Reti ShaneDr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): Thank you Mr Chair. It's a pleasure to speak to the annual review of the tertiary sector and tertiary education and the documents that I will refer to in this address include the select committee report the select committee transcript and briefings to the Education and Workforce Committee in 2017-18. In these documents the substantive topics or even section headings include fees free funding spending Māori and Pasifika revenue and expenditure and the ITP Roadmap so I'm just hitting the scope to what I'll talk through here and anchoring it back to the annual review. I want to speak primarily around the failed fees-free policy—the flagship policy from this Government—and I want to start off as we talk to revenue and expenditure by being absolutely clear about the size of the fees-free policy. It is $2.8 billion. A substantial part of that goes to the fees-free policy; the second part is you have more students and therefore you have more student allowances; and the third part in the books is the capital expenditure at around $700 million. It is a big number—$2.8 billion over four years—and so we were asking what sort of outcomes can we see from that policy and we heard the previous speaker cherry-pick some outcomes but wouldn't it be good if there were new learners and if there were more learners? Wouldn't this be a good policy if it was introduced at huge expense and we actually got new learners and so we were asking how do you know that. Well the ministry actually reports that in April and November each year and in April what they reported was that under the fees-free policy there were negative 2297 learners. Now I was thinking how can that be? We've put $2.8 billion into this. Does negative mean there's less learners now than there were before the policy? Simeon Brown: No—really? Dr SHANE RETI: That's right—2000 less learners now under this policy than there were before. But maybe it was early in fees free so let's give it through the November report. So we waited for the November report and what we heard was there were actually negative 2402. It had got worse. So nearly a year into fees free there are in fact less learners now than there were one year previously. There is the outcome of a failed fees-free policy. So remember I said that April and November are the reporting dates? Well we're into May now. What about the April reporting date? Well that's where all the Official Information Act (OIA) requests can't find it. If it was going to be any good I'm darned sure the Minister would have reported it so I can't wait for that OIA request to come back because I'll predict it's even worse. We were interested in the impact of the fees-free policy. In fact one of the subject headings was What is the completion rate?" and that was one of the things we discussed for fees free. Well tragically the message came back to us from the Tertiary Education Commission that "We're unable to report that because we don't collect information on it." Really? A $2.8 billion policy that's clearly going down the toilet and we don't even report to know how bad it's getting? A terrible situation. So what happened? Canterbury University stepped in and said "Well we'll do a study and tell you how it's going and what we'll find is that actually only 5.8 percent of people who took up fees free said it was critical to them. Oh by the way those are the ones who don't stick it out—those are the ones who don't complete their course." There's the first evidence of completion rates under fees free. But maybe there was something in this for Māori and Pasifika and we asked that. We were wanting to increase the enrolments and the eventual graduation of Māori and Pasifika. How was fees free faring and how was the whole portfolio faring for Māori and Pasifika? What we were astonished to learn—absolutely astonished—was that the Budget that we're talking about budgeted $17 million for Māori and Pasifika but only allocated $12 million—$12.8 million actually—for an underspend of $4 million. I need to understand this: we're wanting to advance Māori and Pasifika in the trades through tools like the Māori and Pasifika Trades Training Initiative and we underspent $4 million. In fact that's the biggest underspend in Māori and Pasifika in the past three years. That lends itself to the wider discussion of revenue and expenditure across the whole portfolio because tragically the whole tertiary portfolio was underspent by $270 million last year. We have polytechs who for whatever reason have needed top-up funding of $100 million and we underspent $270 million in this portfolio. We kept $88 million for Vote Tertiary Education we gave $8 million to Vote Education for NCEA and $170 million left the Vote Tertiary Education portfolio and went into the general fund—which is where I'm guessing it went. It went to fund slushy machines it went to fund failed KiwiBuild and it left its purpose—it left tertiary education—and went elsewhere: $170 million. There's a lot of polytechnics who could've survived and be doing very well today with that $170 million as could the $4 million underspent in Māori and Pasifika. Thank you Mr Chair."