Latest / Early Edition with Ryan Bridge / Andrew Dickens: The great polytech flip-flop we’re all paying for

Transcript

Andrew Dickens: The great polytech flip-flop we’re all paying for · Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Here we go again. The polyitechs that were centralized by
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: the last government are going to be decentralized by the
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: current mob. So we're not quite going back to the future,
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: but because it's not going to be quite the same
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: as we had before the politicians started tinkering. There will
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: now be ten polytechs run locally. Six others will have
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: to prove their financial viability. But it still feels like
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: we're going back to where we started from and this
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: ideological flip flop that we've been going through is not free.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: So the Labor government allocated hundreds of millions of dollars
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: over several years to support the merger and transformation of
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: the vocational education sector. They started doing this back in
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: twenty twenty. It's five years of it hundreds of millions
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: of dollars. Now NASAL has budgeted another two hundred million
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: dollars to fund the reversal. The key cost drivers in
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: this change include swapping out the IT and systems integration
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: across multiple institutions. They centralized them, now they have to
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: localize them. Obviously, staff structuring, which includes finding new staff
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: for the politics and firing some staff created in the
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: centralization that we're in Wellington. Then there's branding and communications,
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: and there's legal and compliance costs. It ain't cheap and
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: at the end of the day we're back to square one.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: Who knows that the politics are going to be profitable
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: And the same thing's happening over at Health New Zealand.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: In fact, it's happening all over the country. As this
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: government reverses the last government's changes, people are packing up
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: their desks all over the country that they first packed
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: up four years ago. So when you look at this,
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: who's to blame well labor for coming up with the
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: new ideas in the first place, or is it national's
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: dogged determination to reverse everything the last mob did because
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: they've built their brand on not being labor. But I
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: don't know about you. The whole thing feels like wasteful
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: government spending and the question we have to ask ourselves
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: after this five years of change, are we substantially better off?
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: For more from Early Edition with Ryan Bridge, listen live
• 1:57
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• 2:00
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