Over the bills and farm away?

So then, financial crisis averted and back in business? The Telford farm-training campus will reopen this year under the aegis of the Southern Institute of Technology. It’s a fine save as far as it goes, but relief isn’t unmitigated.

The Government is sufficiently impressed by the SIT rescue package, and perhaps the flinty edge to expressions of southern community support on Telford’s behalf, that it is investing $1.8 million to keep the campus operating after the previous operator, the North Island-based Taratahi Agriculture Centre, was placed in interim liquidation.

A longer-term package was clearly preferable from a local perspective but a single year is as far as the Government is prepared to commit, amid its wider moves to reform vocational education and training nationwide. Not only are some job losses foreshadowed, but there’s provision for SIT to receive what Hipkins calls ‘‘further Crown support for expenses if operations cease at Telford’’ at the end of 2019.

Tempting, then, to declare nothing is guaranteed. In fact something is – or as near as damn it.

Any move to close Telford after this 12-month period is destined to meet renewed southern opposition, seasoned rather than diminished by the exertions of this year’s campaign.

The nationwide review is necessary. Hipkins isn’t deluded in his depiction of the model for vocational education training nationwide being broken. But the fractures lie in places other than Telford, which receives that little nod that cockies tend to give anything that comes up to a suitable standard.

It is hard to see any sort of coherent model for agricultural training that doesn’t seek to enhance Telford, rather than replace it.

Granted, its intakes (actually tracking up in recent times) have been lower than anyone should be pleased about. This reflects a much wider problem – this outfit has been providing a good strong pathway into a job that too few New Zealanders have been persuaded to take up.

An important point becomes what reasonable expectations should be placed upon it this year. The rescue package involves not only campus attendees but also distance learning, never an easy field but one in which SIT has no shortage of wider institutional experience. SIT has funding to cater for 200 primary industry students through both avenues this year, so that’s the goal.

Except – sheesh – it remains to be seen what damage has already been done to the potential intake by the terrible uncertainty of recent months.

A sizeable team can take real credit for the salvaging of 2019 and while attention may settle on the white knight role of the SIT, the survival instinct of the Telford team itself, the could’ve-been-worse reaction of the Minister, and the political packdown of Clutha District Mayor Bryan Cadogan, Lawrence based NZ First MP Mark Patterson and Clutha-Southland MP, National’s Hamish Walker, we’re at risk of getting entirely carried away and wondering aloud whether the likes of the Tertiary Education Commission, NZQA and Tertiary Education Union might have quietly contributed a measure of helpfulness.

But the fractures lie in places other than Telford, which receives that little nod that cockies tend to give anything that comes up to a suitable standard