Watching what’s happening with the Three Stooges in charge of things at the Beehive, I’m reminded of a number of old sayings. The first is “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Another is “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”. And a third “Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater”.

The latest proposal to trash the many excellent industry-led training schemes and combine them into one government-run “Institute of Skills and Technology” is just daft, and has been met with both outrage and dismay by the bodies currently running them.

The motivation seems to be that many of the polytechnics currently owned and run by the government aren’t producing the outcomes they were designed for, especially among Maori and Pasifika students.

So instead of fixing that problem, and leaving the successful industry-led programmes alone, this government wants to go the Socialist route and put everything under one organisation it alone controls.

If Kiwibuild has shown anything, it’s that government interference in areas well served by the private sector just doesn’t work.

I was in East Germany just after the Berlin Wall came down, and it was, to be quite frank, a bloody mess. Stink of unclean toilets everywhere, rotting food, tumble-down houses, and people who just didn’t want to work, because the state housed and fed them whether they did or not.

Anecdotally, many of the problems being encountered in the polytechnics are similar to what happened in Communist East Germany. Students don’t stay the course, and according to community leaders, would rather stay at home on the benefit than study.

There are a number of excellent industry-led training and apprenticeship schemes which DO work, however, and they are putting trained people out into the workplace at steady and acceptable levels.

I fail to see what changing this to one government body would achieve, save perhaps by further bloating an already inefficient and indifferent public service. All that will happen is that everything will sink to the lowest denominator.

You never get a tasty omelette by mixing bad eggs with good ones…