Ms Simmonds, unexpectedly, got the chance to run for Parliament at roughly the same time that the previous Labour government decided that it was going to merge the country’s polytechnics into one combined entity, Te Pukenga.
She duly won the seat of Invercargill and spent the next three years assailing Te Pukenga with such well-informed skill that setting aside the vocational education portfolio for Ms Simmonds would have been one of Christopher Luxon’s easier decisions when he became prime minister in 2023.
Ms Simmonds did not rip in to the job with "gone by lunchtime" gusto: a lot of meetings, discussion papers and reports preceded her big moment on Monday, when she stood at the lecturn to the left of Mr Luxon at the post-Cabinet press conference to announce that Te Pukenga was to be no more and that polytechnics were back baby.
Except that Te Pukenga was not really a thing of the past, and not all polytechnics were about to return to their previous splendid isolation.
Te Pukenga was on life support though — it would stay for at least a year as a "transitional entity" — and not every polytech was returning to autonomy. Four were deemed not to be trading viably and decisions on their future will be made next year.
Locally, SIT and Otago Polytechnic were returned to regional governance, but Otago was placed in a confusing half-way house of being assured that while it could govern itself it could not run itself: it will be part of an amorphous and poorly explained "federation"of polytechnics. Otago later pronounced itself mystifed.
Overall though, Ms Simmonds enjoyed Monday, and had a whale of a time answering Q11 in the House on Tuesday when, through a series of patsies, she was able to extol how well off Canterbury, Hawke’s Bay, Tairāwhiti, Nelson Marlborough and Clutha (i.e. Telford, whose future is assured) would be.
The tech tiki tour continued on Wednesday as Labour’s vocational education spokesman Shanan Halbert tried to take Ms Simmonds off track to some less fortunate polytechs, such as Otago, Toi Ohomai, Western Institute, UCOL, Whitireia, and NorthTec, and to press her on how many job losses her reforms had occasioned.
Ms Simmonds, well aware that number was in the hundreds, was not taking the blame: "This has occurred as independent financial advisers have worked with individual polytechnics to develop their pathway to financial sustainability. I acknowledge how difficult that will be for those individuals, but this work should have been done more than five years ago."
Other than that, any other potential future job losses would be an operational matter for the respective polytechs, Ms Simmonds said with monotonous regularity, and to Speaker Gerry Brownlee’s displeasure, reminding her that ministers were responsible for the operational detail of the entities for which they had portfolio responsibility.
Ms Simmonds let fly soon after though as she, serendipitously, followed Labour leader Chris Hipkins — the man who invented Te Pukenga — in that afternoon’s general debate.
"Thank goodness there was a change of government," Ms Simmonds said.
"People who knew how to run a polytechnic came into power, and it was turned round to a $17m surplus. Thank goodness. I think I might have said, at the time that it was being set up . . . that it wouldn’t work, because he didn’t know how to run anything. I doubted if he knew how to run his own bath, and it came to be true."
That was not the end of the matter as Mr Halbert was back for more on Thursday, supported by Green MP Tamatha Paul.
Ms Paul got the nub of the debate, asking whether students would have better hands-on and practical training opportunities following the dismantlement of Te Pūkenga.
So, to her mind, did Ms Simmonds: "This is to ensure that there is a vocational education and training network of polytechnics that are financially viable, because you cannot access any sort of training if your polytechnic has a liquidity issue."
