Andrew Dickens: The great polytech flip-flop we’re all paying for

Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

Here we go again.

The polytechs that were centralised by the last government are going to be de-centralised by the current mob.

It's not quite back to the future because it won't be the same as we had before the politicians started tinkering.

There will now be ten polytechs run locally, six others will have to prove their financial viability, but it still feels like we're going back to where we started from.

And this ideological flip flop isn't free.

The Labour Government allocated hundreds of millions of dollars over several years to support the merger and transformation of the vocational education sector.

And now National has budgeted $200 million to fund the reversal.

Key Cost Drivers in this change include swapping out the IT and systems integration across multiple institutions from centralised to local.

Obviously, staff restructuring, which includes finding new staff for the polytechs and firing some staff created in the centralisation.

Then there's branding and communications and legal and compliance costs.

It isn't cheap and at the end of the day, we're back to square one.

The same things happening over at Health New Zealand. It's happening all over the country as the government reverses Labour's changes. People are packing up their desks that they packed up four years ago.

Now who to blame? Labour for coming up with the new ideas in the first place, or National's dogged determination to reverse everything the last mob did because they've built their brand on not being Labour?

I don't know about you but the whole thing feels like wasteful government spending, and are we substantially better off?

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