SpeechHon TIM MACINDOE (National—Hamilton West): Thank you Madam Speaker. At the outset could I acknowledge the Minister of Education for the way in which he conducted his part of the committee stage debate which immediately preceded this. I think it is one of the great innovations that we've seen of recent times. We didn't necessarily agree with all of his answers but he engaged regularly and I think that as I say deserves to be acknowledged. And he did make some compelling points.Now in this contribution I'd like to focus on the skills and employment provisions of this Education and Training Bill. Of course we had a significant debate over the last year or so over the Government's Reform of Vocational Education which became known as RoVE. It was proposed about a year ago. National strongly opposed it even though there are aspects of it that we could see some merit in and all of those aspects are now enshrined in this bill that is receiving its third reading tonight.It is quite a radical centralisation of tertiary education skills and training and that's the aspect that my colleague Dr Shane Reti raised such concerns about when he held this role. In fact he was the spokesperson until very recently for tertiary education skills and training. In our reshuffle last week my fine colleague Mr Brown has taken over the tertiary education aspect and I've been given skills and education. While you're a very fine and capable man Mr Brown I'm a little concerned to see that it takes two of us to replace Dr Reti. Although I have to acknowledge that like rust he never sleeps and he has done very fine work in producing policy that we are going to be proud to run on in the upcoming election.One of the major concerns we had and it does need to be acknowledged again was the huge cost of this megamerger. It was in the region of $400 million. That's a huge amount of money that has come out of other aspects of education. Just to give you one example in last year's Budget industry collaboration projects scholarships awards and university programmes such as the university-led innovation programme were cancelled and at the time we were wondering why. It became clear very soon after that it was in part to fund RoVE. They were helped by the fact that their fees-free policy was a spectacular failure. They'd been estimating about 80000 people would take it up but because only 50000 did they had quite a few dollars left over from that to pump into it. But that was just one aspect that really did concern us.In addition to the extraordinary cost of RoVE—and as I say this is all enshrined in the current bill—the second major area of our concern which I do just want to put on record again tonight was that so many jobs were being lost because of the megamerger that took place. We have effectively now got all 16 polytechnics coming together under one entity called the New Zealand Institute of Skills and Technology. It's a pretty radical restructure. Some of our regional polytechs were very badly hurt. I'm slightly conflicted in that I have to acknowledge as the MP for Hamilton West Wintec is in my electorate. So this new administrative centre is in my electorate. It had to go somewhere and I'm very glad considering it had to go somewhere that it came to Hamilton. I'm very glad that that does result in some extra jobs being created in my electorate. But nevertheless we still were opposed in principle to this megamerger.Now some of them WelTec and Whitireia were at least neighbouring polytechnics so maybe you could say that it was going to be possible for there to be some efficiencies there. But they've had to come together with one chief executive and it does of course therefore mean that there were major job losses and Unitec and Manukau Institute of Technology were also merging with the same consequences. But then you go to the extraordinary bizarre merger between Tai Poutini on the West Coast of the South Island which was merging with NorthTec in Whangārei and the Western Institute of Technology in Taranaki. Now how on earth you could have the West Coast Northland and Taranaki all being able to operate effectively and in a way that didn't cause major disruptions in those regions is almost impossible to contemplate. Yet in February of this year the Government pushed on with RoVE. Tonight here they are enacting it into legislation. I think that there are very significant concerns in this area and I am sorry to see it going ahead as it inevitably will do.