Education (Export Education Levy) Amendment Bill

National members have opposed this bill, and when I last spoke I gave a number of technical reasons that were to do with its retrospectivity and unfairness. But one of the reasons why I strongly oppose the bill is that it expresses some basic philosophy of the current Government. I will tell members why. Labour works on a very simple recipe for Government: “Reward those people whom you regard as your loyal friends and punish everyone else—and do it with cash.” That is what is happening here.

This bill is all about punishing the people whom Government members do not like—that is, the private providers of education for international students. It does not matter whether the provider is a public provider; they will just mess up the market by sending a Minister to China—and that has cut into their income, which they are really regretting. When the students get to New Zealand, the public providers are left alone but the private providers are not. There has never been an explanation for this, because the explanation is publicly untenable. It is simply that Trevor Mallard and the Labour Party do not like people who invest private capital into education. They regard that as an abomination of education. The fact that private providers attract thousands of students is by the by. So this bill to levy those providers—and it does so in an unfair manner—is expressive of the Government’s habitual instinct to punish the people whom it believes do not vote for it.

We are passing this bill on a day when it has been revealed that the Government has decided to spend $8 million of education money on rewarding its friends—the teachers who have chosen to join the Post Primary Teachers Association (PPTA). They are to get a $500 cash payment, which has nothing to do with their merits as teachers, nothing to do with the needs of the children they are teaching, but purely to do with the fact they have joined the teachers union. The other 3,500 teachers, who do exactly the same job, will not get a cent.

💬 Simon Power: Not a dime!

Not a dime! Through the school boards, parents will be asked to make up the difference of $500 per teacher for those who have not joined the union. At least when we have talked about the education export levy, the Minister has given some explanation for why he has done it. I do not agree with the explanation. But when we talked to him about the levy on parents to pay the $500 for the teachers who are not members of the union, there was no explanation whatsoever. So the bill, as it winds to the end of its sad and lonely path through this Parliament, is expressive of those basic philosophical prejudices held by the Government. It is expressive of the way in which it rewards its friends by giving them cash and punishes its enemies by taxing or levying them.

The House needs to be reminded that this bill started out in much worse shape than it is now. When Mr Mallard is sitting in his office with his officials, away from the glare of the common-sense views of the public and the Opposition, his prejudices are expressed in a much more virulent form. Fortunately, through the process of public scrutiny, the excesses of this legislation have been dealt with—but not all of them. Although the Government has ironed out one or two of the worst aspects of the bill, it has decided that it must persist with it—even though no one thinks this levy is a good idea.

The international education export industry is vital to New Zealand. Our schools collect $125 million worth of school fees from it. The deficit in our schools amounts to $28 million. Imagine how bad it would be without the international students. They contributed $125 million in 2002, and, probably, they will provide more in 2003. It is unfortunate that the Minister keeps travelling to foreign countries, because that is what is putting students off from coming to New Zealand, and it is unfortunate that when they do come they will have to pay higher fees in order to meet this ridiculous levy—a levy based purely on the prejudice of the Labour Party.

I rise to support the Education (Export Education Levy) Amendment Bill. I do so because this bill provides protection for the international export education institutions. As Mr Bill English has mentioned, we have a $2 billion industry, which is a very important sector of our export business. It is important that we have a protection in place for the international students who come to study in New Zealand, because we have developed a great reputation internationally for our education system. We now have over 80,000 students who need protection from any of the problems that some of these institutions have faced in the past.

I think the only issue that arose at the Education and Science Committee was clause 5, and the Minister has agreed that it be removed. I believe this bill will now provide a very suitable protection for our education export institutions. I am pleased to support it, and I commend it to the House.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to oppose the Education (Export Education Levy) Amendment Bill. On behalf of the only non-aligned political party in this House, I want to outline, first of all, the negative implications not just for the segment of the education industry that we are directly talking about tonight but for New Zealand education in general. I note that the commentary on the bill states: “The main purpose of the bill is to provide statutory protection of New Zealand’s international reputation as a desirable location”—

💬 Pansy Wong: Ha, ha!

—the laughter is quite well merited—“where international students can study without educational or financial risk.” That was the stated intention of the bill. But when I turn to the bill I see that almost as much of the bill has been struck out as remains. One would wish the Minister and his advisers in good sense would take the whole bill back and rethink the whole issue—that is, the background to this bill.

The Minister and his advisers seem not to have had any regard for the issue of education providers and their concerns. There is no seeming recognition about plant, ongoing capital expenditure, quality staffing, and the high cost of the on-flowing information and publicity—that is, all those trade issues that go with the words “desirable” and “educational organisation”, including host visits. All of that is put aside in this mean bill before us tonight.

This bill treats all institutions in exactly the same way. Those who are confident and sound and have established, at great personal cost and over time, a reputation with regard to their vision of quality private education according to the registration and qualifications as set by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, are treated in exactly the same way as those institutions of dubious value, of which, at this point, there are at least four that have failed. In other words, the ministry has come to this time with a new principle, and that principle is this: the prudent protect the imprudent. It almost goes alongside the Associate Minister responsible for tertiary education, who, confronted by the fact of irregular behaviour and funding by some tertiary institutions, goes ahead and treats the whole lot in the same cavalier fashion, without any regard for those who had worked according to the funding requirements and met the targeted outcomes.

One of those institutions was Telford, which has been in the news recently. It is a small training institution that is going to be severely embarrassed by the $400,000 loss it will now have to look at over the next 3 years because of this new principle that the prudent protect the imprudent. All those who have not worked according to the ministry’s dictates with regard to tertiary education come under the same broad sweep of the Minister’s draconian hand. New Zealand First did not support the bill, and has not supported this bill since the export education levy was first introduced. That is largely because it was very poorly done. As I said earlier, this levy was too much of an impost on legitimate providers, who had no option but to pay. They were given no ownership of the concept and took no real part in the process that decided the conditions and clauses in the bill. In other words, this has been a decree from on high. Export education providers can say quite honestly, and did say, they had no say in who can provide this form of education, but when the can is out there, ready to collapse, they carry the can.

As I said earlier, the prudent protect the imprudent. Those who do right are penalised, exactly the same as those who have shown the failure we have seen over the last 2 years. The other issue that has emerged in this bill is with regard to registered private training establishments. This bill, in its passage through the various stages, has highlighted the complete inability of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to do its task, which is, mainly, to monitor and analyse the actual business of accreditation, auditing, and monitoring of the export education sector. In fact, in the brief time I was on the Education and Science Committee, when the Hon Brian Donnelly was away, I thought the authority’s attitude was nothing less than cavalier, to say the least. When I see just recently that same attitude with regard to the excellent school that Cambridge High School is, I fear for the future of that authority.

If there is to be accountability in the export education sector, it should either be market-driven or there should be effective monitoring agencies able to detect the warning signs and act on them early. The New Zealand Qualifications Authority did not do so. We know, of course, that although the private providers will pay the levy, ultimately the students will bear the cost through increased course costs. In turn, that will make what has been a growth industry—as has already been highlighted—with significant impacts upon international education and more to come, less competitive in what is now an international student market. We know that in Australia, Canada, the United States, and Britain, to name some countries, there is active competition for this same market that we have. That comes against a background, in some countries, of Government support and subsidies. Therefore, this bill, with the impost it will put upon the private training provider, puts us behind the eight ball in that respect.

Another aspect of the bill is that, at the end, any money left over is not to be spent on the purposes outlined in the bill; it can be used for any purpose, at all. That is very untidy and sits very poorly with New Zealand First. So there is a lesson for the Minister and his advisers, and it is this: to correctly analyse the problems of an industry such as this one, they need to talk to the providers appropriately and with a due recognition of, in this case, the emerging challenge of having to regain respect and restate credibility for the provision of education in this country, and not resort to improper retrospective legislation. As we all know, the Minister found that when there was a collapse of one institution, Carich Training Centre, his ministry’s power to act was invalid, so he resorted to what we have before us—a blatant attempt to retrospectively try to get it right. The answer is that he has it wrong. He has it wrong in a very large way.

The impact of the Minister’s inability to correctly analyse the situation and his inability to talk in the appropriate manner—a manner that should have brought the private providers to a recognition of the mutual problem and worked out with them answers that were mutually acceptable—means we have a result that New Zealand First could not support, notwithstanding the fact that we are strong supporters of the high-quality education that can be enjoyed in this country and has been provided by private providers. This bill is not the answer and therefore we believe that it should not proceed further.

I rise on behalf of the Greens to make a very short comment on the third reading of this bill. The Greens have always been very concerned about the nature of export education, and the potential for exploitation of those students who are brought over here to participate in and purchase educational services. None the less, our concerns about the export education levy were directed initially to ensuring that it would be used to support those international students rather than fund the general education budget or vote.

This bill is very narrow in its scope. It ensures that international students who are unfortunately victims of institutions not capable of managing their financial circumstances do not suffer for that. We think it is important that they are properly supported, and we therefore support this bill and its purposes.

I rise on behalf of United Future to say that we are opposed to this bill. When I look back over all the readings and speeches as well as the select committee proceedings on this bill, I see one thing that stands out, and it is one of the reasons United Future certainly opposes the bill—the Government has got offside with a major and important slice of the export education industry.

This is a bill that puts the Government on one side and everybody else on the other side, so that private language schools and private training establishments have been antagonised. In fact, when I looked at the bill again this evening I wondered whether it could have been renamed the “How to Upset and Infuriate Export Education Providers in the Private Sector Bill”. That would have been a nice name for it.

It is one of those bills that set out to divide and conquer. It is an aggressive bill. We were told, as others have illustrated already, that this bill was put into place to address the issue of accountability. Yet we understand the word “accountability” to mean, for instance, that if I make a mistake then I am responsible. But if someone else makes a mistake, how can I be responsible for that person’s mistake if there is no connection between the two of us?

That is one of the outstanding problems this bill fails to address. It actually states that if a private provider fails, then those good providers who have nothing to do with that failure are penalised. For whatever reasons the provider fails, everyone is penalised.

All the way through the passage of this bill we had submissions. Every submitter who came to the Education and Science Committee said they were opposed to it. Accountability means that a method needs to be chosen to help everybody through the dilemma this industry faces, or has faced, but the method the Government has chosen is really that of putting a tax on everybody. We all know that when a tax or levy is imposed, people become suspicious. In fact, trust is broken in any sort of relationship when taxes are levied on people, groups, or companies that were never consulted before those taxes were imposed upon them.

When submitters came and met the select committee, they offered a number of cooperative suggestions and ideas, which, if they had been taken up, would have provided a simple answer to the issues rather than put an antagonistic levy or tax on the entire private sector. One of those ideas, as I recall, was a call for a better bonding system for the control of those who enter the industry, in the way any profession holds the people within its group accountable—for instance, the Institute of Chartered Accountants, the Law Society, or whatever else. Another suggestion—and a very cooperative one, I felt—which could easily have got the buy-in of everybody in the industry, was an insurance programme.

Others suggested that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority should have more teeth and more ability to exercise its powers, or should be given powers to close down private training establishments if they were trading while insolvent. In fact, that suggestion was just ignored, as were a number of other suggestions given to the select committee.

We find it embarrassing that this particular bill is an impost upon the entire industry. It is a huge and exciting industry but every time the Government has interfered in it we have noticed that a hiccup has occurred. For instance, when the Minister went on a visit to China there was a further hiccup or blip in the industry.

This tax bill will penalise only the good institutions, and has therefore already affected the industry negatively. I do not know why the Government did not take a more professional approach with this whole exercise. I am not sure whether the opportunity has been lost for a recovery.

United Future would like to suggest that the bill should be tossed out even tonight and should not go through, and that the Minister should apologise, withdraw the whole thing and start again, and get a more cooperative programme going. That is the support approach, which, by the way, the New Zealand Vice-Chancellors Committee suggested was a good way in which to handle the whole thing. Although that body is not even a private training enterprise, it saw that the bill was an incredibly unbusinesslike and unfriendly approach to the whole exercise.

The Government ought to have encouraged all providers to strive for excellence. So as a result of that not happening, United Future does not feel any obligation to support this bill. It is bad legislation.

The ACT party is also opposed to this legislation. I agree with Mr Ogilvy from United Future that we should have thrown it out right at the beginning. This legislation illustrates the Minister’s and the Government’s attitude to education in this country. I use the legal profession as an analogy. The legal profession self-regulates. The Law Society is the gatekeeper as to who can be registered as a lawyer and practise law in this country. Sure, the Law Society is backed up by statutory legislation. Nevertheless, the law societies are the gatekeepers, and they punish their own very swiftly when they are complained about or when they do not keep up the high standards required of them. There is no better way to keep standards high than having peer groups as the gatekeepers, the people who come down in judgment on those who misbehave.

This legislation deals with only the private education providers. They are the only ones that are being taxed. The responsible ones are being punished in order to deal with those that might in the future let students down or might not obey the legislation regarding trust accounts etc. Why did the Minister not introduce legislation, for instance, to tax all the polytechnics when taxpayers forked out $50 million for Wanganui Polytechnic? Why was he not consistent then? Why did he not bring in legislation then to tax all the polytechnics? Why is he punishing just the private providers? All those people out there who work very hard in the education provision industry—international, or export education, as we like to call it—do keep high standards and do not use money for things other than what it is paid in for, but they will now be punished. Where is the incentive for institutions to adhere to the rules if they know that a slush fund exists, which will grow bigger each year, to bail them out if they go under?

Instead, we have the New Zealand Qualifications Authority as the gatekeeper. Let us look at the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. Members should remember that the legislation was brought in largely because of the Modern Age Institute of Learning and Carich, which both went belly-up. We have here the New Zealand Qualifications Authority’s report of the quality audit conducted in February 2003 on the Modern Age Institute. The summary states: “The first NZQA audit of Modern Age was held in September 2001 and found 14 requirements of QA standard 1 not met. The current audit also found 14 non-compliances and made four recommendations.”

That is the institution that will be charged under this legislation with being the gatekeeper for those that wish to supply export education. That is the organisation that cannot even monitor or keep quality control of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA), as we saw with Cambridge High School. What we have seen with that school is a policy that is so ideologically driven that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority would bend over backwards to spin all its audits and quality checks to show that what it believes is successful is a success.

The NCEA is a failure, just as this will be a failure under this legislation. It will be a failure because the New Zealand Qualifications Authority is not capable of monitoring anything at all. In fact, it should not even have the word “Qualifications” in its name. It is not about qualifying anything. It is just about quantity. What the New Zealand Qualifications Authority is pushing all the time is bums on seats, and never mind whether there is any learning going on—just so-called qualifications.

Questions have been asked that have never been answered before this legislation was brought in and pushed through the House. For instance, I asked the Minister in September 2003—and the question has never been answered—why the New Zealand Qualifications Authority bothers to carry out audits of private institutions if it is not prepared to take action before the financial situation reaches a crisis point, as happened with the Modern Age Institute of Learning. Why did the New Zealand Qualifications Authority not advise the 500 or so students of the Modern Age Institute, when it carried out its audits, that they should not hand over any more fees to the institution? Why? There is no answer—silence. They do not know and they do not care. They are just fattening cattle for beef. That is what this Government thinks of export education.

What does the Minister do? He rushes off to China to try to patch up the reputation of the safety of New Zealand schools. China puts pressure on the Minister and he rushes off there. What about New Zealand students? When does the Minister rush off to anywhere in New Zealand when parents of students in New Zealand are concerned about the quality and safety of their children’s education? Never. He does not. He does not go to places like Taihape, New Plymouth or Taranaki, Invercargill, or the West Coast. He does not care and could not care. He just rushes it through.

Last, there are two more things. The other reason why this legislation has been introduced was because of Carich, another institution that went under. Carich was a training company that had the famous Carich’s Computer Gym class, which led to a national certificate in computing and business administration. Why did the numbers soar at that institution? Why did that organisation get into so much trouble? Well, it was because it had a fully funded New Zealand Qualifications Authority – approved Computer Gym course, fully subsidised by the Ministry of Education, that gave every enrollee a free desktop computer. Sixteen-hundred computers were given out—so many that the computer company said it was the biggest single order ever given to a locally owned assembler. It is no wonder that these outfits get into trouble when this Government endorses policy that has incentives such as free give-aways to enrol people so that organisations can get more taxpayer funding.

I conclude by saying that heaven help us if we get to the stage that the UK has got to with international fee-paying students. The UK’s Sunday Times in July stated: “For sale: university places go to cash-rich foreigners”. In the UK now, if people have the money and are from overseas but do not have the qualifications, they can get in ahead of domestic students who have higher qualifications but do not have the money. That is the route we are going down in this country with export education with this sort of legislation, and that is why the ACT party is opposed to it.

I rise to support this excellent piece of legislation.

It is obvious that the Hon Chris Carter has not even bothered to take the time to read through the bill, and that is why he had only one sentence to deliver. Labour must have known this legislation was bad, and that is why the first, second, and third readings of this bill have all taken place as the very last item of business in the House. Labour wants to get away from scrutiny by the media, but I am sure there are still members of the public who are interested in export education who are hanging on to every word of the debate that is taking place right now.

The public was assured by the Minister of Education, the Hon Trevor Mallard, at the end of last year, when this bill was first introduced, that the bill would improve the international community’s confidence in New Zealand’s export education. Well, the number of international students in language schools in New Zealand has plummeted by a third, we were told by Statistics New Zealand. Of course, some of the reasons for the fall are due to external factors, such as the rising dollar and increased competition internationally for students. However, the high-profile collapses of some educational providers in New Zealand, the constant changes to the Labour Government’s immigration policy, and the protracted procedure involved in obtaining student visas all contribute to the loss of New Zealand’s competitive edge compared with other countries, particularly in attracting students from China and Korea.

Let us reflect for a moment on the recent, very high-profile saga relating to National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) credits at Cambridge High School. We learnt once again that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority has audited Cambridge High School and did not detect any problems. We were told by National’s education spokesman, the Hon Bill English, that in effect the Minister of Education assured the Education and Science Committee that the authority has monitored the way NCEA credits are administered by the various schools. Well, so far, the authority has not provided answers about its role in not detecting the problem at Cambridge High School. So where is the authority’s accountability?

Let us come back to the export education sector. In similar instances, the authority has not provided answers so far for its failure to detect problems in the high-profile collapses of private educational providers, despite the fact that staff in those schools and other people had brought those concerns to the authority’s attention. Curiously, the authority seems to be reluctant to take action and, to date, it has not fronted up to take responsibility for their failings. After all, the New Zealand Qualifications Authority is responsible for accrediting and monitoring export education providers, but it does not seem to want to take responsibility for its own failings. Instead, this bill was introduced to make private providers pay for the failure of their competitors.

This bill should never have been introduced into the House. The passage of the bill will create a totally undesirable precedent. Think about this: private educational providers are to pay and be punished for the failure of their competitors, when they have no say over who can join the export education sector. The authority that can decide who can join the sector in the first place is the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, and the authority’s job is to monitor the quality of the provider and whether those providers adhere to guidelines. So the price of the failure of the gatekeeper—the New Zealand Qualifications Authority—is to be paid by the private educational provider.

Apart from the lack of confidence due to the lack of robust accreditation and monitoring systems in the export education sector to ensure the delivery of a quality standard of academic and pastoral care for international students, another reason that has contributed to the drop in the number of international students is the lack of understanding by the Minister of Education of the needs of those students. Many students and their parents write to me, complaining that graduates cannot get a job after finishing their study because employers are reluctant to give them a job offer. Employers are put off by the uncertainty and the length of time involved in the New Zealand Immigration Service issuing work permits. As a result, international students cannot secure opportunities to gain work experience in New Zealand.

When students approach the New Zealand Immigration Service for a work visa so they can look for a job, they are told they need to have a job offer to secure a work visa. The students are like footballs, being passed from one post to another. International students and their parents get the impression that New Zealand is interested only in making money out of the students, rather than in being fair and giving the students at least the chance to gain work experience before they return to their homeland. When we think about it, those graduates would make ideal potential migrants to New Zealand after they complete their studies here. Why not think outside the square and introduce a job search visa to enable international students to gain work experience? In the long term, we may even gain some good migrants.

It is time that the Minister of Education did some homework and came to grips with the $2.2 billion export education industry. Instead, the Minister of Education has gone into overdrive and announced scholarships to attract international students from overseas. That is interesting, is it not? He has chosen to overlook the fee-paying international students who are prepared to come and pay for their tuition here. Instead of doing his homework, this Minister of Education would rather spend taxpayers’ money to offer scholarships to international students and to put spin doctors—under the name of “counsellors”—in overseas posts. If the Minister of Education does his homework, he will understand that we need to ensure that the export education sector delivers quality education at a competitive price. We need a well-thought-out visa policy, effective processing of student visas, and to provide work opportunities for international students. Funding spin doctors overseas will not solve the problem.

The New Zealand Qualifications Authority should work with the export education sector and learn to trust it. After all, the success of the export education sector was the result of a lot of good work by various institutions. Most language schools and other institutions have been in operation for a while and have the good of the students and New Zealand at heart. They do not deserve to be treated this way by the Labour Government. If the Labour Government is serious about wanting to restore the confidence of the international community towards the export education sector, it should allow and encourage the Education and Science Committee to conduct an inquiry into the New Zealand Qualifications Authority’s capacity to do its job properly.

This bill was brought to Parliament as a knee-jerk reaction to the collapse of both the Modern Age Institute of Learning and Carich New Zealand. Both those institutions were accredited by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, which is the only body that can enrol international students, yet today it has not been held accountable for its failure to do its job. National is totally against the passage of this bill.

The Education (Export Education Levy) Amendment Bill is excellent legislation. I commend it to the House.

This is a bill that, although small in stature, has a significant impact on the education sector, and in particular on those that choose to provide educational opportunities by way of being private providers. We have watched as Deborah Coddington and others—including Mr Bernie Ogilvy from United Future, and Pansy Wong from National—have outlined what peculiar legislation this is. Instead of concentrating the Government’s mind on issues regarding the quality of the courses offered by the various educational providers, this legislation simply isolates one group of providers regardless of the quality of the educational courses that they offer to students. This legislation divides the tertiary education sector between the courses offered by public State-owned providers and those offered by private providers. Unfortunately, the bill does not examine the quality of the product that is offered to students by institutions, nor does it test the quality of courses in a way that would have avoided the fate of the two institutions that collapsed. Because of those collapses, this legislation is now being wheeled in at the last minute as a rescue measure.

The major difficulty with this legislation is that it is simply against private providers and is not in favour of ensuring there is quality education for fee-paying students. What this bill should have done, as my colleague Deborah Coddington pointed out—and this was raised during the second reading and the Committee stage—is to take the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the Tertiary Education Commission and put those two bodies on the rack. Those bodies should have been asked how it came about that two institutions collapsed and lost students’ money during the course of those collapses. More particularly, the Tertiary Education Commission and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority should have been asked about exactly what they were doing at the time of the collapse of the two institutions. But instead of the Minister turning his mind and his focus to the Government authorities that have a statutory responsibility for the quality of courses provided at educational institutions, he simply decided that he would go after the private providers alone.

Members on the Opposition side of the House have consistently said throughout the course of the debate on this bill, which has been lengthy, that that is the wrong way to look at educational questions, because who provides the service, or the course, is not the issue. The issue is not whether the provider is State-owned or privately owned; the issue is whether the student who is paying for the courses provided by an institution is receiving quality education in return for the money that is being pumped into the institution.

The Tertiary Education Commission, which was to have been a light-handed, streamlined strategic steering instrument, now employs 324 people, and in the last 12 months it has spent $7.8 million on consultants and contractors to do the most basic of tasks—that is, to implement the charter and profiles system. That is what the Tertiary Education Commission was supposed to do in the first place, but, no, it has paid $1 million to Burleigh Evatt for the implementation of the charters and profiles system. What was the Tertiary Education Commission doing when the institutions collapsed? Where were Andrew West and his team when that occurred? Where was the New Zealand Qualifications Authority when it occurred? This legislation should focus on the audit and quality control functions of those two institutions, not on punishing private providers per se.

During the same week that we see a bill that will punish private providers about to, presumably, pass through this House, we also learn that the Government has stitched up a deal with the Post Primary Teachers Association, and is to offer only to members of that association a $500 sign-up bonus. Over 3,000 quality, competent teachers who are not members of the association will be left out of that deal. What does that deal do for the quality of the education that our children receive? What does that deal do for the quality of the courses that our children will be taught? It does nothing! All that it does is reward members of the association for their collective bargaining. I know that my colleague Roger Sowry would say that under the Employment Relations Act, which passed through this House under extraordinary urgency in the year 2000, it is contrary to the Act to allow bargaining arrangements to favour members who belong to a union over people who do not belong to a union.

The Government’s intentions in respect of education are crystal-clear this week. We find legislation that slams private providers, and we find dirty deals being done with the Post Primary Teachers Association, but not with teachers who are not members of unions. As my colleague the Hon Roger Sowry asked, where is the good faith in that bargaining arrangement, and where is the good faith in the arrangements that private providers sought out when they set up institutions to provide courses and opportunities for students that the State did not provide? The public providers did not make opportunities available to the students who were seeking those opportunities from private providers. The Minister of Education needs to stand in this House to tell members who are debating this bill that it will not punish just private providers and to tell members that his deal with the Post Primary Teachers Association is not in breach of the Employment Relations Act. I believe that it is in breach of that Act.

This bill is a farce, and the two authorities and organisations that should have been under the gun following the collapse of the two providers are not other private providers, but the Tertiary Education Commission, which is slack at best, and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, which could not even find a chief executive for 18 months because it has been in such a shambles during the last 12 to 15 months. This bill has taken a long time to go through this Parliament, and the reason it has taken such a long time to do so is that it is bad law. It is a bad ideological step to punish providers because of their public or private status, and not to seek out the institutions that will not provide quality education to the students who attend them.

I support the bill.