English Bill: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
English Bill: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:624;Page:19421] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 I have a series of questions the Minister in the chair the Hon David Benson-Pope might like to answer. One picks up on the issue raised by my colleague who has just sat down. Is the Government doing a savings scheme for tertiary education or not? I suspect that yesterday it was not but since the  
New Zealand Herald 
 ran it on its front page today that something the Prime Minister said would happen could not happen today the policy is back. So the Minister can tell us about that. I also want the Minister to answer some questions about the exploding bureaucracy that he is overseeing. 
Can the Minister tell the Committee why the amount of money spent by the Ministry of Education on policy advice has doubled under his Government? Are they the people who gave advice about how to waste hundreds of millions of dollars on tertiary education? Are they the people who advise the Government to ignore the needs of children with special education needs? Why has spending on policy advice doubled from $25 million to $47 million? Why has the amount of money spent on ownership advice doubled? Twenty million dollars a year is now spent in the Ministry of Education on ownership advice. That figure is twice what it was 5 years ago. Why has the amount of money spent on administration of regulation trebled on the Minister’s watch? Why has that amount trebled? Can the Minister tell us? 
Spending on policy advice has increased by 200 percent spending on ownership advice has increased by 200 percent and spending on the administration of regulation has increased by 300 percent but the operations grant increase for schools in 2005 is just 2 percent. That shows us the Minister’s sense of priority. Why has the bureaucracy the number of civil servants employed in the Ministry of Education—putting aside the intake of special education needs into the ministry—gone up by 24 percent? Why does he need 24 percent more bureaucrats to give bad advice on how to run the education system? Can he tell us that? 
Another thing I want to ask the Minister is this. Why is the Government so wrong in its forecast about tertiary education expenditure? I have looked back at the forecasts for the 2005-06 year. That is the next one coming up. To go back to 2002 it forecast $2.8 billion. The latest forecast is $3.26 billion. Why is the Government’s forecast half a billion dollars out? Why has that forecast changed by half a billion dollars? How many special-needs kids’ nappies would that change? That shows that Government expenditure on tertiary education is completely out of control. Suddenly $500 million has appeared in the forecast which means that parents are selling raffle tickets to pay for teachers and doing sausage sizzles outside the The Warehouse to buy some decent computers. They are using the leftover money from the computers to pay for the teacher-aide to change the nappies of the child who cannot walk or talk but suddenly the Government can find $500 million extra for tertiary education. It just appears in its forecast. Where does that $500 million come from? It would have been more except that the Government doubled the amount of money spent on policy advice. 
Why does the Government not cut back the spending on policy advice and spend some of that on special education? Why not cut back the ownership advice funding—$20 million? All that does is pay officials to go around polytechs telling them how to break the rules so that they can get enough money to be financially viable without fixing their basic financial problems. [ 
Interruption 
] That is what they tell me. The officials from the Ministry of Education turned up and said: “Why don’t you run one of these phantom computer courses? That’ll fix up your financial problems.” Is that not great! The Government is paying one official millions to tell the other officials how to blow out the Government’s budget by hundreds of millions. That is some kind of perpetual motion machine that just keeps spewing money out week after week and year after year. Would the Minister please give us the answers.