English Bill: Appropriation (2004/05 Estimates) Bill — Third Reading Imprest Supply Debate 
English Bill: Appropriation (2004/05 Estimates) Bill — Third Reading Imprest Supply Debate 
[Volume:619;Page:14973] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 That Minister should talk to a few farmers if he wants to find out whether they respect his Government’s view of farmers. He will get a strong clear message. His involvement with the agriculture portfolio consists of waving out of the aeroplane window as he flies over on the way to somewhere else. He showed his regard for rural communities by overseeing the closure of just about every rural school in South Canterbury except for one that happened to have as a chairman someone who used to be the Green Party candidate. Jim Sutton broke his back for the Green Party to keep its rural school open and closes the rest. [ 
Interruption 
] The Minister ought to take it seriously. He closed Watlington Intermediate down. It had 500 pupils and was a very successful school. The classrooms were full. That is why 1500 people turned up to a public meeting in his electorate and that is why he will not win that seat in the next election. But he has got some padded-out position high on the Labour list—a man who is now almost completely divorced from New Zealand politics and who will never reconnect. 
If members want a little indication of how this Government works often these things appear in the small stories as much as the large ones. Mr Mallard boasted in the Budget about everything he had done for at-risk children. He appended to his press release a list of 42 programmes. I asked him: “Give me the names of those 42 programmes and what money is being spent on them and what money the Budget plans to spend on them since it was on a Budget document.” I got the answer to that question today. The list of 42 programmes comes from policy work done in 2001. It is nothing to do with the current Budget at all. Not only that but the Government gave an honest answer to a parliamentary question and that is very unusual. The Government said: “Here are numbers the amount of money spent on it but they don’t mean anything.” 
It is just a small incident—a list of 42 programmes put out for at-risk children in education. If members read the Minister’s press release they would have thought that that was what was being funded by this Budget and that the Minister was doing a whole lot of stuff for at-risk children but he was not. It was a policy stocktake that was 3 years old with numbers that meant nothing. So many people who have had goodwill towards this Government in education are gradually finding out that they have been sucked in by that goodwill. 
We used to talk about standards in schools and National certainly still does. However I want to raise the issue of standards in a bureaucracy—standards of integrity standards of professionalism and standards of good public policy. Yesterday the report of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority into Cambridge High School was released. The chief executive of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority went to great trouble to say that it was only one room at one school where the credit cramming was going on—that is kids getting credits when they really did not do any work for them. 
The New Zealand Qualifications Authority has been in that school for the last couple of years and apparently it never saw any of this. The credit-recovery room at Cambridge High School has been going for over 2 years. I asked Trevor Mallard at the select committee whether the New Zealand Qualifications Authority was monitoring the New Zealand National Certificate of Educational Achievement and he said that it was. I asked him whether the subjects were moderated and he said: “Every subject every year in every school.”—apparently except every subject last year and this year in one school! Who believes that? Nobody believes that. The official educational agencies are on a mission of untruth about the National Certificate of Educational Achievement and the Minister is leading it. He does not have a clue whether practices like that are happening in other schools. Does it matter? To him it does not and to this Parliament it probably does not but for thousands of students earning life-changing qualifications at the young age of 15 and 16 when they depend on us to ensure that qualification means something then this scandal does mean a lot. 
I can assure the Minister that similar practices are going on in other schools. Cambridge High School made the mistake of putting it in one room because it is a school that had a small enough number of kids that they fitted in one room and it called it the credit-recovery room which sounds like an arm of a debt-collection agency and it got the book thrown at it and so it should. But the public agencies have let those students down as they are letting down thousands of other students. The New Zealand Qualifications Authority was in that school time after time for 2 years. The Cambridge High School issue came to the notice of the public only because of the dreaded media—television and magazine reporters who investigated and put those matters into the public arena. 
 That in itself is a scandal. The public agencies are so ideologically committed to this qualification that they will not admit any fault. As the chief executive said: “One room in one school.” I tell the Minister that if it turns out it is not just one room in one school but many rooms in many schools then that chief executive should lose her job. 
It is no better in the tertiary sector. In fact I would say it is worse. We have seen through questions in the House here and extensive publicity a tale of low-level corruption and unprofessionalism a lack of ethical behaviour and weak leadership in our tertiary sector. Has this cost us anything? Well again as members will know it does not matter too much today and it might not matter too much in this House. But at a time when our economy is crying out for skilled people when thousands of at-risk young people have been dumped in the Correspondence School out of our mainstream school system and when we have desperate levels of low achievement among our young children this Government has been hosing away money through its mates in the polytechs and other agencies and is unwilling to do anything about it. 
We have much higher priorities. I do not have anything against people getting some adult education going to night schools learning how to paint learning another language or learning one’s own language—as many of them have been. Those are all good things on their own. But they become very bad things when paid professionals of the State ruthlessly exploit the weak leadership of this Government in tertiary education. 
Steve Maharey 4 or 5 years ago laid out his vision for tertiary education and many people agreed with it including some of my own party—quite unwisely I might say and I told them that at the time. He said he wanted to steer the system to make high-value strategic choices in the national interest. Well when a Labour politician says “the national interest” one knows he or she is getting mixed up. What has happened is exactly the opposite of what he said. Instead of the money being channelled into what he said mattered—research and high skills for the knowledge economy—it has all ended up to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars on low-value non-strategic courses that no Government chose. That is really the core of it. By his own definition Steve Maharey has utterly failed. He laid out what the policy would do. He made the choices apparently and the money—$1 billion extra actually on tertiary education during the term of this Government—has gone on the lowest-value courses that one could imagine. That has also been a product of the Minister’s failure and failure in the educational bureaucracy the Tertiary Education Commission. This Budget commits $45 million to that organisation and it is totally wasted; in fact; it is destructive. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: For the benefit of members I inform them that the Independent member and the member for the Maori Party have decided to share their 10-minute slot. I will ring the bell with 1 minute remaining.