Macindoe TimHon TIM MACINDOE (National—Hamilton West): Thank you very much Mr Chairman. I hope perhaps to be able to take a couple of calls on this bill this afternoon not necessarily consecutively but in one I'd like to focus on Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 443 that is in my name and is on the Table at the moment. It naturally refers to the Waikato Institute of Technology more commonly known as Wintec. So I have the great privilege of being effectively the member for Wintec in this House. Wintec has two campuses in my electorate—the city campus and the Rotokauri campus both of which have been performing extraordinarily well and meeting considerable demand for many years now. I'm very proud of all they are achieving. I'm very proud to be associated with them. So I want to say as the member for Wintec I am deeply concerned that a model that is working very well in the Waikato region and that caters for many from outside our region and for many international students is effectively at great threat of being undermined when they have not requested that at all. As previous speakers in this debate have noted the reforms threaten to bring major losses there and elsewhere around the country and in particular effectively the seizure of assets in a way that I find absolutely inexplicable and indefensible. We have as others have already noted the potential here for another fees-free disaster and I think that will become apparent as people dig down into the specific points of this bill. I do want to commend the huge body of work that Dr Shane Reti the National Party's tertiary education spokesperson has done because he is a very details-focused individual very analytical and he really has not only done the work of unpicking what this bill is all about but he's been around the country meeting with councils and staff from all of the polytechnics and talking at length with them about how they are affected by it. So I hope that he in particular will be listened to with considerable respect. I want to acknowledge the Minister of Education is in the chair and I thank him for being here this afternoon. I don't criticise him for the fact that he hasn't taken a call yet because I believe that he's probably been showing other members some respect and hearing some of the concerns. But I hope he will take a call fairly soon and frequently during the afternoon because a number of different matters have been raised with him. I in particular would like to put a few questions to him at the outset because I focused in the second reading debate last week on some of the major concerns that we've heard particularly from the Tertiary Education Commission and from Treasury and I do believe that the Minister needs to respond to them. I asked the Minister if he's concerned that the Tertiary Education Commission has warned that the reforms will cause workforce disruption a decrease in student numbers potentially of 18000 students and 2310 apprentices and will not meet the needs of industry and the regions. That is a pretty damning assessment and so I hope that the Minister is going to give us his response to those concerns and in particular to be able to find some way of allaying them. The second thing is that I was deeply alarmed—and so I know are many other members particularly on this side of the House—to hear Treasury's risk analysis of the Government's review into vocational education describing the review's potential impact as ranging from extreme to major. That again is a very damning assessment. I think the Minister must answer the question of how he responds to that dire warning and why apparently he seems to be ignoring it or at least taking an I know best" approach because this is the assessment of Treasury and when added to the assessment of the Tertiary Education Commission it sends out two very strong red flags and those issues must be addressed this afternoon. The third question that I want to put to the Minister relates to the fact that effectively the Government's reforms will dissolve local polytechnics into a hollow and meaningless legacy campus. Now as I've said the Waikato region is very proud and rightly so of the success and the significance in our economy and in our community of Wintec. But this bill is pulling down a very successful high performing institution to create a much less effective a far more mediocre model. So I ask the Minister what message is he sending to the Wintec council its staff and its students—who I have the privilege of representing in this House—who have been doing so well for so long and who have not asked for these changes and who stand to lose considerably from their implementation without any rational explanation or compensation for the loss of those assets? I've come to the end of my first call. I hope the Minister will deal with those and I'll talk to my SOP later."