Debate on Crown Entities, Public Organisations,and State Enterprises — New Zealand Teachers Council

So much rests on the broad shoulders of Dr Cullen this week because the rest of his front bench is crumbling, starting with the Prime Minister, who has had no response to the Māori challenge, and including Mr Goff, with his liberal views on under-age sex, and the Minister in the chair, Mr Maharey, with a failed tertiary policy.

I found a quote the other day that I thought I might share with members. It is about the work of the Tertiary Education Commission. “The work included the Tertiary Education Advisory Commission’s four reports, the industry training review, the training opportunities and youth training review, the work of the adult education and community learning working-party, and, most importantly, the passing of the Education (Tertiary Reform) Amendment Act, the development of the tertiary education strategy 2002-07, and the promulgation of the first statement of the tertiary education priority.” That is all its work in 5 years, and what is the result? The result is widespread mismanagement and potentially fraudulent behaviour among our polytechnics, which have unexpectedly blown the least strategic part of his Budget out by $80 million over the last couple of years, the worst year being 2003.

I ask the Minister when he will start taking this matter seriously. Let us take the example of Brylton Software and its joint-venture deal with Christchurch Polytechnic. That polytechnic had 96,000 enrolments, which we are told is only about 20,000 or 30,000 people, and it earned $15 million in revenue from the Government. The head of development for Christchurch Polytechnic was Vicki Buck, who was also a director of Brylton Software, which provided the course that involved students being given CD-ROMs. So $15 million flowed into Christchurch Polytechnic, and I want to know—and the students of the polytechnic want to know—where it went. How much did Brylton Software get, with the director of development for Christchurch Polytechnic being a director?

I can recall much debate in this Parliament about Aotearoa Television and Tuku Morgan and his shopping habits. I remind the Minister that about $100,000 in director fees were in question in that case, and there was huge debate. I suggest to him that if the Tertiary Education Commission had been a Māori organisation, he would have sent in an independent investigation months ago. He would have taken the view that the public would not tolerate Labour being soft on Māoris. Well, it is not a Māori organisation, but the extent of the mismanagement is enormous. It amounts to $15 million just in Christchurch—before we begin to talk about Tairāwhiti Polytechnic, the Open Polytechnic, and The Tertiary Alliance, all of which have not merely dipped their toes in the water but been in it up to their necks.

Given the obvious potential conflict of interest, what did the Minister do? Well, he went and asked the people who were conflicted whether they had behaved themselves. They said that, yes, they had behaved themselves. But the answer to the parliamentary question does not say that. It says that at one stage the two people in the polytechnic who were conflicted advised of their conflict and withdrew from negotiations. So, in an answer to this Parliament, the Minister has confirmed that Vicki Buck and her offsider were involved in negotiations between Christchurch Polytechnic and Brylton Software—a company of which they were shareholders, and she was a director—involving $15 million.

Then today I outlined to the House allegations from students at Tairāwhiti Polytechnic that in enrolling for one course they were asked to enrol for another course in order to “help with funding”. When they enrolled they attracted hundreds of dollars of public money for their enrolment. Every person in Christchurch who enrolled because he or she got an inducement attracted $800 of public, taxpayers’ money. When will the Minister set up an independent investigation into these matters?

Once again we see why the Minister of Education, the Hon Trevor Mallard, is an absolute disgrace to education in this country. We stand to debate the report on the Teachers Council, and because this Minister has repeatedly pushed unnecessary and superfluous legislation through the Education—

💬 Hon Bill English: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I am sorry to interrupt my colleague, but I just want to clarify the process. I was asked whether we would agree to take the education reports that are relevant to the Minister in the chair now, and was told that Mr Mallard would be here later to debate the reports—

💬 Darren Hughes: No, but—

💬 Hon Bill English: If that is the case, then we were misled, and that is a serious problem. I was advised that Mr Mallard would be in the Chamber later to deal with—[Interruption] The whips had better clarify that, because that is the agreement I signed up to. If that had not been the case, I would not have agreed to it. We will have to change the course of this debate, so that we know what is happening and all opportunities are available.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): Can I suggest the two whips sort out the order of the debates. As Chairperson I cannot be expected to know that. If they could sort that out, I would appreciate it.

The Teachers Council is an absolute disgrace. It does not even report to the House—it is only by leave that we can even debate it. The Teachers Council has been in operation for 29 months, in some form or another. It was set up as a push from the teacher unions to take over from the Teacher Registration Board, because the teacher unions did not have representation. In those 29 months it has managed to breach the Public Finance Act; it has not issued a statement of intent, so we cannot even measure how well it has done; and it has managed to issue only a draft code of ethics. We heard in an open session at the Education and Science Committee that the excuse was that it was still having teething problems. It spat out its director, Margaret Kouvelis, amid great secrecy. Then what did the Minister do? I think it is bizarre that he is not going to take a call to explain why every one of the entities in his portfolio—the Teachers Council, Learning Media, the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, Career Services—is in total disarray and disorder. The New Zealand Qualifications Authority is not doing what it is meant to do. Learning Media is pouring money down the drain. It was once a profitable company, but now is spending money hand over and fist.

So what did the Minister do? On 1 July 2003 he appointed Joanna Beresford as the chair of the Teachers Council. The council was set up to provide a leadership role in the teaching profession, and it has done nothing of the sort. How could the Minister of Education appoint as the chair of the council a person who had been working with the teacher unions since the 1980s, a person who actually said: “We must actively promote trade unions as at the very core of a democratic and participatory society.”? Well, someone tell the band to strike up the “Internationale”, because that is nothing to do with promoting leadership in the teaching profession.

It is a disgrace that we have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayers’ money on this Teachers Council but we are in a worse state than we were before. What does the annual report state? Well, as I said earlier, one of the most important things it states is that the council had not complied with the Public Finance Act. It had breached that Act, in that the audited financial statements were not available within 120 days after 30 June 2003. We are now almost into June 2004 and it still has not even brought them back to the House. How are the taxpayers, the parents of children at schools around New Zealand, expected to have confidence in what their children are being taught, how they are being taught, and whom they are being taught by, when the Teachers Council—much-vaunted by the Hon Trevor Mallard when he was just in Opposition, and who, in an article I wrote for North and South magazine, hailed his vision of the new Teachers Council as something that would replace the Teacher Registration Board, do away with all the nonsense being taught in colleges of education, and make teacher registration compulsory—still does not even know, although it is compulsory for teachers to be registered, how many teachers are teaching in New Zealand? How can we know how many are not registered, if we do not even know how many are teaching?

What are we paying these people on the Teachers Council? We have four people who are paid over $100,000 a year. As I have said, it is a disgrace.

I want to talk about the Tertiary Education Commission and I want to congratulate my colleague the Hon Steve Maharey on the good work he has been doing in this area over the last 5 years. The member opposite, Bill English, asked what Mr Maharey had been doing for the last 5 years. I will tell him what Mr Maharey has been doing for 5 years. He has been reducing the cost of tertiary education for students. He has been making it easier to pay loans back and to reduce loan burdens. He has been reintroducing a Modern Apprenticeships scheme, which the National Government scrapped.

I cannot understand how one could find fault with an apprenticeship scheme that puts young people into work in industries where we absolutely need their skills, because otherwise we choke economic growth. The National Government just got rid of that. It did not see the point of it. Well, the Minister has been reintroducing it. We now have over 6,500 people on these schemes, and we are going to increase it to 8,000. We now have Modern Apprenticeships available in 28 sectors. We have nearly 1,500 Gateway placements, from 126 schools. We are targeting 4,000 Gateway placements. We now have 126,000 people in industry training in this country, and that is what the Hon Steve Maharey has been doing for 5 years. I congratulate him.

I started university in 1993, which was one year after Lockwood Smith introduced the student loan scheme.

💬 Government Member: The bad old days.

In the bad old days. I remember, in 1990 when I was at high school—we were going through the election and discussing it at school—that the National Party said it would abolish the $1,300 tertiary tuition fee that the Labour Government had forced students to pay. Well, National did abolish it, but replaced it with a $3,000 tertiary tuition fee. Perhaps it could be said that that party was being honest, I do not know, but I think it was being a bit slippery. The fact is that my fees went up 14 percent per year under a National Government—

💬 Steve Chadwick: How much?

On average, it was 14 percent per year. I did not know what I would be paying, from year to year, in my tertiary fees. When students are trying to get jobs over summer and pay fees for the next year, because they do not want to take out loans, it certainly helps if they have some vague idea of what their fees will be from year to year. Well, students have that now. The fee maxima system means students know that their fees will not increase by any more than 5 percent each year. That might not seem a big deal to people who did not pay for their education in the same way we did, but it certainly would have helped when I was a student. It certainly would have helped to know that the difference might be about $200 and not $1,500.

Another thing we have done in tertiary education is to remove the interest on student loans while students are studying. When I went to varsity I took out a student loan, but I did not take out the maximum I could have. I tried not to, because I knew I would have to pay it back. When I took that loan out I just was not aware of the huge amount of interest that was compiling while I was a student. When I finished my degree and received my final loan statement, I was shocked to find out that I was, in fact, thousands of dollars further in debt than I thought I actually was, just because of the interest I had accumulated while studying. That is hard. When people are young, they are just trying to get through varsity—because their parents cannot afford to put them through—and they are having to work, so it comes as a bit of a shock when they suddenly realise they are many, many more thousands of dollars in debt.

💬 Simon Power: Your parents were on $80,000 a year.

My mother was on the domestic purposes benefit when I started university. Mr Power might not have realised that. She supported me as much as she could, and I appreciated that help. When I finished varsity and started paying the loan off, I had gone to work as a laboratory analyst. Laboratory analysts earn a good wage. I was earning about $35,000. I was happy with that, but there was no way my student loan repayments were keeping pace with the interest. My loan was getting bigger and bigger, I was trying to pay it off, but I just could not keep up. That is fairly dispiriting. I started to think: “Well, what’s the point?”.

I remember reading the article by Lockwood Smith in which he gave out the fine words: “Just don’t bother trying to pay it back.” He asked why students were moaning and whingeing about the loans, and said they should just forget about them. That is easy to say for someone who does not have a student loan, and who does not know that when students try to get a mortgage for a house, the loan counts against them, that they are paying 10 percent more off their salaries, and that they are faced with doing that for the rest of their lives. Well, in 1999 changes were made and interest was taken off loans while students were studying. In addition, in my case on my salary no more than 50 percent of my loan repayments went to paying the interest.

I want to take a few minutes to look at certain elements of these reports before us. In particular, I would like to start with Learning Media Ltd. This entity, as we all know, has had a major cloud over it in the last year or so, due to nothing more than the expense account of a former chair, a Mr Donald Sollitt, whose expenses of over $200,000 were achieved on the back of credit cards. I believe that that was a very dark cloud that hung over Learning Media Ltd. When we asked in the select committee what had been done to recover that money, we found that $9,000 of that sum had been invoiced back to him. Yet, the expenses he had been living on as a spree were a sort of joke. He must have thought it was a bit of a joke, too, that he was asked to repay only $9,000. I think the reason, given to us sort of sideways, was simply that this same said gentleman had gone into bankruptcy and therefore the Government could not gather any more money from him. I do not believe that that was a sufficiently good answer, on that occasion.

Even if we put aside the horror part of Learning Media’s history, there are still some very worthwhile matters I would like to bring to this House. The literacy and numeracy programmes that Learning Media has started are, and have been, very well recommended by both students and teachers around the country. I can see that as those develop and unfold, they will advance New Zealand.

Another thing I noticed too, in Learning Media’s report to us for the last year, was that its overseas operations had increased some 30 percent. The revenue was mainly from the US, but it was also from Canada, and I think from Scandinavia and other countries, which indicates that as a Crown entity, Learning Media was starting to overcome the shadow placed upon it through its former chair. As select committee members when we reviewed and questioned the entity on that aspect, we felt that its progress was notable.

I would also like to take up one aspect of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority in its report to us. The committee, along with the public, remains somewhat concerned—some even sceptical—about the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) and its processes of assessment in New Zealand. The public, the parents, and the children—the scholars and the students—do find it difficult to compare their assessments with others within their own group and age level, and they also find it very difficult to find any useful understandings between schools as to what the system has actually achieved. As a result, I have noted that schools have then gone into, and are increasingly going into, alternative forms of assessments and examination procedures, because of the poor information being obtained from the NCEA programmes. More schools and principals this year have told me that they have certainly signalled to their parents the benefits of other examination systems, so that parents, children, and, of course, employers can get a grip on what is happening.

The International Baccalaureate, with its benefits, for instance, is one of those programmes that parents are turning to and asking their children to take on, more and more, in schools. The Cambridge examinations are flourishing around New Zealand, on the back of a misunderstanding—or a lack of understanding—of how to interpret the NCEA programme. I think that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority needs to wake up and listen to what parents and employers are really wanting. Standards-based achievements have limited features for parents, students’ learning, and employers. I also note that the Education Review Office has sent a real hurry-up message to the qualifications authority about the NCEA programme. So United Future, as a party, believes that the NCEA implementation was frustrated from day one through a lack of resourcing.

This debate on the financial review of Crown entities, public organisations, and State enterprises certainly points out the differences there are in this Parliament on these matters. This Labour Government is committed to ensuring that Crown entities and State-owned enterprises are working together with communities for the benefit of all New Zealanders. We are committed, as a long-term shareholder, to the State-owned enterprise model, as opposed to the “hold for sales” stance of the previous Government. Shareholding Ministers seek to maximise the value of their companies for the benefit of all New Zealanders. National, in contrast, could not wait to fob off the family silverware. Just about everything of value to New Zealanders would have been gone by lunchtime under the National model.

This applies even to something as sacred to New Zealanders as our public school system. Our party is committed to a strong public education system that meets the needs of all New Zealanders. We believe that most New Zealanders would expect that this was true of all parties, but it is certainly not true. After all, when Don Brash was asked about it, what did he say? He said: “For my part, I don’t care who owns the schools.” Well, I have news for Don Brash. Most New Zealanders do care who owns the schools. They believe in a viable public education system—a strong, quality public education system paid for by the taxpayers, because that is what real choice is about. Real choice is about all New Zealanders being able to send their children to good quality schools. We want every school to be a good quality school, and every child to have the opportunity to attend a high-quality public education facility. We are not interested in the market model, which has been so disastrous in so many areas of New Zealand life.

In early childhood education, what this Government is about is improving both access and quality. We have provided a lot more places in early childhood education, and by ensuring that early childhood educators are better trained and qualified, we can ensure that the quality of the education that children get is better. We know that the key to quality education is quality teachers. There is plenty of research to prove that. We want to improve the standard of early childhood education, so we must improve the standard of the teachers in that area.

This has met with some opposition from those who espouse the market model and who think that early childhood education is actually about childcare and babysitting. It is not. It is about ensuring that every child in early childhood education is having quality learning experiences that nurture the child and prepare the child for attending school. We are committed to having early childhood teachers who are better trained and qualified, and I know that this will ensure the future of New Zealand education and of our children, and that we will be thanked for it in time.

In the primary service, the emphasis has been on literacy and numeracy programmes based on strong research to show what is really good for our schools. There are some excellent research programmes, particularly at the education department of Waikato University, that show what can be done to improve the one area of the education system where there has been the greatest problem, and that is with the “tail”, as it is called. Eighty percent of pupils in New Zealand schools are doing really well, and our education system is providing a really excellent education for them. But everyone in the education system knows that there is a group of about 20 percent of pupils who are certainly not doing as well as we would wish them to. When one looks at the international comparisons, that tail in achievement is there. It is there for every other system in the world, but our Government is dedicated to getting rid of it.

I invite the Minister to take a call to explain the activities and the purpose of the Tertiary Education Commission. As this House has been made aware in the last couple of months, the tertiary education strategy itself has totally failed. We have ended up with by far the biggest growth in expenditure in the least strategic courses, and if there is any other way the Minister thinks the commission’s strategy should be measured, he can get up and tell members. But it would seem to me that if the lowest priority eats up the most new money, then there is something pretty wrong with the strategy, and he may have been better off without one.

That raises the question of what the commission actually does. One thing it does do is get offside with every other Government department. It has just published a document about the different roles that different institutions might take. The document looks like it has been written by probably a second-year policy analyst, who no doubt has sat at the Minister’s knee, listened to all the jargon, and gone off to put it in the word processor. It is full of all sorts of odd expressions, but that covers up a fundamental strategic contradiction within that document, and also within the commission.

In practice, no one in the tertiary sector takes much notice of the commission. The tertiary sector used to be hopeful that somehow this steering strategy would amount to something, but it has now become hopeless, because it found the commission is hopeless. The commission talks, and talks, and talks, and when it has finished talking, it reports, and reports, and reports. I think there have been 11 or 12 reports in the last 4 or 5 years.

I understand that what the commission is trying to do is decide what direction tertiary education should take. Government departments have some interesting comments on it. I want to quote Te Puni Kōkiri, which is not a department that everyone in Parliament takes a lot of notice of, but it made this comment: “It seems to us that when students are making decisions about what course of study to undertake, it is unlikely that aligning it with the tertiary education strategy will be uppermost in their mind.”

Well, I could not have put it better myself. The Minister is trying to devise a machine that I call “the revenge of the middle-management”. If people who have been in big organisations who then get into Parliament have been middle-management in those organisations, they believe that the boss always got it wrong. So they invent some machine that will make all the right decisions and prove that they were right. This is about tens of thousands of young New Zealanders making decisions, and they are not making decisions willy-nilly, but decisions for which they pay tens of thousands of dollars.

Why would the Tertiary Education Commission know better? The answer is that it does not. It does not matter how much data the commission collects, how detailed the profiles are, or how much it signals, facilitates, and relationship-builds—which I gather is its function; that is what one does when one has no authority and no control—it will never be able to get the right answer. That is because tertiary education these days is so dynamic, so changeable, and so much driven—as it should be—by generally young people’s choices, that by the time the commission catches up with what has happened, it is too late, because it cannot change it.

The community funding is exactly the best example of that. By the time the commission caught up, the $80 million blowout was out of the bag. It was too late. The fraudulent enrolments had already happened, the conflicts of interest had already conflicted, and the commission still cannot do much about it. What it does is ring up the culprits to ask whether they have done anything wrong, which is like asking burglars whether they have burgled a house and they say they have not. The commission rings up the culprits, who say that it is not right and that they did not do any of those nasty things, and the Minister goes away reassured.

So what is the strategy all about? Well, it has crumbled. It has lost credibility in the sector. The Minister has lost credibility, and I want to know what he will do about that. He has spent hundreds of millions of public dollars on this strategy over 5 years—for nothing. Was it for this document that has come out, which was meant to be the Landscape document but is something else? It has been roundly criticised by every Government department, and we need some answers.

The debate around education, which seems to be coming to an end, has largely consisted of Bill English—who would know about crumbling—talking about crumbling, and Ms Coddington talking about the Teachers Council. There was a little bit of a discussion about Learning Media and other good things that are going on, and now members are back to the Tertiary Education Commission. So I guess I will spend most of my time on the Tertiary Education Commission, and take up the invitation of Bill English, who was desperately interested in this matter. He was so interested that I guess he will take another call straight after this so he can be part of it. I will invite him to take another call at the end of these 5 minutes to use up the rest of that time in the completion of his so-called demolition of the tertiary education strategy.

The basic proposition is this: if a nation is to move towards a more strategic approach to tertiary education, it has to have someone to do it. This is not Nigeria, so therefore we will not run it as a Government department. Therefore, there has to be an intermediate body. That is what the Welsh do, what the British do, and what California does—one could go on and on. Every country that has moved towards this kind of model has had to have an intermediate body that stands one step removed from the Government, so it can have the independence from Government policy it needs, and one step removed from the sector, so it can satisfy the need for the Government to know that there is a body out there that is scrutinising and doing its job properly.

I ask National members to get up and tell us whether they will run a strategic approach to tertiary education, rather than return to a market-based approach. Will Mr English tell us, when he takes his next call, whether he will take the Tertiary Education Commission and repeal the legislation that underlies it?

If we are to have a strategic approach, someone has to do it. We cannot go back to the market. I did not hear anything about that—all I heard from the National Party is that it wants to give more direction. It wants to tell universities what to teach. It wants to tell polytechnics what to do. These are autonomous organisations in a democratic society, and I will never put this Government in a situation whereby it will dictate what those organisations do. We want them to be autonomous organisations. I ask Mr English, when he takes his next call, to take up that challenge.

What has the National Party done over the last little while? The Tertiary Education Commission has been in business for a little over a year. Mr English has not been the leader of the National Party for a little over a year, and I do not know whether he has done anything. I have not seen anything. Now and again he pops up in the Chamber. Now and again he does a speech somewhere, but I cannot remember him accomplishing one thing.

Unlike him, in a little over a year, the Tertiary Education Commission has completed its first round of charters—523 of them are approved. It has completed its interim profiles for last year for tertiary education institutions, industry training organisations, and the larger private trainers. It has just completed one of the most stunning examples of policy in the last 4 years under this Government—the Performance-based Research Fund. I know that we debate back and forwards now and again—and I am looking at Maurice Williamson. I know that for many years Maurice Williamson thought we had to have a strategic approach to tertiary education research. We now have it. It is a class act. Right across the world, I am told by Sir Howard Newby, the person who runs the Higher Education Funding Council for England, that this is a class piece of work. It is better than the research assessment exercise, which is about to go into the last thing again. Who did that? The Tertiary Education Commission did that huge piece of work.

The Private Training Establishments Strategic Priorities Fund has now been through two rounds of spending. That fund was capped by the work of the Tertiary Education Commission. We have had completed rounds for the Innovation and Development Fund, the E-Learning Collaborative Development Fund, and the Partnerships for Excellence. We have had the Growth and Innovation Pilot Initiatives round—the second one is underway—the Building Research Capability in the Social Sciences round has been completed, and the Pacific peoples strategy and the Māori education strategy have now been put in place.

The Centres of Research Excellence programme is run by the Tertiary Education Commission, and we have had a 9.3 percent increase in industry trainees since it took over that strategy. We have the Modern Apprenticeships programme, the Gateway programme—which it administers across the country for us—and it runs the whole industry training strategy. I could go on and on through pages and pages of work.

The Tertiary Education Commission has been going for a little over a year. Am I happy with it? If its officials worked any harder, I am not sure they would go home, at all. All organisations as big as this will have teething problems as they work issues through with the sector. An issue like 5.1 worries this Government because we want to make sure we can get all of this under control.

Reports noted.

New Zealand Trade Development Board

Report noted.

Abortion Supervisory Committee