EIT (Eastern Institute of Technology) – Chris Collins

The biggest learning facility in Hawke’s Bay … it’s undergone a terrible lurch under Gabrielle as you may’ve heard, but luckily Chris, you got out in time, didn’t you? [Chuckles] So the advance of EIT [Eastern Institute of Technology] has been fantastic and he will describe that tonight, so I’ll leave it all to you. Thank you.

[Shows slides throughout]

Chris Collins: Thank you very much. [Welcome in Maori] Just acknowledging the home people at the outset, and acknowledging whichever waka you come from, warm greetings.

My name’s Chris Collins; I was chief executive at EIT from 2004 through ‘til December 31 2022, so just at the end of this year. So I want to at the outset acknowledge people here who’ve had strong links with EIT – Cynthia [Bowers], who was on council at EIT during my time, so was one of my bosses. Cynthia was the local government representative on council when the legislation was structured in that way; Bill [?], who was at the School of Business, there also when I was, at the start; and Barbara [Brookfield], who was at Massey of course, based on our campus as well. Now probably other people have had connections that go well back, so I just acknowledge those who may well’ve been connected with the institution for a long time as well.

Just a bit about my own background and how I ended up here. I was in the university sector for … ooh, nearly twenty years or so, at Victoria and Massey University in various roles, moving into sort of senior management roles in university. I became interested in taking on a CEO [Chief Executive Officer] role in a polytechnic and thought, ‘I need to go and get some experience in a polytechnic’, so I took a job at UCOL [Universal College of Learning] Institute of Technology, and I was there for about eighteen months actually – I’d only been there for a year actually, I would’ve thought – and I had my eye on a CEO role that was coming up elsewhere in the sector, and I saw this ad [advertisement] come up for one for EIT. And so I said to my wife, “Look, I’m just going to put an application in just so I get some experience in the process” … ‘cause you usually have to sort of go through these things sometimes, don’t you, to try and learn from the process etcetera; and we didn’t really have a serious conversation about it at all. The long and short of it all was that I got offered the job. So when I did tell Naomi, “Oh gosh, they’ve offered me the job”, she said, “We haven’t even talked about this!” [Chuckle] And she described it that actually, she cried for three days, partly ‘cause we had four children under five at that stage and we were sort of leaving our network of where we were in Palmerston North. We lived on the university campus actually, and so the thought of suddenly relocating I think was just a huge hurdle.

Anyway, to finish the story, we’d been here about a year I think … might’ve been a couple of years. My daughter who’d started school here – sort of Saturday morning, sitting round the breakfast table – said, “Dad, I’m really glad we came to came to Hawke’s Bay and if you decide to shift again I’m not coming with you.” At which point my wife said, “Same here.” [Chuckle] So it ended up being a happy story.

I suppose you could say I got a bit lucky, actually, because I ended up taking on a role of CEO of an institution that had a good reputation, that was sound, that had a good history, and was highly regarded within the sector, whereas the other institution, as an aside – I won’t say which one it was – that I’d been looking at had quite a different history actually. [Chuckle] So I ended up in a plum institution really, and getting the chance to bring my family up in Hawke’s Bay. And they very much regard themselves as Hawke’s Bay kids now, although they’re off, you know, having studied and gone elsewhere and done things. But I do like to tease them that they were born in Manawatu, which … they don’t like being teased about that actually. [Chuckle]

I thought I’d just go over a bit of history; I’ve one or two slides here which I’ll show you – it’s not the main part of it, but I have some maps and the like that I wanted to give you a sense … but that’s easier to show on a slide, and we will then provide some opportunity for people to ask questions if you’ve got comments to make.

As you probably know, EIT started right back at the beginning as the Hawke’s Bay Community College; 1975 it was sort of formally opened, and the original intent, right back of course, was there’d been a desire for a university to appear somewhere in Hawke’s Bay. The Hawke’s Bay University Trust had been formed; Margaret Hetley had signalled that she wanted to donate her land at Otatara in memory and in honour of her husband who’d passed away many years before. And she had interesting background herself; had been through Cambridge University and done modern languages, I think, there; and wanted to leave this as a sort of a legacy.

During the sixties it became aware [obvious] that actually there was very little chance of another regional university being established, and some of the leaders here at the time started to try and see if they could position towards something like a polytechnic. For those who’re interested, by the way, we got Kay Morris-Mathews … some of you may know her … who is one of professors at EIT, Professor of History; educational history in particular. She produced this book with a colleague up in Tairawhiti, called ‘First to See the Light’. It was part of our fortieth celebrations on the history of EIT and Tairawhiti Polytechnic as well. Now probably if you went out to EIT – although it’d be hard to find anyone out there ‘cause the campus is closed – but there’s still some boxes of books left. If you want a copy you could probably go and get one, I imagine. If you’re interested in the history it gives a good history and colourful history of EIT, so she has captured that really well as part of the fortieth celebrations.

So one of things she notes in there actually, is they thought they’d try and pitch for a polytechnic, but actually, the officials of the day sort of said Hastings didn’t really qualify for a polytechnic and Napier didn’t really qualify for a polytechnic; and you can’t try and join the two together and see if you can get one that way. So they hit some resistance right from the start. And then there was a bit of a shift in the political winds, and there was [a] glimmer of hope with the Labour Party, and so there was some lobbying that occurred with politicians and the like about the possibilities of opening something, and they formed, according to Kay actually, [the] Hawke’s Bay Technical College, the initial interim name until legislation could be put in place. There was a change of government and the new government put in place legislation for community colleges.

The one here in Hawke’s Bay was the first community college established in New Zealand, out at Taradale. They’d earlier approached Margaret Hetley about the possibility of [if] she would be happy if there were a vocational educational institution to be put there. And she gave her assent to that and so the campus was built out there and opened in 1975. The first major building was called the Margaret Hetley Building – [it] was named after her – which is the older four-storey building that was built at the start.

And the first director that [who] was appointed [was] – and again Kay talks about this in the book – Phil Amos; I think he became the Minister of Education in that Labour government – you might remember that name from the seventies Norman Kirk government. He went up to Fiji and chatted to John Harré who was working at the University South Pacific, and sort of talked to him about this idea of community colleges and would John be interested in coming back to New Zealand and being involved in that; and that’s what eventuated. John was quite an interesting appointment really, for Hawke’s Bay; now sadly, actually, we learned only recently that John Harré passed away in February this year, a good ripe age of ninety-two. He passed away just around the cyclone time; we missed it actually, it was only afterwards that we became aware of it. But John had an interesting background, he’d done a PhD in anthropology out of … I think it was London University. People who’ve been around here will probably remember John … colourful character. John was, you know, long-haired, sometimes kaftan-wearing, so he was an interesting person to come into probably what was a reasonably conservative Hawke’s Bay at that period. John was absolutely passionate about community education and did a lot of work in the community education space that involved doing work with gangs, and all sorts of community education delivery.

One of the stories I do remember reading from that period – when I was looking for some archival stuff myself – was there was a wonderful – I use that term with humour – headline from the New Zealand Truth; d’you remember the New Zealand Truth paper? I don’t think it had too much truth in it; but anyway, the headline was that the Hawke’s Bay Community College, or … can’t remember what they called it then … was running sex courses. John had organised some women’s study courses to be held out at the Community College, and of course this hit the headlines as a sex course. So John brought, you know, some new thinking and some new challenging things into Hawke’s Bay as well, and actually really gave what was to become a strong community basis for that college. During the 1980s it then became the Hawke’s Bay Community Polytechnic [and] their name was changed; it finally got polytechnic status.

John finished in about 1985 and John Rose was appointed as the principal from about ‘85 to 1990. That was another critical milestone in terms of the change of legislation where the government of the day brought in the 1989 Education Act, and one of the things that did was instead of these institutions or colleges being run from the Ministry in Wellington with a local sort of principal … bit like schools in a way … they became separate Crown entities and had to stand on their own two feet. And so in one way this was a whole new environment for the Hawke’s Bay Polytechnic to operate [in] and required some, you know, new skill sets around running the whole institution. Anything you had to build you had to do yourself, and also, the country moved towards a much more market model of education around that time. John finished in 1990, and Bruce Martin was appointed as Principal/CEO of the new institution. During the nineties they changed their name to Eastern Institute of Technology, and that was a period of quite significant growth and establishment for EIT to become the institution that it became.

At that stage I was at Massey University actually, and EIT was wanting to start offering first year degree programmes. The first degree of course at EIT was a nursing degree, which is one of the changes that occurred; and there was increased demand from the community for students to be able to access degree level education as well. And so it did a partnership agreement with Massey University about offering the first year of a degree at EIT, and then the students could carry on a pathway through to continue at the university. Eventually of course, “We want to do our second year here at EIT; we don’t want to have to necessarily transfer.” And I do remember somewhat guiltily – I was at Massey at that stage, and I remember thinking – not so much about EIT, it was probably other places – thinking, ‘Well they can’t possibly finish our university degree over there, they’ve really got to come to us to finish the degree.’ So there was a certain amount of institutional snobbery that existed, and I was guilty of it; definitely on the other side. So this forced EIT to go to the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, and of course there’d been a freeing up of the system which was quite constrained before then, for institutions to start going through NZQA and getting their own accreditation, which is what EIT progressively did to offer the qualifications so they became EIT’s own degrees. So that was a period of quite significant growth for the institution and an ability to start actually building the campus.

Some of you may remember or know of Kerry Marshall who was here for many years teaching business originally. When EIT became a separate Crown Entity under the new Act, they needed some sort of business skills at the Centre. I remember Kerry telling me he basically got pulled out of the Business School into the Centre, helping to sort of run the actual finances of the institution because they had to start doing that themselves. But I remember Kerry telling me, prior to that with the Ministry if they wanted to buy new equipment, he said they’d get a list together and they’d submit it down to the Ministry. And he told me the story, how they met with these officials one day. On their list of equipment they had ‘Computer’, ‘cause they didn’t have any computers; this was right at the start of computing, so they’d listed, you know, [a] couple of computers. And they sat down with the official and the official crossed everything off until it got to fire extinguisher – and they got a fire extinguisher. [Chuckle] That was it! Now that was the disadvantage of being you know, under that old system where everything had to be ticked off out of Wellington. Once the legislation changed it enabled institutions and communities to take control of their own destiny; a Council was appointed rather than just the Board, and they had a lot more delegation and authority to be able to spend and do things. And that really meant that EIT could take off over the next decade to become, you know, quite a sizeable institution with quite wide-spread provision.

So that brings us up to the era where I became involved, and I’ve got a couple of slides which I’ll show you. Our goal really was to become a major credible provider for our community, and one of the drivers was we wanted to establish major vocational activities, applied professional and higher education … so there was an element of higher education … and this was important for us so that people didn’t have to leave the region; so our goal very much was if we could offer something viably here in Hawke’s Bay then we’d do it. But we couldn’t do everything – we were never going to have a law school here; we were never going to have a med [medical] school here; we weren’t going to have an engineering school; we just didn’t have the size and critical mass to offer those things. But we would try and offer it locally and do that with regards to our institution. This meant doing quite a broad-ranging portfolio, but we knew that people wanted quality, they wanted relevance, and they needed to be accessible – those were sort of key drivers for us as an institution in terms of what we were trying to achieve. So it meant that we were able to spread ourselves right across Hawke’s Bay.

Now the other significant event that occurred in the life of EIT was the merger with Tairawhiti Polytechnic. Tairawhiti was a separate institution; it had become a community college about a year after the Hawke’s Bay Community College started and it had a rich history of working up through the East Coast, but it had got itself into financial difficulty on a number of occasions. It was really just a bit small, the funding model didn’t really work for a small institution, and it’s population was highly distributed across that East Coast. So that was a crossroads for us, and Cynthia would’ve been deeply involved in those discussions that we had – you know, EIT was strong and sound; Tairawhiti Polytechnic was in financial difficulty and struggling. And you know, do you stretch yourself out to become a bigger institution with the extra financial risk and challenges? Those were all the debates that occurred at that time. But we thought it was important actually that EIT, probably in the long term, be bigger – it was going to be hard to survive on that size – but secondly, there were some things that Tairawhiti were very good at that could make us a stronger institution. So in 2011, instead of just being EIT Hawke’s Bay we became Eastern Institute of Technology with EIT Hawke’s Bay and EIT Tairawhiti. And actually that’s been a really rich and positive experience for us – EIT became a better institution, there’s no question in my mind about that. Tairawhiti was very good at that reach out into the community and distributed delivery; EIT brought some real quality to the system behind it all, and the two made us stronger.

So if you look at each of those circles, one of the things we then progressively developed was regional learning centres dotted across the region, so each of those circles’d represent somewhere we have a regional learning centre or a programme running. This is just a programme up here in Hicks Bay, but we would have regional centres sitting in small communities to try and make the education more accessible. And those tended to be lower level programmes obviously; to do the higher level programmes you needed to come to the main campuses, mainly Hawke’s Bay but also, to a lesser extent, Gisborne. So that reach out into the community was really important.

One of the things that I’ve always been proud of with regards to the staff of EIT … this is an actual map of where classes were run, and this map would’ve been done in 2019; we update it every year but I’ve used the one from 219 [2019] … so each of those dots represents somewhere where an EIT tutor was running a class in 2019, and I think that’s probably unmatched pretty much anywhere else in the country. A lot of these courses would’ve been agricultural courses … bee keeping, forestry, horticulture … Maori language on marae etcetera, so there was a real commitment from the institution to get out and to reach out across our community. And I think that’s one of the important things that I’m watching very closely to see whether this is maintained and that provision continues. Roughly about eighteen hundred students in 2019 were studying not on one of our main campuses; they were in one of our regional learning centres somewhere, or a farm or a forestry block or somewhere, and that’s really down to what the staff have been able to achieve.

We always had a pretty broad ranging portfolio, and one of the reasons I wanted to use Powerpoint to show all those slides, but this one here too, was to show you the programmes students enrol in, and this is a graph of our provision up ‘til 219 [2019]. Along here we’ve got the different qualification levels and up here is the number of students obviously; but you can see something that’s quite striking, which often people didn’t realise about EIT – the single area where people enrolled most and the qualification level that had more students enrolling than in any other level at EIT, was Level 7 degree. So we had more people studying at Level 7 degree than any other qualification level on the qualification framework. And people often didn’t have that understanding ‘cause there was a sense that often you just had to go away to a university to study. But the reality is the sorts of people who were doing degrees with us tended to be older; tended to sometimes have dependents, have children, have family reasons why they couldn’t … so less of that sort of straight eighteen year old school leaver, though we had those as well, but we tended to have a much older profile of students at the institution.

So the sorts of degrees you could do … there’s a range of degrees that were on offer at EIT, and the thing you’ll notice about them is that they’re all ‘applied’ in nature. It’s all vocationally orientated, so you don’t go to EIT or a place like EIT to do a history degree or an English literature degree. And actually, there’s [there’re] some high end more technical vocational things like medicine, engineering and the like which we couldn’t do either. So that gives you a sense of that.

The other thing that people often don’t have a sense of is actually what had grown a lot, particularly since 2000, [which] was the growth in graduate and post-graduate programmes. Interestingly, one of the things that really drove this was government policy, in that attracting international students really only became possible at the post-graduate level, in terms of getting visas for students and the like. So we established a wide range of post-graduate … and again, all very ‘applied’ professional types of Masters degrees as opposed to the ones that weren’t. That’s the sort of wide range of areas that were on offer.

EIT also had a strong educational performance rankings in the NZQA system; you could be a Category 1,2,3 or 4 Institution. You didn’t want to be a 3 or 4 – that was in serious trouble – a 1 or 2, and EIT has been a Category 1 Institution all the way through, at the top of the rankings. So it meant that we were achieving really what the community wanted us to do, which was to provide quality education through the system. High levels of Maori participation, some of the highest in the country, and actually seventy-five percent of our students in Tairawhiti would identify as Maori; in Hawke’s Bay forty-two percent of our students. And that was important for the future of our region, because this is significant numbers of our community.

The other thing that we grew strongly was international student numbers. Covid of course dealt to this quite seriously as you can imagine, but as you can see we had about three hundred and twenty-six equivalent full time students in Hawke’s Bay in 220 [2020], and in Auckland we had about two hundred and forty.

So the other decision we took was to establish a campus in Auckland, and that was an International Graduate School campus. Now why did we do that? Again, lots of debate and discussion around the Council table around this question, and the reason essentially, at the time, was challenges for institutions – I think we had about eight years of no inflation adjustment to our funding. The government of the day was saying, “If you’ve got challenges with costs, grow your revenue, attract more international students.” The simple fact is that about sixty percent of international students were in Auckland, and it was harder recruiting them into provincial cities. So we established a Graduate School in Auckland which was only offering post-graduate qualifications, nothing under-graduate, and it was a slow steady start but one that was very successful.

Here’s Hawke’s Bay student numbers – you can see what was starting to happen around international students, they were starting to decline. It was getting harder to get them into Napier and we didn’t want an Auckland operation to cannibalise what we were doing in Hawke’s Bay. But you can see what happened, actually … this is Auckland numbers around international, and you see what happened to our Hawke’s Bay numbers as our Auckland campus grew. And it became much easier in our conversations recruiting overseas to attract students by just having an Auckland campus. I sat down with some international students in Auckland and said, “Why have you come to EIT? I mean, why wouldn’t you go up the road to Auckland University? Why would you come to the EIT campus in the CBD?” It was interesting talking to them – reasons they gave me were: 1) they were older; they were mature students often out of industry; didn’t really want to go and sit in a university alongside a whole lot of twenty-three year olds who hadn’t actually worked. They were often managers, you know, in their thirties, they had families; so they wanted something that was applied, vocational. More connected with industry was one of their drivers. And secondly we were a lot less expensive. So Auckland University would be $40-$45,000; we were sort of $25-$30,000, so for someone in that older bracket it made it much more viable for them.

One of the reasons we did this was to help really, to want [for want of] a better term, fund that because what we were getting from government didn’t make this very possible. And the most you could fit in a class often was how many you could fit in your mini-van alongside the driver, which meant you had small classes going out into remote rural areas. We needed more revenue to be able to keep doing the things we wanted to be able to do and needed to do in Hawke’s Bay. So that became an important part of our strategy, was to try and diversify our revenue in the sense of being less reliant on government; but secondly, also internationalise our campuses so that our students were sitting in a classroom with students from around the world. And actually, most of the year we would have students coming from about forty-five to fifty different countries round the world. Sometimes you’d wonder, ‘How on earth did they hear about us?’ You know, they’d come from countries you’d think, ‘How on earth did they hear about EIT, wherever they were?’ But it meant we had internationalised our campus and our students, and it also it gave us revenue to be able to be more effective out into our wider community. So that’s been an important development, and actually the EIT campus in Auckland is still there and it’s bounced back strongly [in the] post-Covid environment. The growth this year has been quite substantial; in fact it’s … as I understand it … it’s the largest in our sector in terms of international[s] returning to that. So that became an important part of what we were.

I just want to finish quickly … the next big shift that occurred of course, was the reform of vocational education which was announced by Minister Hipkins in 219 [2019]. There were three things Mr Hipkins wanted to achieve: 1) he wanted to redefine the roles of education providers [and] industry training organisations; secondly he wanted to create a single institution across the whole country; and thirdly he wanted to create a new funding model, because there was recognition everywhere that the current funding model wasn’t working. So those were the three goals. We were supportive of this; we did think there needed to be a redefining of some of the roles because there were aspects of the system that weren’t working.

We had some questions around this one, and my position’s still the same on this – we supported … New Zealand’s a small country, and to have institutions that didn’t co-operate, didn’t collaborate, didn’t work together … we’re too small for that. We needed a system where institutions would work and support each other, but I think key to it – and this is in the Charter of Te Pukenga – is that regional leaders could make decisions about local provision and local operations. So that was key from our support level. I still have very big question mark about whether that’s being achieved; in fact that’s one of the things – if I was a dog with a bone right up until December 31 last year – [it] was round that particular key thing, as the Charter says regional leaders should be able to make decisions about operations and delivery which in many ways we didn’t have prior to the 1990 reforms. It was hard to get permission out of Wellington. And now we’ve … since the 1990s … had the ability to do those things and it’s worked well for Hawke’s Bay, it’s worked well for the institution, and it’s important I think, for the future that again, local decision making is able to be there but to be integrated with the wider provision across the country, rather than everyone trying to do their own thing. So I think there’s a very big question mark about that and I’ve yet to see that evidence strongly come through the system.

And the third aspect – we certainly supported that – we needed a new funding model. The question is whether the new funding model they’ve come up [with] is going to work. And you’ll see of course, universities at the moment are in quite a bit of strife with the same question actually – that the current funding model is broken and it’s not working. So this has been redesigned; it’s been rolled out for the polytech sector, but the jury’s out as to whether, actually, we’ve ended up with anything better, or we ended up with anything worse.

And so EIT now is – as of last year, which is the reason why I finished … so all the CEO roles finished last year … and EIT was dissolved into the new single national institution which is Te Pukenga, New Zealand Institute of Skills & Technology. And they are currently going through that process now of reconfiguring, redesigning how the single institution will work as opposed to the sixteen separate entities they had beforehand. So that’s a challenging task; right at the moment as we speak, staff will be hearing about some of the structural changes. That certainly will be affecting all the managers at EIT right at the moment in terms of their roles and jobs, and new roles and jobs will be being distributed out across the system. That’s occurring all this week as I understand, in terms of the consultation process around that.

Again, key thing for me is I want to see a system 1) that yes, has some integration nationally, but 2) allows regional leaders to make decisions around deliveries and operations, and that have those strong community and local connections; and to be able to do the things that we’ve done over the history of our institution … for that to be able to continue and be driven by decision making and leadership that is based here, along with leadership that is based elsewhere. And I think that’s where the jury is still out, for that to be demonstrated that it’s going to work.

Of course if there’s a change in government at the end of the year, the Opposition party say they’re going to unpick it all and take it back to a more regional based model; so we’ll see, I suppose, by this time next year – we’ll either be trying to bed this down much more effectively, or actually it’ll be unpacking what has been established in the last three years back to a model of regional institutions.

So look, thank you – that’s just given you a bit of an overview. I’m just mindful of the time, so I should stop and provide people the opportunity to ask any questions or make any observations, But thank you for listening so well, and I hope that gave you a bit of a flavour of EIT and it’s history.

Joyce: Oh Chris, we enjoyed that, that was excellent. [Applause] I did ring into the office last week and the girl gave me the student numbers just before Gabrielle at three thousand two hundred and seventy-one, so there’s a lot of students for a small area like this.

Chris: Yeah, well we got to just under five thousand students across the whole institution – in fact we hit five thousand students when you take Tairawhiti, Auckland and Hawke’s Bay into account, so equivalent full-time students. So that’s about ten or eleven thousand students all up.

And I should comment actually … yeah, the campus got seriously flooded. About ninety percent of the buildings were all completely flooded. The campus is closed now, and I take my hat off to the staff at EIT – ‘bout ninety percent of all courses are still running this year. They’re running out of community halls, churches, marae, workshop[s], so they’ve done a great thing keeping things going. What we hope to now see is the campus reinstated.

Chris, on that subject, what zone is [are] the buildings on now with the new …

Zoning? My understanding was it won’t be a 3.

It’ll be a 2 or a 1?

Yeah, I think so. I went for a walk around campus last week actually; [the] great irony is if we’d had a relatively simple stop bank just a little bit alongside the campus, we’d’ve been absolutely fine. It breached – the Tutaekuri [River] – further up the valley and came through that way.

But yeah, EIT’s campus was one of the better, if not best – I’m biased obviously – but one of the better polytech campuses in New Zealand. It was modern, then good investment had occurred by successive generations of leaders and governors, so it was in prime condition, but of course it’s just had a ton of water go through it.

Cynthia Bowers: Chris, you threw your heart and soul into EIT; you certainly did. If it’s not too much of a personal question, I’m really interested to know what is next in line for Chris Collins?

Chris: [Chuckle] Yeah, my kids keep asking that too. So what I’ve been doing is making myself available for more governance work really, and signalled that I would be interested in doing more Board work. I’m on four different Boards at the moment; one of them’s local, [a] couple of others are sort of national, Auckland-based organisations. So I’m really focusing really more on that governance role and activity, and taking longer in the morning having a coffee, and having a cafe stop. In fact one of the things I’ve discovered is, going to a cafe I’m usually battling with the other people who might be semi-retired who get to the newspaper first. [Chuckles] And I’m one of those annoying people who spends too long reading it.

Comment: I was involved in the original promotion of the Hawke’s Bay University Trust, having been tapped on the shoulder by Ron Shakespeare to help push it from the point of view of the Road Carriers’ Association, and Frank Hooper to push it on the angle of the Contractors’ Federation; but the biggest problem I found was that traditional problem we have here to set the university up, and that was parochialism. It seems to be easing now by comparison with what it was, but it certainly was very strong in the late sixties. 1968 was when we were …

Chris: Promoting of the Trust, yes. That’s right, and obviously I read in Kay’s book, the local mayor – it would have been in Taradale at that stage – sort of obviously took the initiative to actually try and do a bit of lobbying to get it in the middle somewhere, which Taradale … and I think it was a smart decision actually, because there were lots of times I wished I was in the CBD of Hastings but then that wouldn’t work for us ‘cause we need to be in the CBD of Napier as well. But Taradale I think was a smart decision by your generation of people who helped make that decision.

I’m not up with the latest data for this year, apart from I know Auckland’s gone really well. Hawke’s Bay would’ve been more challenging given the cyclone obviously because we don’t have a campus here; but certainly they are coming back and we had more applications coming into EIT at the end of last year, more international applications coming in than almost pre-covid. The challenge for us then, and it’ll be still the same now, was getting them in through Immigration New Zealand. So there was such a back-log there that it became very difficult, so that was what was holding us up.

And on the viticultural [?] I completely agree, there’s no question actually, that EIT’s School of Vit [Viticulture] and Wine was academically the strongest school in the sector. The challenge Hawke’s Bay always had, and we battled with this continuously, was the size of the industry in Marlborough was so massive. I mean eighty percent of the wine industry sits in Marlborough – mostly all savvi [sauvignon] blanc; not all, but it mostly is, whereas eighty percent of the red wine production comes out of Hawke’s Bay. But it’s so much smaller as an industry size it often made it quite hard to attract government attention because the industry’s so big down there. But academically this programme was strongest here.

And actually two things we did I didn’t mention … partnered with a university in China where we’re teaching; we’ve got eighty students sitting in [??] University in China who our staff are going across there, teaching vit and wine into our joint campus over there; and another university we’ve started with over there around business and creative industries – again, another joint campus. But the Vit and Wine was the thing that drove it. A very big university, that one in [?] – big beer brewing city, and they had a degree in Brewing Engineering and they wanted to offer a Vit and Wine speciality within their Brewing Engineering degree, and so they came to EIT and got our staff to do the teaching.

Joyce: I didn’t introduce Barbara Brookfield who is a Landmarks executive member, and as you can see she has a connection …

Barbara Brookfield: Well thank you Chris, that has been fantastic and it’s a real blast from the past for me. I was based on the Hawke’s Bay EIT campus from 1989, so go way back. Back then there was the Margaret Hetley Building and there was a whole lot of prefabs – the only buildings, and they were all old, leaky, freezing. And you look at the growth that’s happened under exceptional leadership including your own, under great governance and huge community support. And when Massey and EIT first offered the first year of con-joint degrees in Business Studies and Bachelor of Arts, way back, the demand was enormous from the community, and the number of applicants we got for a limited number of places … we could only take about forty percent of the applicants which just demonstrated the enormous need to offer higher level education in this region. So you know, when we look at all these wonderful vocational degrees that EIT has developed it’s a huge asset to our region and it keeps so many of our young people here. A lot of the demand back then was from more mature students who couldn’t relocate partners, families etcetera to go and study, and it was a wonderful opportunity for them to further their education.

So Chris, best wishes for your coffee drinking and governance roles. [Chuckle] You’ve worked long and hard to build EIT to the magnificent institution that it is, and the growth both in terms of the programmes, student numbers and the campus growth has been incredible, and it’s a huge asset to our community. So thank you very much.

[Applause]

Chris: Thank you. The one thing I think you can all keep out for in the new reforms as they roll forward, is 1) there’s credible sort of regional leadership involved here, and 2) that they re-open that campus.

Barbara: Absolutely. Thank you, Chris.

Chris: Thank you very much.

[Applause]

Joyce: Thank you very much, Barbara. I’d just add too, Chris, that the sadness I read – I think it was in The Guardian this morning – was the fact that teachers right up until this part in history have been able to say to children, “Work hard and you’ll be fine.” And this might be the next era where you can have children working very hard but actually not getting a job, and the vocational comes in perhaps where you might get the hands-on job more. It was just sad reading that, ‘cause that’s what IT and everything has done to us. Thank you for coming.