Donnelly Brian: Education (Tertiary Reforms) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Donnelly Brian: Education (Tertiary Reforms) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:643;Page:13177] 
Hon BRIAN DONNELLY (NZ First) 
: 
 I take a call just to stress three points. The first is the point about academic freedom. I have to say that the Opposition has this totally wrong. There is no change to the Act in terms of the protection of academic freedom and institutional autonomy. 
Dr Paul Hutchison 
: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. We are actually debating Part 1. The academic freedom part is dealt with in the purpose clause and is actually not relevant to Part 1. 
Hon BRIAN DONNELLY 
: Speaking to the point of order Mr Chairperson I note that the Opposition speakers have been referring to academic freedom and institutional autonomy all the way through their speeches. I am responding to their speeches. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Clem Simich) 
: Thank you. 
Hon BRIAN DONNELLY 
: I wish to make the point which is quite simple that references to those two concepts are still in the Act. This bill makes no change to them except to strengthen their protection. That was explained to the members of the Education and Science Committee time and time again. 
I also want to make a point about charters. There was a sector that wanted charters but it flowed over into the polytech sector as well. Universities can still have their charters. There is nothing in this legislation that prevents them from having charters. The problem is that they came along and said they have to have institutional autonomy but that they also want to have those 10-year charters signed off by the Minister. The whole thing contradicts itself. 
What the committee said was that long-term planning is good governance practice and we would expect that all tertiary institutions would have in place some form of long-term planning vision statements etc. But we said we would leave it up to the institutions themselves to devise what works for them. So small private training establishments might have a totally different need from say a large institution like Auckland University which may decide that it will stick with the charter that it has spent money on. I want to make clear that the select committee said that we will put in place something requiring long-term planning but we did not prescribe what form it was to be in and it certainly was not to be signed off by the Minister. 
The third issue is around the notion of commercially sensitive information. Clearly the Tertiary Education Commission has a responsibility—and it is spelt out in the Act—to continually monitor the financial risk of the institutions themselves. That is prudent. Why would we be putting literally tens of millions of dollars into an institution that was going to go belly up in the next week? We need to have some sort of guarantee that the institution is not engaged in some foolhardy scheme that will turn the whole thing to custard. So the Tertiary Education Commission requires information beyond just purely and simply the information around those programmes for which the institution is seeking money. But the question is whether the Tertiary Education Commission requires information that burrows down deep enough to be commercially sensitive information. 
The problem brought to our attention—and I think it was a genuine problem—was that if universities for example had to reveal all their contracts then they could not give that information because they would have already signed contracts not to reveal it to anyone. Commercially they would be breaking their deals right from day one. But secondly their concern was that the Tertiary Education Commission also comes under the Official Information Act as do universities. The Tertiary Education Commission told us that it could refuse information that was commercially sensitive. The universities responded by saying: “But they might not know what is commercially sensitive. We do.” and that was a very very good point and a valid point. 
We asked the officials to go away and look at this matter seriously and it was confirmed to us that the level of detail of information that would be required by the commission in order to be able to do its monitoring function was at nowhere near the level that would require commercially sensitive information on research contracts etc. and even if it was required—and the officials said it would not be—and the commission got an Official Information Act request on it the commission would first go back to the institution and ask it what its opinion was under the protected disclosures provisions under the Official Information Act. 
Therefore I have to say to the Committee that I am not too certain about the tidiness of the language that is used in the bill because it is really about that commercially sensitive information that is protected under the Official Information Act. That part is what really is relevant in terms of the amendment that Dr Paul Hutchison has put forward. I think it is a genuine attempt and I will not lambaste him for it. It is still an issue that we are not 100 percent comfortable about and it is a line call for us at this point in time.