English Bill: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
English Bill: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:627;Page:22151] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 The Minister has a number of questions to answer. When I read the  
Education Sector Review 
 I see that he has more questions to answer in fact than any other Minister I have come across. I want him to answer this one: the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) has been something of a controversial matter—particularly this year. In fact it has been controversial since it started but there was a major scandal at the start of the year about scholarship. Given the extensive publicity given to that scandal I would have thought that any Minister who cared about the young people of New Zealand and the qualification they get for all their hard work at secondary school would pay some attention. One would think he would round up all those thousands of officials and tell them that it needed sorting out. The  
Education Sector Review 
 tells us that he did not do that. On page 41 it states: “There is an urgent need to stabilise NCEA”. I suppose that is why we pay senior civil servants $300000 to figure that out! They should just ask sixth-formers. 
It goes on to state: “and there is a view that greater Ministerial involvement and drive would assist this.” That is bureaucratese for saying that he is doing nothing. It was the State Services Commissioner who was responsible to the Minister who said that. For his own chief official to say that he is lazy is a huge risk but he said it. He put it in print. I have never seen that before—the most senior official in a department says that a Minister is lazy. 
What could be more important than stabilising the NCEA if someone is a Minister of Education? What could be more important than 130000 young New Zealanders turning up to classrooms every day working hard full of aspiration and ambition? Well they have found out—no one has told them yet but we will—that the Minister’s senior official thinks he was not doing anything to stabilise NCEA. 
I am sure he had plenty of ministerial involvement and drive to get to the test matches and to get to China to destroy our overseas student market—the more he goes the quicker the numbers drop. But he was not stabilising the NCEA. That is just one of the sad tales that is laid out in vivid detail in the  
Education Sector Review 
. 
There are a couple of other ones and I will hold the Committee’s interest with just one. We have had 2 years of debate about the quality of tertiary courses and this is what the officials conclude about the Government agencies that overlook quality in tertiary education: “it”—meaning the 10 pages of description beforehand—“means that there is no independent assurance of either the quality of these courses or the credit value which is a key driver of costs”. 
So we have spent $100 million on the New Zealand Qualifications Authority Tertiary Education Commission and bits of the ministry per year—I do not mean $100 million over 5 years; Labour always inflates its figures—and the conclusion having spent that $100 million is that there is no independent assurance of the quality of courses. 
I say to the Minister that he may think he is the toughest smartest smoothest political operator and the pride of a generation of the left. That is what he thinks. The only one who thinks more in terms of that is Steve Maharey who was equally responsible. But Minister Mallard has left the most appalling mess in education and when I say “left” I do so advisedly.