We need job opportunities not job cuts

Media release
5 March 2009

We need job opportunities not job cuts

The tertiary education minister needs to launch an open and wide ranging discussion about the future delivery of tertiary education along the lines of the Job Summit. Instead, she seems to be following through on a pre-election political vendetta by cutting jobs away from the Tertiary Education Commission says TEU transitional co-president Associate Professor Maureen Montgomery.

"We have been proposing for some time that we need to have a public debate about the role that the whole tertiary education sector, not just the commission, can play helping New Zealand in the next few years. We need to look at creating job opportunities not job cuts."

"The focus must be on getting more people into training and post-compulsory education so that New Zealand can be prepared to seize opportunities when the global recession abates. Granted that we always expect value for our tax dollars but redundancies and restructuring often fail to increase efficiency. Rather, they result in low morale among the remaining staff who are run ragged to cope with the increased workload.”

"While tertiary education workers have had our occasional battles with the Tertiary Education Commission and the compliance costs and bureaucracy it has brought to our jobs, the commission has also brought some much-needed order to the duplication and chaos of tertiary education provision in the 1990s. When the commission was first established it was hard to find tertiary education specialists in the public sector. It would be a waste to lose the years it took to rebuild that base of expertise at the very time we need those people to address the increased demand for skills and training," concludes Dr Montgomery.

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