Martin Tracey: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Text is subject to correction 
Martin Tracey: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 01 August 2012. Volume:682;Page:4216. Text is subject to correction.] 
TRACEY MARTIN (NZ First) 
: 
 I rise to take a call on the tertiary education estimates for 2012-13 as the education spokesperson for New Zealand First. There is little time to cover all of the contradictory statements and actions with regard to education that this Government this Minister for Tertiary Education Skills and Employment and this Budget make to the students and education professionals of this nation but I will start with the fact that this Minister and this Government keep making statements about the need for a knowledge-based economy and then put financial barriers in the way of the very citizens who are seeking to be part of that economy. This Minister and this Government speak of lifelong learners but one of this Government’s first actions when it came into power was to cut funding to the adult and community education field removing the opportunities for second-chance learners to the tune of $14 million. The overall tertiary education expenditure for 2012 is $60 million less than it was in 2011. Adult and community education has suffered even further cuts and so has the funding of adult literacy and numeracy while at the same time in this Budget there are increased subsidies for private companies that want to make a profit from selling education.  
In my community from Orewa to Whangarei women hoping to return to the workforce—well not just hoping any more; these are widows and women living alone who now under new legislation must go out and upskill themselves and find employment—employees who are seeking to upskill to improve their promotional possibilities and older students who need to get National Certificate of Educational Achievement level 1 2 or 3 so they can partake in the Minister’s focus on level 4 have zero access to adult and community education. There has been no adult and community education in the area from 2009 and therefore they have zero opportunity to get anywhere near the Government’s rhetorical targets.  
Here we have a Government and a Minister that laud our education system overseas. They recognise and market our international reputation as an exceptional education system. They market that fact so that they can draw in foreign students to our shores with the view to making money from those students while at the same time removing support for its own citizens—the children the students of their own taxpayers. 
 Previously in this House I have had to commiserate with the Rt Hon Dr Lockwood Smith on the direction that the National Party is taking on education matters. Previously that was around technology teachers; now it is around the student allowance. In 2006 Dr Smith told the  
Sunday Star-Times  
that he would have preferred a universal student allowance scheme or at the very least one that hit wage and salary-earning families less hard.  
Let us not forget in all this argument here that the very people making these budgetary decisions the very people who are telling our students to go out and protest on the streets like in Greece are the people who pulled the educational investment ladder back up from behind them—that is Bill English Steven Joyce John Key Hekia Parata and Peter Dunne to name just a few. They all got a tertiary education for nothing. They were all invested in by the grandparents of the students who today under this Budget get nothing—or virtually nothing—and I would suggest that those grandparents need to come and get a refund.  
When National’s Wyatt Creech introduced the student loan scheme in 1992 20 years ago this year the upper allowance for students living away from home was $109.25 per week. Under this Budget the same student can now look forward to $170.80 per week. So over the last 20 years this living allowance—because it is an allowance to live on—has increased by $61.55. That is just over $3 per year. We have heard a lot about the Labour Party living on “Planet Labour”. I do not know what planet the National Government or the Minister live on if they think that over the last 20 years the cost of living in this country has risen by only 1.8 percent per year. In the year 2011 alone the price of fruit and vegetables—just fruit and vegetables for that single year—increased by 8.1 percent.  
To add insult to injury in 2006 when Dr Smith was concerned about these things the parental income threshold to get a student allowance was $64000 gross; now it is $55026. So not only have parents’ incomes got lower because of the rising cost of living and not only have their children’s allowances got less valuable but the Government tells their children that without this education they and the country will not be a success. And it has extended the freeze on the increase in the parental income threshold—