Shearer David: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee 
Shearer David: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee 
[Volume:673;Page:19342] 
DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert) 
: 
 It is my pleasure to rise again to speak on an area that like that of my previous contribution is of critical importance to the New Zealand economy and to the way we develop and grow our economy. The Tertiary Education Commission is a complex being in terms of its funding and whom it funds. I want to touch tonight on just one aspect of what it does. 
The Tertiary Education Commission establishes and promotes the opportunity for lifelong learning throughout New Zealand. This is an extraordinarily important area for New Zealand for the simple reason that the economy is changing extremely fast and extremely quickly. As our economy changes we want people to be able to engage and move with those changes. We also want to be able to cater for those who step out of the workforce for various reasons and step back into it again and need to upskill once more in order to join and become profitable members of society. I think it is a great worry for New Zealand that this Government rather than promoting the opportunity for lifelong learning has gone out of its way to erode the opportunities for those people. An amount of $2.3 billion goes into the tertiary education area through the Tertiary Education Commission. One of the areas that was targeted under the previous Minister for Tertiary Education was adult education. For a mere $13 million of that vast amount of money we stripped out what had become an institution in New Zealand and had helped countless numbers of New Zealanders to re-enter the workforce. For more than about 100 years thousands and thousands of New Zealanders me included re-entered the workforce as a result of second-chance education re-skilling and upskilling—a different way of getting back into the workforce through having their skills renewed by joining the education system. We once had 212 schools involved in night classes and now we have 24. That is disgraceful. It is absolutely disgraceful for $13 million out of a budget of $2.3 billion. PricewaterhouseCoopers said that the benefit cost was 70 to one yet we still stripped it out. 
I thought this Minister for Tertiary Education might have had a different approach from his predecessor. Yet in this Budget the over-55s are thrown on to the scrap heap. We could say that maybe the over-55s should be thrown on to the scrap heap. Maybe those people do not have to upskill and be re-skilled. But actually 55 now and in the future is and will be a very young age. Those people will go on to be working members of society perhaps well into their 70s. Yet those people cannot get student loans. We have discriminated against older people being able to get student loans yet they are the very people who have paid their taxes for about 40-odd years and they are not able to have access to student loans any more. To compound the problem we have also added to that the people who are part-time students. Those part-time students now cannot get their course-related costs paid. Those people tend to be women who have gone out of the workforce perhaps for child rearing and now want to move back into it. What we are seeing and I would like to see the analysis on this—it would be very interesting not only for this House but for New Zealanders in general—is that women are being targeted more unfairly under these policies than men are. I think women are being disadvantaged more than anybody else. I think that is a disgrace—it is an absolute disgrace. We should be encouraging people to get back into the workforce. We should be encouraging people to upskill. We should be encouraging our economy to move forward as a result of those people joining our workforce with the right and appropriate skills but instead we are penalising those people. We are penalising their initiative. We are penalising their self-sacrifice.