Simmonds PennyPENNY SIMMONDS (National—Invercargill): What a mess this Government has made of our valuable tertiary education sector. What a mess! First the shambles of Te Pūkenga: the mega-merged polytechnic which has wasted over $200 million already and will waste another $220 million if it is allowed to continue. Last year it produced an $86 million deficit frittering away the hard-earned reserves of successful polytechnics and their communities. And now the deficit disarray in the university sector that somehow escaped the notice of the Minister of Education Jan Tinetti and Minister of Finance Grant Robertson prior to the Budget just one month ago. So yesterday they had to make a special announcement of a bailout. What is it about this Government that they just don't see these disasters coming that are of their own making? They have been very good at spinning the story that New Zealand is just experiencing what every other country is but that is so very wrong. This Government has mismanaged the New Zealand economy and left each of us—our families businesses and community organisations—in a precarious situation because of the toxic combination of high inflation fuelled by wasteful Government spending high interest rates a severe balance of payments deficit and now a recession. So how has this played out in the tertiary education sector? Well like everyone else the universities and the polytechnics have had their operating expenses skyrocket with inflation but they have also been hit with low international student numbers because this Government was slow and lazy with getting international students back into New Zealand. Australia wasn't—they put in place incentives like dropping student visa fees additional post-study work rights and increased hours of work permitted while studying. They knew how important it was for their education sector to get international students back and how important the pipeline of international graduates into skill shortage areas and their businesses and their industries was for the economy. Australia was out there promoting their country to the world and what was our Government doing? Dithering about whether we actually wanted international students back in New Zealand and prioritising offering our education offshore—anyone who has tried that knows how difficult it is. What does the Government not understand about the ripple effect of expenditure out into the community and supporting our industries and businesses in times of skill shortage constraints? And how about the impact on our universities of secondary school students who spent their senior years locked out of school? There are low first-year retention rates right across the university sector because many students haven't been well enough prepared for the rigours of tertiary education. This Government has driven our universities to the positions they are in now and yesterday's bailout announcement will not stop the redundancies reverberating through the sector. It is band-aid politics: trying to cover up the inaction of this Government over the past six years. I have watched how heartbreaking it is to see good staff lost to the polytech sector and now the universities are going through the same process. This could have been minimised if we had not had a Minister of Education preoccupied with the ideological centralisation of polytechnics and industry training organisations misguided intentions to constrain the number of international students coming back to New Zealand and mismanagement of our economy. The plight of our tertiary sector lies fairly and squarely at the feet of this Labour Government make no mistake about that. National knows that our school pupils need to have a better grasp of the basics of education. We know that the Immigration Service must unblock bottlenecks—SPEAKER: Order! The member's time has expired.PENNY SIMMONDS: Thank you Mr Speaker.