Clendon David: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Text is subject to correction 
Clendon David: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 01 August 2012. Volume:682;Page:4217. Text is subject to correction.] 
DAVID CLENDON (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Chair. I would like to talk a little about the tertiary sector. To say that the sector is under stress is almost an understatement. Right throughout this year for staff for students for general staff for academics and for technical staff everybody is feeling the stress of an under-resourced underappreciated and under-supported sector. This is despite the fact that as the previous speaker Tracey Martin noted we are constantly told of the significance and importance of the tertiary sector in producing the New Zealand we want in terms of economic development and in terms of building a stronger better society. Unfortunately the rhetoric is not matched by the support by the Budget as we see from the documents we got earlier this year.  
The increased funding committed for the 2012-13 year to the tertiary sector looks like a 3.5 percent increase on the previous year. We know of course that with the growing demand for tertiary education at universities at polytechs at private training establishments and elsewhere there is a greater demand costs have gone up and actually the 3.5 percent nominal increase looks very much like a cut for the sector. I think that the lack of support and the lack of resourcing of the sector reflect the fact that this Government and this Minister for Tertiary Education Skills and Employment seem to think that tertiary institutions are more in the nature of machines for processing people. You plug people in one end and you drop lumps of information on them. They swallow those lumps of information and come out the other end with a degree and a credential.  
Actually teaching and learning are not like that. You do not start with a clean slate. Institutions of learning are communities. They are learning communities or ought to be. I know this because I worked in that sector for 12 or 13 years. When you get a genuine community of academics of support staff of funders of teachers and of course of students that is when tertiary education actually works. Tertiary institutions are not simply machines for processing for delivering a commodity called education because education is not a commodity it is a lifelong process of give and take teaching and learning and ought to be seen in that context.  
One of the obvious symptoms of course of the lack of support for the tertiary sector is the announcement this afternoon that Canterbury University is going to be obliged to lose some 150 staff over the next 3 years and that is a great tragedy in many ways. I had a meeting with some senior academics from Canterbury just a couple of weeks ago and they flagged what they knew was likely to be a fairly uncomfortable future for them. They gave me a copy of this document entitled  
What If an Earthquake Made Us All Smarter? 
. Being good Cantabrians they have not sat around waiting for somebody to come to them with a solution. They have been thinking and working incredibly hard to look for a positive future to rebuild that university and not only to make it as good as it was—which was very good—but actually to make it better more sustainable and more resilient.  
They make the point in this document which has been around for a few weeks or a month or two at least that “Without significant investment the earthquakes foreshadow a concerning future for [the University of Canterbury] over the next 10 years.” The announcement today indicates that that concerning future is a reality. I have some sympathy for the vice-chancellor Rod Carr. I am sure he did not enjoy making that announcement today that 150 academics and/or other staff can expect to lose their jobs over the following 3 years.  
Canterbury University is in an incredible position to exploit a tragedy quite frankly. These academics understand this. They talk about having a centre of research a “global centre of research and teaching in earthquake studies and disaster resilience and recovery;”. Canterbury has always had a very strong reputation. The Centre for Advanced Engineering along with Scion and other agencies has been doing a great deal of very good work around building in timber. We know that there is a laboratory a living laboratory called Canterbury where we could discover how it is that communities rebuild how they come back—[ 
Interruption 
] 
The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson) 
: Order! There is a telephone ringing in the Chamber. This is not a tollbooth or a telephone box; this is a debating chamber. The member who has it please turn it off. 
DAVID CLENDON 
: There is a wonderful opportunity to attract academics internationally to provide opportunities for our own academics and our own students to engage in action research which is research intended to understand to discover things as they happen and to feed back projects processes—