Parker David: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeParker David: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee[Sitting date: 27 November 2014. Volume:702;Page:967. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour):I rise to address and request a response from the Minister of Education as to why the Minister thinks that the Government should have overall control of universities because that is the effect of having the ability to appoint 40 percent of members of any board. Indeed securities legislation is illustrative of this point. If a company acquiring shares in another company acquires something like either 40 percent of the voting power on a board or 40 percent of the shares it is treated as taking it over.Dr Megan Woods: A hostile takeover.Hon DAVID PARKER: That is right. It is treated as taking it over and it has got to be fair to the minority even though the minority in that sense is more than 50 percent. If you take the case in point here if the Minister has the authority to appoint 40 percent of a university council which is what the Education Amendment Bill (No 2) if passed will allow all it has got to do is get in some cases the vote of one other person on the university council or the board or whatever the Government is going to call them—one other vote in addition to the 40 percent that the Minister is going to have the right to appoint. We have had no justification for that. No justification has been attempted by Steven Joyce and no justification has been attempted by the Minister in the chair Hekia Parata.There is enormous change coming in the provision of tertiary education around the world. We are seeing enormous change as a consequence of information technology. Universities have a number of functions some of which this Government does not like. This Government would prefer universities to be merely technical training colleges. It does not value learning that does not have direct economic output—and that is absolutely clear from the statements that you have from the likes of Steven Joyce—and yet the social purpose of universities through the centuries has been much broader than merely vocational training. We ought not to elevate vocational training which is part of the role of universities to being more important than other values. This change allows Steven Joyce to get his way and to elevate vocational training further. What will it do? It will also suppress dissent including political dissent. That is one of the reasons why the Government is removing the right of university councils to say that they want to have student representatives. This legislation is saying that they cannot say that. It is not saying that it is going to leave it to the universities to choose as to whether they do; it is going to remove that current right of student representation that exists in some institutions. Why is that important? Well we know that when things go wrong in society political activism is one of the things that causes them to come right and therefore protects democracy. We have got some terrible things happening at the moment in New Zealand in respect of political standards. I would expect one of the societal responses to that to come from universities and political activism at universities from both academics and students at those universities. When we had the worst period in New Zealand’s democracy prior to the recent events it was actually under the Rt Hon Robert Muldoon’s National Government when we had apartheid controversies and we had Springbok tours. Where was the heart of the dissent coming from? It was in large part from university activism—it was. University activists and university students were the heart of activism against apartheid and against the Robert Muldoon regime which effectively did not push against it in the way the New Zealand population wanted it to.One of the other challenges that is coming to the university system arises from online learning. The cost of tertiary education fees is going to plummet around the world and this presents real challenges to university funding models that are already pressed. Already and Stuart McCutcheon of the University of Auckland has told me this the profits of the University of Auckland—the annual amount that it has got to put towards its additional capital expenditure and to improve the university—is about the same as the amount of fees that it gathers from foreign students. There is the importance of foreign students now because the level of funding that comes from the university—the amount of funding that is in part controlled by the generosity of Government provision—is so lean now that universities are increasingly reliant on foreign fee-paying students in order to make the budget balance. The challenges that are faced by that funding model are immense because universities are going to face competition from internet-based teaching programmes which will be of supremely high quality including from superstar lecturers from around the world from universities which are frankly overall in the international rankings far higher ranked than the highest of New Zealand rankings. Those universities are going to be competing into New Zealand and they are also going to be competing for those foreign fee-paying students who are already a source of revenue that is higher than the overall profitability of the major universities.How do you get through that transition? Well you have actually got to trust universities and the wide groups of stakeholders who go to universities including students and the staff who work there to manage their way through that challenging changing circumstance in the future just as they have managed their way through the challenging circumstances as they have changed over the last hundreds of years. How have they done that? They have done that by being allowed to be independent as they balance the different interests of the different stakeholders who are involved. They do include the Government because the Government provides part of the money and of course the Government has got an interest in the education policy but the stakeholders also include students and they also include staff. Those are the sorts of reasons why all of the stakeholders—other than I think one submitter according to the select committee report—came along and asked why the Government is changing the make-up of university councils because they are inhibiting the ability of universities to find the right pathway through this very challenging circumstance which if managed well will mean that more people will be able to get a good education for less money and more of the money that is spent on education can go into world-leading research which will actually improve the standing of the New Zealand institutions.The changes that are proposed in this bill make this very difficult transition harder rather than easier and we have yet to have one contribution from the Minister in the chair Hekia Parata justifying why these changes to the method of university governance are required and why the Minister will not stand and defend the fact that the Minister will now have effective control of universities by being able to appoint up to 40 percent of the members which if it was a private company would be seen to be effective control. The member on the other side Andrew Bayly who made the last brief contribution is well experienced in commerce. He will know that the right to appoint 40 percent of the board of directors or 40 percent of a university council amounts in commerce to effective control. Can we have some acknowledgment from the other side please that what is happening here is that we are devolving to a Minister of the Crown the future effective control of universities which is casting aside the hundreds of years of experience not only in New Zealand but also throughout Europe and throughout the United States.Interestingly in the submission from Mr McCutcheon on behalf of some of the universities he actually noted some US jurisprudence that actually went through this history as to why it is that not just academic freedom but also political freedom and the ability to adapt to changing circumstance have been protected by universities maintaining their distance from Governments and not being under the control of Governments—of course being influenced by Governments; there is nothing wrong with that but not going so far as to be under the control of Governments. The effect of this legislation is that in future Steven Joyce will be able to control universities. He will be able to say: “We don’t want you to do as much on political activism; we want you to give more vocational training.”