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Speaker 1: Here we go again. The polyitechs that were centralized by

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Speaker 1: the last government are going to be decentralized by the

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Speaker 1: current mob. So we're not quite going back to the future,

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Speaker 1: but because it's not going to be quite the same

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Speaker 1: as we had before the politicians started tinkering. There will

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Speaker 1: now be ten polytechs run locally. Six others will have

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Speaker 1: to prove their financial viability. But it still feels like

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Speaker 1: we're going back to where we started from and this

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Speaker 1: ideological flip flop that we've been going through is not free.

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Speaker 1: So the Labor government allocated hundreds of millions of dollars

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Speaker 1: over several years to support the merger and transformation of

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Speaker 1: the vocational education sector. They started doing this back in

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Speaker 1: twenty twenty. It's five years of it hundreds of millions

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Speaker 1: of dollars. Now NASAL has budgeted another two hundred million

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Speaker 1: dollars to fund the reversal. The key cost drivers in

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Speaker 1: this change include swapping out the IT and systems integration

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Speaker 1: across multiple institutions. They centralized them, now they have to

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Speaker 1: localize them. Obviously, staff structuring, which includes finding new staff

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Speaker 1: for the politics and firing some staff created in the

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Speaker 1: centralization that we're in Wellington. Then there's branding and communications,

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Speaker 1: and there's legal and compliance costs. It ain't cheap and

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Speaker 1: at the end of the day we're back to square one.

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Speaker 1: Who knows that the politics are going to be profitable

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Speaker 1: And the same thing's happening over at Health New Zealand.

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Speaker 1: In fact, it's happening all over the country. As this

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Speaker 1: government reverses the last government's changes, people are packing up

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Speaker 1: their desks all over the country that they first packed

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Speaker 1: up four years ago. So when you look at this,

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Speaker 1: who's to blame well labor for coming up with the

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Speaker 1: new ideas in the first place, or is it national's

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Speaker 1: dogged determination to reverse everything the last mob did because

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Speaker 1: they've built their brand on not being labor. But I

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Speaker 1: don't know about you. The whole thing feels like wasteful

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Speaker 1: government spending and the question we have to ask ourselves

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Speaker 1: after this five years of change, are we substantially better off?

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Speaker 1: For more from Early Edition with Ryan Bridge, listen live

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Speaker 1: to News Talks it be from five am weeks or

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Speaker 1: follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.