Dunedin Green MP Francisco Hernandez said the Green Party made an Official Information Act (OIA) request from Te Pūkenga, about which New Zealand polytechnics and institutes of technology would be able to stand alone.
The highly redacted information revealed only the Open Polytechnic and Ara Institute of Canterbury would be independently viable.
Mr Hernandez said it appeared Otago Polytechnic and Southern Institute of Technology were not listed as being viable.
"This is another kick in the guts for the South.
"The government are proceeding with the Waikato medical school which is going to be a big loss for the University of Otago, they’ve done cuts on the new hospital, and now the polytechnic looks like it’s going to be the third institution that they are going to gut down and degrade."
He believed Otago Polytechnic and SIT were being forced to cut staff, courses and assets to make them independently viable.
All the government had done since coming in was "cut, cut, cut".
"This is another programme of cuts from the coalition of cuts."
Tertiary Education Union industrial assistant national secretary Daniel Benson-Guiu said if the institutions were not stand-alone, it implied they would fall into a federated model where they would lose a lot of the autonomy that they used to have.
"What we understand is that the [Tertiary Education and Skills] Minister [Penny Simmonds] is going to be making decisions on who becomes stand-alone, and that may not be related to viability.
"That is awkward and something that needs to be understood better."
He said the minister needed to explain how she would make the decision about who was going to become stand-alone, because that was not very transparent at the moment.
"I believe that she is likely to choose SIT because she is the electorate MP for that area, and it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily the right decision."
To get a clearer picture of the model, he said the TEU sent questions to the minister under OIAs.
"We asked questions at the beginning of August at the time that the proposal got put forward, so that we’d have information to make proper submissions.
"We didn’t receive that information in proper time and we still haven’t received it. Submissions closed a couple of weeks ago.
"So there’s a lot we still do not know about what the model is going to look like, how it would operate, and the logistics of it.
"We’ve got more questions than answers."
He said they had appealed to the ombudsman about the lack of information, and it was now being investigated.
"Everyone needs to understand — our communities, our industries — that the model we’re looking at going into the future — even if it continues to have the old brand such as Otago Polytechnic and SIT — it’s not going to look the same.
"We’re likely to see all of the institutions start to move more towards a system of sustainability and viability, purely on economic metrics, which is going to mean that we’re going to lose educational provision, courses and students at the end of the day.
"And that will have an effect on Dunedin."
Otago Polytechnic executive director Dr Megan Pōtiki said the institution remained fully committed to supporting the nationwide initiative aimed at strengthening the sustainability and success of polytechnics within the Te Pūkenga network.
"We are confident in the quality of education we provide to our ākonga and the communities we serve.
"To continue delivering this excellence, we are focused on re-establishing strong business practices as we work toward becoming a standalone institution once again."
Ms Simmonds said the redactions in the OIA information provided to the Green Party were made because work was still under active consideration by the government.
She also told media the recently released information was not a detailed analysis of the present situation.
"Cabinet intends to make policy decisions before the end of the year on the proposals."
