Early Edition with Kate Hawkesby

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 communicatio