Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Madam Assistant Speaker thank you very much for the opportunity to speak on this bill that I'm sad to say we will be opposing. David Seymour: What do you mean sad"? You should be proud that you're opposing it.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Well I am proud to oppose it—you're quite right. It does include various nefarious elements to it. I must say I've been out and about talking to a lot of New Zealanders like we all do in the course of this job and I'm bound to say I have never come across anybody who thought the most important thing that the nation needs is to do away with charter schools. This dreadful idea that there could be people doing things differently in our education system innovating and trying different ways of dealing with longstanding problems about trying to deal with getting a better education for the most marginal kids in our country. I've never had anybody come up to me and say "We must stop this dreadful experiment." But anyway that seems to be the great priority of this Government. I've also never had anybody come up to me and say "We must get rid of these dreadful national standards also."Hon Iain Lees-Galloway: Well you definitely don't get out.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Well funnily enough—Hon Iain Lees-Galloway: They're appalling. Have you got kids at school at the moment?Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: I've got four kids at four different schools in the electorate and I speak to parents all the time and the one thing—the one thing—that the parents want to know and I as a parent want to know is how my child is progressing.Hon Iain Lees-Galloway: Talk to your teachers.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: We talk to the teachers. That's a good place to start—talking to the teachers and it's always useful just to have a simple easy-to-understand nationwide measure of progress and that's what we've done. But anyway so there we are.But I'd like to just concentrate a little bit on the tertiary education changes here because we've had a very interesting few months of this Government. It was of course terrified of the prospect of wealthier families having a $1000 tax cut so they did away with that and instead gave those same wealthy families $6000 worth of free education. So I couldn't understand the coherency of that thinking but here we have the free-fees policy. I was at the opening of a university building yesterday and the Prime Minister was rather sheepish in the way that she referred to the free fees and then quickly apologised to everybody else who had paid their fees recently and didn't have access to this. But that's just the way things go if you're chopping and changing your fundamental policies in a nature like this. Anyway we have $2.8 billion invested in the tertiary changes over the next four years a lot of it in free fees. It was supposed to remove barriers to tertiary education and training. Well let's see if it has removed any barriers. All the indications so far are that there are no extra students at all coming as a result of the free fees. So we're paying $2.8 billion to get what we're already getting which is a number of people going to tertiary education—not very good value for money.But then of course the question is who is eligible for these free fees. The idea is that it should be your first year of tertiary education—well that's easy to understand if you come straight from school. But much more than half of the total number of—they think—80000 students who will be eligible for this will have to somehow prove that this is indeed their first year of tertiary education. Now anybody living in Auckland knows that you know many many thousands of people have come to this country fresh and may have done training overseas. We have no way of knowing whether they have or have not. The records don't go back far in New Zealand so we don't have any way of knowing whether people have studied earlier or not. If they are of my age and in the 1980s they studied for a couple years we've got no way of knowing. So it relies on an honesty box system. With $2.8 billion worth of spending you would think the Government would think very carefully about how they organise this and they haven't. They've rushed it through in this madcap way that they go about the Government.So we have this expensive new system in place and there is a real concern that there could be a number of people rorting the system. The current rule in place is that you have to sign a statutory declaration that you are indeed studying for the first time and this has pretty robust penalties. Earlier when this matter was raised the Minister assured us that there are tough provisions in place. If you go against your statutory declaration you're in big trouble—up to three years' imprisonment—but this bill waters that down substantially. It says actually if you make a declaration saying that this is indeed your first year of tertiary training but it turns out that it isn't well you're up for a fine of up to $5000. Now it's interesting some of those students may be studying maths and you wouldn't have to be too smart to work out that if you're getting a tertiary education with the fees of $6000 or $7000 or $8000 for free if you possibly got caught the thought of having a fine of $5000 might not necessarily be all that strong a deterrent. But that's the way it is.We heard from the Minister saying "Oh well." His main defence seemed to be that if people cheat on their student allowances they face a fine of only $2000. Well that doesn't seem a very strong argument to me at all. I actually just checked the legislation and it's absolute nonsense. If you receive an allowance on the base of a false declaration you're up for 12 months' imprisonment if you get caught for doing that and a fine of $5000. So I'm not quite sure where he's coming from on that—only to say this is just more evidence of one of the most colossal areas of spending announced by this Government which has soaked up a very large amount of the extra money available for Governments to spend on a whole range of things from mental health through to every other topic under the sun. They've decided to spend it on this area. So far we haven't seen any increase in students. Time will tell—but we do know that there is plenty of opportunity for rorting of the system and this bill actually makes it easier. So on that basis we're opposed to it."