What Does Singapore's Newest University Partner Know About What Happens Inside Its Veterinary 'Hospital'?

Massey Sells 'Gold Standard' Veterinary Education to Singapore . . . But Does Singapore Know What It's Bought?

In November 2024, New Zealand’s Massey University opened a branch campus in Singapore in partnership with PSB Academy, one of the island state's largest private education providers. While touted as a premier option for students who want to stay in their own home domain to study, the question this article poses is whether the arrangement fosters issues arising from a lack of transparency for those students and those who rubber stamp their studentship to and of New Zealand-centred Massey.

Massey's veterinary qualifications – its brand, its accreditation status, its claimed gold standard of clinical care – are actively being sold to Singaporean students and Singaporean institutions as the basis for a significant and growing commercial relationship.

But would those students and their funders choose Massey if they knew what went on, on the ground back at Massey Central in New Zealand?

Massey has been operating in Singapore since 2008. Its partnership with PSB Academy – formalised in April 2024 in the presence of New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon – is described by the university as a "first of its kind" for a New Zealand institution. It set an ambitious target of enrolling 5000 offshore students by 2026.

The Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT), another of Massey's Singaporean partners, specifically promotes Massey's expertise in veterinary medicine as a key offering of its joint programs.

But do these partnering organisations – PSB Academy, SIT, their students, and the Singaporean government bodies overseeing these arrangements – know what’s going on inside the Palmerston North-based veterinary “teaching hospital” (branded “Companion Animal Hospital” for the New Zealand public)?

It’s all too easy, from across oceans, to buy the marketing hype and the relationship lobbying. But, in the interests of (a) students paying significant fees for a supposedly "premier" education, (b) the standards being imported into the Singaporean veterinary ecosphere, and (c) most of all, the pet owners of Singapore, those commercial partners have an obligation to monitor the standards of this institution at a deeper and more realistic, every day level.
 
IIIVE suggests they might start with the Harry Kelly Case Study, and the full and ongoing series of coverage published on the New Zealand consumer publication, The Customer & The Constituent NZ.

The Numbers Behind the Brand

In terms of the broader institutional picture behind the University’s veterinary facility, while Massey has been positioning its veterinary credentials as a premium export product to Singapore's education market, its own financial position hasn’t quite aligned with high levels of competence in terms of fiscal responsibility.

The university recorded a deficit of NZ$41.4 million in 2023 – a figure Massey itself confirmed, though internal reporting had placed the loss as high as $50 million as of October that year. It cut hundreds of New Zealand jobs – including 56 positions in the College of Sciences alone, with a further 20 slated to go in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences – while simultaneously funding its offshore expansion.

Staff and students described the cuts as "brutal". Radio New Zealand reported fears the plan was putting the university into "a death spiral".

New Zealand’s Tertiary Education Union described the move as “a classic example of public education being inappropriately run as a business instead of a public good.

“It is disturbing to witness Massey setting up shop in another country while cutting hundreds of jobs in Aotearoa (New Zealand). It shouldn’t need to be said but apparently it does - instead of building empires abroad, the university should be keeping staff it already employs, and serving the students and the communities it is funded by our government to serve and has a responsibility to first and foremost.”

Meantime, The Times Higher Education described the Singapore venture as "delusional" for a cash-strapped institution.

And, in terms of the intersection between standards, integrity and fiscal priorities, it is indeed noteworthy that the taxpayer-funded external legal team retained to manage, suppress, and where possible extinguish the documented evidence of what happened to Harry Kelly in December 2025, is being paid from the same constrained institutional budget and by the same leadership team that is simultaneously telling Singapore it represents world-class veterinary standards.

Every dollar spent on legal monitoring of these publications and associated advice to Massey's leadership on how to avoid the release of incriminating evidence (which appears to have been either to recommend or to condone its intentional breaches of New Zealand’s holy grail of public body information release, the Official Information Act 1982, its Privacy Act 2020 breaches, to say nothing of the multiple breaches of the Veterinary Council of New Zea;land’s Code of Professional Conduct for Veterinarians) has been a dollar that would, demonstrably, have been far better deployed into higher standards of training – most especially in ethics – for those “educating” its students.

The Reality Behind the Hype

The full documented record of what occurred inside Massey's Companion Animal Hospital - unsupervised junior staff making life and death decisions without qualified oversight, contraindicated drugs administered without owner consent or clinical justification, records falsified, and a co-ordinated institutional cover-up - is laid out in forensic detail across the Harry Kelly Case Study on this site and the full investigation series at The Customer & The Constituent NZ.

Most recently, a private email from Massey's own Dean of Veterinary Science — sent to the leadership of the Veterinary Council of New Zealand before any investigation had concluded — characterising the complaint as "wholly unfounded" and signed simply "Jon," has been published in full. That letter, obtained through a Privacy Act disclosure, is now part of the permanent public record.

The VCNZ's structural conflicts of interest - including a senior Massey academic sitting on the Council that adjudicates complaints about Massey — are documented in detail here.

What Singapore's Veterinary Professionals Need to Know

In the week of March 17–20, 2026, IIIVE completed a formal notification exercise to veterinary practices across New Zealand - from Northland to Southland - formally advising the New Zealand veterinary sector of the documented findings in the Harry Kelly case.

That notification is permanently published on the Harry Kelly Case Study page of this site, together with a geographic summary of recipients, so that any pet owner whose animal has been harmed or killed either by Massey's Companion Animal Hospital directly, or by a Massey graduate in a referring clinic's employ, has documented evidence that the sector was formally placed on notice.

IIIVE will be conducting an equivalent notification exercise directed at Singapore's veterinary sector in due course.

Also See:  Massey's Misrepresentation on the World Stage Aided & Abetted by 'Accreditation' Bodies that Don't Enforce Their Own Accreditation Standards . . . Examples here (Australian Veterinary Boards Council) and here in the Correspondence (American Veterinary Medical Association) section of the Harry Kelly Case Study.