Estimates Debate — Vote Tertiary Education

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 Ōrewa 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 $64,000 gross; now it is $55,026. 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—

Tēnā koe, Mr Chair. I would like to talk a little about the tertiary sector. To say that the sector is under stress is almost an understatement. Right throughout this year, for staff, for students, for general staff, for academics, and for technical staff, everybody is feeling the stress of an under-resourced, underappreciated, and under-supported sector. This is despite the fact that, as the previous speaker, Tracey Martin, noted, we are constantly told of the significance and importance of the tertiary sector in producing the New Zealand we want, in terms of economic development, and in terms of building a stronger, better society. Unfortunately, the rhetoric is not matched by the support, by the Budget, as we see from the documents we got earlier this year.

The increased funding committed for the 2012-13 year to the tertiary sector looks like a 3.5 percent increase on the previous year. We know, of course, that with the growing demand for tertiary education at universities, at polytechs, at private training establishments, and elsewhere, there is a greater demand, costs have gone up, and, actually, the 3.5 percent nominal increase looks very much like a cut for the sector. I think that the lack of support and the lack of resourcing of the sector reflect the fact that this Government and this Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment seem to think that tertiary institutions are more in the nature of machines for processing people. You plug people in one end and you drop lumps of information on them. They swallow those lumps of information and come out the other end with a degree and a credential.

Actually, teaching and learning are not like that. You do not start with a clean slate. Institutions of learning are communities. They are learning communities, or ought to be. I know this because I worked in that sector for 12 or 13 years. When you get a genuine community of academics, of support staff, of funders, of teachers, and, of course, of students, that is when tertiary education actually works. Tertiary institutions are not simply machines for processing, for delivering a commodity called education, because education is not a commodity, it is a lifelong process of give and take, teaching and learning, and ought to be seen in that context.

One of the obvious symptoms, of course, of the lack of support for the tertiary sector is the announcement this afternoon that Canterbury University is going to be obliged to lose some 150 staff over the next 3 years, and that is a great tragedy in many ways. I had a meeting with some senior academics from Canterbury just a couple of weeks ago and they flagged what they knew was likely to be a fairly uncomfortable future for them. They gave me a copy of this document entitled What If an Earthquake Made Us All Smarter?. Being good Cantabrians, they have not sat around waiting for somebody to come to them with a solution. They have been thinking and working incredibly hard to look for a positive future, to rebuild that university, and not only to make it as good as it was—which was very good—but actually to make it better, more sustainable, and more resilient.

They make the point in this document, which has been around for a few weeks, or a month or two at least, that “Without significant investment, the earthquakes foreshadow a concerning future for [the University of Canterbury] over the next 10 years.” The announcement today indicates that that concerning future is a reality. I have some sympathy for the vice-chancellor, Rod Carr. I am sure he did not enjoy making that announcement today that 150 academics and/or other staff can expect to lose their jobs over the following 3 years.

Canterbury University is in an incredible position to exploit a tragedy, quite frankly. These academics understand this. They talk about having a centre of research, a “global centre of research and teaching in earthquake studies and disaster resilience and recovery;”. Canterbury has always had a very strong reputation. The Centre for Advanced Engineering, along with Scion and other agencies, has been doing a great deal of very good work around building in timber. We know that there is a laboratory, a living laboratory called Canterbury where we could discover how it is that communities rebuild, how they come back—[Interruption]

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): Order! There is a telephone ringing in the Chamber. This is not a tollbooth or a telephone box; this is a debating chamber. The member who has it, please turn it off.

There is a wonderful opportunity to attract academics internationally to provide opportunities for our own academics and our own students to engage in action research, which is research intended to understand, to discover things as they happen, and to feed back projects, processes—

I thank the previous speaker, David Clendon, for his lecture as to what a university does and also for his assertion that this Government is about rhetoric when it comes to tertiary education. I would like to now dispel that with some facts. I would have thought that somebody who lectured at a university might be focused on a few facts, because facts can be quite helpful to discern the difference between what is actually happening and what could be known as rhetoric. So I would like to make a few comments, if I could, because I think this Government has made very good progress in strengthening our tertiary system. Here is some of the evidence. In 2012 we are funding the highest number of core tertiary places that have ever been funded in New Zealand universities and the wider tertiary system—13,200 more places in 2012 than in 2008. It is not “bums on seats”, either, as we are also funding for performance, for completing courses, and for qualifications, and every institution has 5 percent of its tuition funding at risk so that they focus on that.

We are getting better results for priority learners than has been done previously for those who have struggled historically. For example, Māori at university now have 5,500 more places than in 2008, and their completion rates are up, too.

We are making great progress in literacy and numeracy. I note that the member for New Zealand First was concerned about that. Well, she will be pleased to know that the expectation out of embedded literacy and numeracy at foundation levels means that this year there will be 122,000 people taking courses at foundation level with embedded literacy and numeracy, which is up from 36,000, 2 years ago, and is up from 15,000 just after we came into office.

We have also made great progress in simplifying and reducing qualifications in New Zealand, which was a big issue when we arrived in office. People were crying out for a reduction in the number of qualifications between levels 1 and 6. We are down to 3,500, and we will be down to about 1,300 by the end of 2014.

We have also made some very good progress in the industry training space, which is very, very important because the industry training space was not going at all well when we came into office: 53 percent of trainees in 2008 and 54 percent in 2009 achieved no credits at all—no credits. They were phantom trainees. They were trainees of the previous Government’s imagination. We have since seen a real lift in performance of industry training organisations. We have had a 19 percent increase in credit achievements from 2008 to 2010, and the provisional results for last year now suggest that we are getting a 70 percent credit rate achievement in industry training. So that is a good result, too.

On top of that we had the Green member saying that New Zealand universities were poor and struggling. Well, I can tell him the good news. They may have been in 2008, but in 2012 we have now got university incomes up by 13.5 percent, in the global financial crisis. So they may have been struggling 4 years ago, but their incomes 13.5 percent higher today, with a 2.9 percent increase in university incomes in the last year alone. So that should help Mr Clendon with his problems with the facts.

New Zealand’s tertiary education system is healthy, it is getting healthier, and it is also doing it during the global financial crisis. And in Budget 2012 we are investing more. We are investing an additional $42 million in engineering over the next 4 years. We are investing an extra $17 million in science teaching at universities, we are putting $100 million extra into research at universities, we are putting in $30 million to reduce the funding gap between public and private tertiary providers, and we are putting in 3,000 more Youth Guarantee places over the next 4 years. That is what we are doing to invest in tertiary education. So we have a member popping up, criticising the Government for being about rhetoric and telling stories, and then doing exactly what he said the Government was doing. Then he sits down, and he does not realise that all these facts say that the New Zealand tertiary system is going much better.

What is more, we are supporting Canterbury University. Yes, it is in times of trouble. We have maintained its funding. We have made sure that we have stood behind it. We are working with the university in terms of investment opportunities going forward, so that it can lift itself again to actually invest in areas where there is strong student support. We are taking that business case forward. Yes, Canterbury University has had difficulties. One of its faculties has lost 1,000 students as a result of the earthquake, and the member seems to be suggesting that it should not adjust its staffing at all to reflect its new reality. Well, it is tough, and I feel for those people who are not necessarily going to be able to stay in that role, but for the sake of the other 2,000 people working at that university and the thousands and thousands of students, we have to acknowledge the reality of what happened. We have to invest in the future, but we have to take it forward, and we have to be realistic about what is going on.

We are investing significantly in the tertiary education system. Before I sit down I would like to make one comment for Tracey Martin, the speaker before Mr Clendon, who criticised the idea of international students coming to New Zealand as if it was a bad thing. Well, it is not a bad thing. It is good for this country. It is good for this country to have the people-to-people links that international students bring to this country when they come in. Frankly, when the Chinese, the Indians, students from the other Asian communities, the English, the Europeans, and those from the US come here, they do some learning. Yes, they provide some income for New Zealanders, and when they go back they are lifelong friends for New Zealand. That is helpful to have when you are a small country in a small waka at the bottom of the world. International education, despite what New Zealand First members think, is not bad. It is good for this country, actually. Those members need to realise that it is a positive thing that we invest in it and, happily, it does not take away any places from domestic students. So it is all good stuff.

So you can relax, Mr Clendon, because the tertiary system is in good hands. If you want to debate facts, I am happy to do so at any time.

I call the honourable member—

💬 Dr Paul Hutchison: I am taking a short call on the tertiary education estimates—

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): I have not called the member yet. I have not called the member.

💬 Dr Paul Hutchison: Oh! I thought you had.

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): I see you were out of the starting gates really early this time. I call the honourable member.

💬 Dr Paul Hutchison: Oh, you have called me without naming me.

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): I have called the honourable member.

It is an absolute pleasure to take a call on the tertiary education estimates. I must say I thought it was somewhat mean-spirited and sad that Mr Hipkins from the Labour Party denied me a call on the science and innovation part of these estimates, because tertiary education and science and innovation are inextricably linked, and we have a great story to tell. It is very, very sad that the Labour Party is not interested in this vital area for New Zealand’s future, for our economic growth—

💬 Chris Hipkins: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. As you well know, members are entitled to object to leave being sought, and it is not in order to then go into a rant and a rave about that. If the member is too incompetent to get up and seek the call—

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): Order! The member was doing very well up to a certain point, and then he went a step too far. But I notice that the member is coming to the debate.

Absolutely. I am talking about the estimates for tertiary education, because it is all very good news. What I wanted to make very clear was that the total, direct cross-portfolio science, innovation, and research funding, which includes tertiary education, has risen significantly—17 percent year on year since 2008—and this is in pretty difficult economic times. So the record is one of substantial progress.

What is of particular note is that this Government has indeed recognised that New Zealand’s future economic growth cannot be dependent just on primary products and cannot be dependent just on tourism, but, indeed, is highly dependent on value-added products, whether they are manufacturing or our agrifood products, which this Government has indeed concentrated on. I wanted to just make the comment that the Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment did—that these estimates include $100 million of additional research funding, in terms of the Performance-based Research Fund, to $300 million by 2016.

💬 Chris Hipkins: Judith wants to get on to ACC.

This is hugely welcomed—hugely welcomed, Mr Hipkins—by the various universities, because this is the one area where they do indeed have the opportunity to do this sort of research. And this is the funding that creates the idea flow that is absolutely vital for innovation and its ultimate commercialisation in New Zealand, and I would hope, Mr Hipkins, that in the future you may take some interest in it—Mr Hipkins?

💬 Chris Hipkins: Yes.

So the point is, Mr Hipkins, be well aware that this Government has cemented in a substantial $100 million in these estimates over the next 4 years. As well as that, there has been this increase of $42 million in operating funding for engineering; an additional $17 million operating funding for science students, which is a 2 percent funding increase per equivalent full-time student; and $100 million, as we have said, for the Performance-based Research Fund, which is hugely important for the wider science and innovation budget. Clearly, this Government has made a great focus on this area over the last 4 years, making a transformation from a time when New Zealand had really forgotten about the area of science and innovation. The percentage of GDP that was invested had been static for 9 to 10 long years, and now, fortunately, it has come up.

So I just want to finish by once again saying that this is an area that, under this National Government, has seen a renaissance in funding, has seen a renaissance in focus, and indeed is going to make a huge difference in terms of the economic development and the ability to retain graduates who go through our tertiary education system as we have it right now.

Vote agreed to.

Vote ACC