English Bill: Education (Export Education Levy) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
English Bill: Education (Export Education Levy) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:619;Page:14927] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 This will not be the last Education (Export Education Levy) Amendment Bill that this Parliament sees under this Minister. Even though he will be here for only 12 months I am sure he will find reason to get another such bill in because he will have to. No one is more responsible for messing up the way our export education industry is perceived by other countries than the current Minister of Education Mr Trevor Mallard. Every time he goes overseas the student numbers drop. I do not know what he says to the Chinese Government but it does not like it much and it does not help. The effect of him going overseas is that the private training institutions to which this bill applies are not listed on the Chinese Government website that sets out options for Chinese students coming to New Zealand. So he has failed. 
 So if the idea was that Parliament would pass this bill and that that would reassure overseas Governments that New Zealand was a provider of quality education then Parliament has wasted its time. That is not actually what has happened. It has not had that effect. I invite the chirping senior whip from the other side to go and have a look at the Chinese Government website and I tell her that that is what she will find. 
What is worrying those overseas Governments is what also worries us—that is the incompetence of the Minister. When Government representatives meet him that is what is reinforced in their minds. The incompetence of the Minister is this: public agencies already have a range of mechanisms by which they underpin the viability and equality of the organisations that provide export education—and those public agencies have failed. Everyone agrees with that actually. I think even the Minister agrees with that. They have failed. They have not used those powers properly and they have not taken this export industry seriously. It is a billion-dollar earner for New Zealand but the New Zealand Qualifications Authority has been regarded as the place to put people when nothing else can be found for them to do. The authority is meant to be out there ensuring compliance but in fact it has not been doing that. 
So we have this which is the second export education levy amendment bill this Minister has had to bring in because he has not done his own job of putting pressure on his own civil servants. And why is that? Not only does he not take export education seriously but he is ideologically and deeply opposed to the private training institutions that are part—only part—of the export education industry. He is very happy to get up and kick them around at every opportunity impose a levy and give the New Zealand Qualifications Authority even more powers such as he has under this bill. 
This bill includes the fact that this levy will be used to reimburse the costs of the public agency. Well we can guarantee that that is not an incentive for careful use of the funds by that public agency or for careful management of its expenditure. 
This bill exemplifies the problems that the Labour Government has created in education. Time and time again when things go wrong the Government punishes everybody. It does not pick out the people who broke the rules. It does not let people live with the responsibilities of the bad decisions they make—which is often the case in the collapse of those private educational organisations. It does not let people face those responsibilities. What the Government does instead is punish everybody. So this levy is a levy on all the sound long-term high-quality operators in order to pay for some people who messed up. 
It is a direct analogy with what the Government has done with our polytechs. Some of them have blatantly and ruthlessly exploited Steve Maharey’s weaknesses as a Minister of Education. But what has the Government done about that? Instead of dealing to the people who ruthlessly exploited its soft rules it has decided to punish every polytech by cutting the funds of all of them. And that is what this bill does to the private training establishments. 
I say to the Government that that leads to bad behaviour. It encourages bad behaviour and it is a disincentive to good behaviour. It is a disincentive to quality and a disincentive to viability. It is also a disincentive to good operators to keep on being good operators because if one is a good operator in the export education industry one just ends up paying a bigger and bigger levy. The longer that that good operator lasts the more levy it will pay. The better the operator is than everybody else the more levy that operator will pay. That to the Minister no doubt is just common sense because that is how Labour thinks: if an operator does better it will try to bring it down; if the operator does badly it will protect the operator from the consequences of its own decisions. That is the problem at the core of this bill. 
There are a number of technical problems that were discussed at the Committee stage. For instance the bill is retrospective. This Parliament is legislating today to allow for the use of a levy that is quite different from the use for which it was raised. The last education levy bill specified that use; this bill changes that provision. 
Debate interrupted.