Peters Jim: Education (Export Education Levy) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Peters Jim: Education (Export Education Levy) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
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JIM PETERS (NZ First) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to oppose the Education (Export Education Levy) Amendment Bill. On behalf of the only non-aligned political party in this House I want to outline first of all the negative implications not just for the segment of the education industry that we are directly talking about tonight but for New Zealand education in general. I note that the commentary on the bill states: “The main purpose of the bill is to provide statutory protection of New Zealand’s international reputation as a desirable location”— 
Pansy Wong 
: Ha ha! 
JIM PETERS 
: —the laughter is quite well merited—“where international students can study without educational or financial risk.” That was the stated intention of the bill. But when I turn to the bill I see that almost as much of the bill has been struck out as remains. One would wish the Minister and his advisers in good sense would take the whole bill back and rethink the whole issue—that is the background to this bill. 
The Minister and his advisers seem not to have had any regard for the issue of education providers and their concerns. There is no seeming recognition about plant ongoing capital expenditure quality staffing and the high cost of the on-flowing information and publicity—that is all those trade issues that go with the words “desirable” and “educational organisation” including host visits. All of that is put aside in this mean bill before us tonight. 
This bill treats all institutions in exactly the same way. Those who are confident and sound and have established at great personal cost and over time a reputation with regard to their vision of quality private education according to the registration and qualifications as set by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority are treated in exactly the same way as those institutions of dubious value of which at this point there are at least four that have failed. In other words the ministry has come to this time with a new principle and that principle is this: the prudent protect the imprudent. It almost goes alongside the Associate Minister responsible for tertiary education who confronted by the fact of irregular behaviour and funding by some tertiary institutions goes ahead and treats the whole lot in the same cavalier fashion without any regard for those who had worked according to the funding requirements and met the targeted outcomes. 
One of those institutions was Telford which has been in the news recently. It is a small training institution that is going to be severely embarrassed by the $400000 loss it will now have to look at over the next 3 years because of this new principle that the prudent protect the imprudent. All those who have not worked according to the ministry’s dictates with regard to tertiary education come under the same broad sweep of the Minister’s draconian hand. New Zealand First did not support the bill and has not supported this bill since the export education levy was first introduced. That is largely because it was very poorly done. As I said earlier this levy was too much of an impost on legitimate providers who had no option but to pay. They were given no ownership of the concept and took no real part in the process that decided the conditions and clauses in the bill. In other words this has been a decree from on high. Export education providers can say quite honestly and did say they had no say in who can provide this form of education but when the can is out there ready to collapse they carry the can. 
As I said earlier the prudent protect the imprudent. Those who do right are penalised exactly the same as those who have shown the failure we have seen over the last 2 years. The other issue that has emerged in this bill is with regard to registered private training establishments. This bill in its passage through the various stages has highlighted the complete inability of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to do its task which is mainly to monitor and analyse the actual business of accreditation auditing and monitoring of the export education sector. In fact in the brief time I was on the Education and Science Committee when the Hon Brian Donnelly was away I thought the authority’s attitude was nothing less than cavalier to say the least. When I see just recently that same attitude with regard to the excellent school that Cambridge High School is I fear for the future of that authority. 
 If there is to be accountability in the export education sector it should either be market-driven or there should be effective monitoring agencies able to detect the warning signs and act on them early. The New Zealand Qualifications Authority did not do so. We know of course that although the private providers will pay the levy ultimately the students will bear the cost through increased course costs. In turn that will make what has been a growth industry—as has already been highlighted—with significant impacts upon international education and more to come less competitive in what is now an international student market. We know that in Australia Canada the United States and Britain to name some countries there is active competition for this same market that we have. That comes against a background in some countries of Government support and subsidies. Therefore this bill with the impost it will put upon the private training provider puts us behind the eight ball in that respect. 
Another aspect of the bill is that at the end any money left over is not to be spent on the purposes outlined in the bill; it can be used for any purpose at all. That is very untidy and sits very poorly with New Zealand First. So there is a lesson for the Minister and his advisers and it is this: to correctly analyse the problems of an industry such as this one they need to talk to the providers appropriately and with a due recognition of in this case the emerging challenge of having to regain respect and restate credibility for the provision of education in this country and not resort to improper retrospective legislation. As we all know the Minister found that when there was a collapse of one institution Carich Training Centre his ministry’s power to act was invalid so he resorted to what we have before us—a blatant attempt to retrospectively try to get it right. The answer is that he has it wrong. He has it wrong in a very large way. 
The impact of the Minister’s inability to correctly analyse the situation and his inability to talk in the appropriate manner—a manner that should have brought the private providers to a recognition of the mutual problem and worked out with them answers that were mutually acceptable—means we have a result that New Zealand First could not support notwithstanding the fact that we are strong supporters of the high-quality education that can be enjoyed in this country and has been provided by private providers. This bill is not the answer and therefore we believe that it should not proceed further.