarding credits on students' records of achievement and as a result of the changes that this bill now makes providers can be held to account for not only issuing false qualifications but also now for false representation on a student's record of achievement. At the same time the penalty is increased for a fine up to $50000 which is comparable to offences of a similar nature. The increase also allows for an increase in the time that a prosecution can be pursued from what is now 12 months to five years under the Criminal Procedure Act 2011. That makes that particular issue a lot more workable.We've heard from Minister Davis about the wānanga. This is really important because at the moment a wānanga cannot use a protected term such as university to describe themselves which really puts them in a difficult situation if they want to market themselves overseas. It is a term that not very many people will understand outside of New Zealand. There was in fact a submission from Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi specifically pointing out that it was difficult for them to market themselves because of that misunderstanding or non-understanding of the description of whare wānanga.There are so many of these changes to the bill in Part 2 but I see that I'm running out of time so what I would like to do is I would like to commend and say thank you to the previous select committees thank you to all the 2054 interested groups and individuals who provided submissions and commend this bill to the House.