Education Amendment Bill

Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Minister of Education) Link to this

Yes, I am sure, as my colleague says, that Dail does not mind at all being elevated in that way, given his profession.

The bill implements a number of policy changes to improve the efficient administration of education. It also starts a process of tidying up some of the cluttered education legislation. I want the Government’s strategic direction for education to be underpinned by clear and consistent legislation. Certainly, that was the aim of my predecessor, as well.

The Government has undertaken major reforms in early childhood education. Our 10-year strategic plan Pathways to the Future: Ngā Huaraki Arataki sets out to increase participation in quality early childhood education, improve quality overall, and promote collaboration. As part of that plan we want to implement a new regulatory regime for early childhood education. The bill replaces Part 26 of the existing Education Act 1989 with a new Part 26. That change will legally underpin the Government’s key policy to provide all New Zealand children with quality early childhood education—a policy that enjoys support right across the early childhood sector. Existing provisions contain ambiguities. The new amendments will give the early childhood sector more certainty about the standards they need to meet to provide this quality; as I have signalled to the sector, we intend to ensure that these standards work and to preserve the high level of diversity right across early childhood education. The second significant amendment to the Education Act 1989 provides for the existing National Student Number to be extended throughout the whole education sector. The National Student Number is already used in the senior secondary school and tertiary sectors to keep students’ academic records correct and to ensure the efficient and accurate funding of our education institutions. Extending the National Student Number will help us to get reliable and speedy information in order to identify non-enrolments when students move from one school to the other—an issue that concerns members right across this House. The National Student Number will also solve problems of national data collection, as currently a number of stand-alone systems are used by schools and early childhood services to record this information. Researchers will be able to obtain statistics information for their longitudinal research, so we will be able to see how well our students are doing nationally and internationally and how we can do more to help them. The National Student Number will also solve problems of national data collection by enabling the stand-alone systems that are used by schools, early childhood services, and education agencies to “talk” and interact with each other, which will also advance our cause.

The bill contains amendments that will make things easier for boards of trustees to carry out the important work they do in managing our schools. It clarifies some procedural issues for the Teachers Council, especially in relation to the registration and discipline of teachers. The bill updates the provisions relating to scholarships for teacher training, and it provides that these bonded scholarships are repaid through the student loan scheme if the recipients default on their obligations.

As I stated before, I want the Government’s strategic direction in education to be underpinned by clear and consistent legislation. Our current legislation is much amended, and some of it is out of date. This bill makes a start on some of the work needed to clear away old legislation such as the transitional School Trustees Act. It has updated some old provisions of the Education Act 1964 and transferred them to the 1989 Act—an example of that is the offence of insulting, intimidating, or abusing staff in our schools and early childhood centres.

Education is one of the key aspects of the Labour Government’s plan for this country. Indeed, we see education as being essential to the transformation that we are seeking to bring about in the economy, because we know that we need a more qualified group of people who are staying in school, then moving on to get further qualifications when they leave. We know that that is crucial to the development of our social policy, because we believe that if we have highly educated people, those people will have more capacity and skills to be part of raising a family, to be part of the community, and to do all the things that go with being an active participant in the kind of modern country we are seeking to develop.

We know that education has a great deal to do with the development of that very important area of national identity. This has been an extraordinary area of policy over the last few years, with New Zealanders now being excited by the notion that films and music are being made about them, developing a real sense of identity in relation to the landscape and the environment, and getting a real sense of being an independent group of people in the world. To do those kinds of things we know that people need to be well educated and have a clear sense of the capacity and skill they will need to be able to play the role of Kiwis in the 21st century—in whatever shape or form that might take.

This legislation is just another part of the reforms that have been undertaken by the Government since its election victory in 1999. Every aspect of the bill, which has been gone over by members throughout the House, has had various endorsements from different people around Parliament. I listened to the Committee stage debate last week, and I thank people like Brian Donnelly for helping to lead the legislation through, and for adding to it by clarifying areas, particularly around the guidelines for early childhood education. That was much appreciated, and I acknowledged it at the early childhood sector conference that I recently talked at.

I thank the members on the other side of the House, including people like Mr Peachey, who has brought into the House hands-on, recent experience of a large secondary school. I appreciate that kind of debate. I know that we will differ; I know that Mr English, who is revving up in his usual way with a glass of water, has strongly advocated such things as national testing. This is a dividing issue between people on the opposite side of the House and people on this side of the House, who prefer to move down the road of a personalised, learning-centred approach to education. We know that Mr English is positioning himself, as usual, as I said, to be revved up around issues like national testing, but I think those are good debates to have. There is a very clear difference between the National Party and the parties on the Government side of the House. We on this side of the House believe that we have a progressive agenda. It is good to have someone like Mr English representing the last century so that people can understand that. I am looking forward to hearing the rest of the debate.

Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) Link to this

The most revealing comment that Minister Maharey has made in public since he became the Minister of Education came when he told the New Zealand Herald thatpeople like myself and others were trying to “wreck our social democratic school system”. I can tell the Minister he will live to regret that comment, because the school system is not a social democratic one. It does not belong to the kind of washed-out socialism that he represents; it belongs to the parents, the children, and the citizens of New Zealand first. Then there are the teachers, the teachers unions, and, of course, Labour, which is the one group that acts as though it owns the system. []

Some things in the Education Amendment Bill are useful, and the member for Otaki—who almost was not re-elected—would do well to take note of this: this bill brings in the world’s most advanced education voucher. I am impressed by that, and I want to give my compliments to the previous Minister of Education, Trevor Mallard, for whom, I must say, I had some respect. Nowhere in the world has anyone tried what New Zealand is trying out in early childhood education, as permitted by this legislation, which is an entitlement for a child that is adjusted by the hour, according to the qualification of the adults present. That is the world’s most sophisticated voucher. So when Labour members get up and rant against things like choice, diversity, and voucher systems, they need to know—as I am sure the member for Rotorua did not know—that they are introducing a voucher now. We support the bill for that reason.

I do not believe what the Minister said about diversity. He said this legislation would foster diversity. I hope the amendments that were moved successfully by Mr Donnelly will work—I doubt it, but I hope they do work. No one is less in favour and more against diversity than this Labour Government. The Māori Party has figured that out. Its members know that when the highly prescriptive regulations of this legislation are put in place, they will have the effect of making kindergarten look like kōhanga reo, Montessori, day care, and creches. The regulations will be very prescriptive, and everyone will have to do exactly what the Secretary for Education says, right down to the level of detail, and that will be a force against diversity.

I understand it is the Minister’s intention that every early childhood centre in New Zealand will have to re-register over the next 3 or 4 years. That policy is absolutely crazy, and it is typical of what Steve Maharey calls progressive, because that word is laced right through his education policy. There is an enormous waste of resources, in the name of a vague concept that no one quite understands, and it completely misses the point. That is what will happen in the early childhood sector.

The Minister failed to mention the most interesting debate that occurred during the Committee stage around national standards. I would like the Minister to answer this simple question: how many New Zealand children, at the end of year 8—that is, the end of standard 6, or form 2—are literate and numerate enough to succeed in secondary school? I have asked that question through parliamentary questions.

MOANA MACKEY (Labour) Link to this

I am sure that the Hon Trevor Mallard, who has just come down to the House, will be very interested to know in hindsight that that member was showing him respect over all those years. I am very happy to stand up in this debate and support the third reading of the Education Amendment Bill.

I was not on the Education and Science Committee at the time this bill went through it, but, of course, the issues around early childhood education were such a pivotal part of the election campaign that just about every member who stood for Parliament in the last campaign knows a fair bit about it. I think one of the things that came out in the campaign was that New Zealand seriously lags behind other countries, and has been very slow to recognise the importance of early childhood education when it comes to putting our preschool children into early childhood education.

ALLAN PEACHEY (National—Tamaki) Link to this

I rise to speak in opposition to the bill, and before I do so I take the opportunity to thank the Minister for his acknowledgment. I did not have the opportunity during the Committee stage, but I did appreciate the Minister’s kind comments about Rangitoto College. I know the college was very grateful that he took the time to visit the place, unlike his predecessor, and I express the hope that the Minister’s experience there gave him an insight into what makes up a successful school. There are major differences between the Minister and me on philosophical grounds, and I doubt that they are reconcilable.

I want to refer to a couple of things that came up in the Minister’s speech. I am sure it was a slip of the tongue when he referred to boards of trustees managing our schools. Maybe that sums up the difficulty that this Government finds itself in. The whole purpose of boards of trustees was to provide governance for schools, not to manage them. That was to be the responsibility of principals and professional staff. One of the things I observed over the later years of my principalship was an increasing desire by the Government to suck boards into management, and that is not what they were elected to do.

There is a fundamental flaw behind this legislation and all legislation that has preceded it over the last 6 years, and it is this. The Minister talks about the strategic direction the Government has for education. We all know we have to improve the learning of all our children. We all know that it is not satisfactory that, according to the Education Review Office in its report to the Government, up to 20 percent of our children are not experiencing success at school. They are not learning to read, to write, to do maths, to understand new technology, to develop the attitudes and attributes they need to be successful in a 21st century economy, and to contribute positively to their communities.

Frankly, we could argue whether the figure is 18 percent, 20 percent, or 8 percent; it actually does not matter: if one child is not being equipped to function as an adult, then we have to do something about it. The Government’s answer is to centralise, centralise, centralise, and, when that is not working, centralise some more. Sooner rather than later the Government must come to the realisation that the answers to the learning issues that face our children are not in bureaucrats’ offices in Wellington. I have said it in this House before and I repeat it: no child learns in the office of a bureaucrat. Children learn in schools with their teachers.

I want to take a moment to acknowledge schoolteachers, and I am pleased that reference is made in the bill to giving them protection from insult, abuse, and intimidation. In the book I published last year, What’s Up with Our Schools?, I wrote at great length about the importance of schoolteachers and the role that school principals have in making sure that teachers are looked after. I had a rule in both the schools I led that children who swore in the hearing of a teacher, or at their teacher, could go and empty their lockers, because that was the last we were going to see of them. If our teachers are to do their job in the classroom, then it is vital that they are able walk into the classroom every morning of every day of the school week, knowing they are going in there to teach, and knowing that their self-esteem, their sense of self-worth, is not going to be challenged by things like bad language.

Too many of our school principals are willing to turn a blind eye to that sort of behaviour and make an excuse for it. All they are doing is detracting from the way teachers feel about themselves and their job. And we know that what happens is that the best teachers leave first. We need every good teacher.

Do members know what good teachers do? They make children learn. Teachers do not just entertain children and keep them happy; they make them learn. They cannot do that if the environment in which they are placed by their principals and their communities detracts from that ability. They will just leave and go to a school where they are looked after and where they can teach. Worst of all, they will leave teaching. That is one of the problems with the Government’s policy. The centralised, micro-management approach is driving teachers nuts. They have to spend far too much time ticking boxes, saying they got the process right, not establishing whether children are learning and what we will do about it if they are not. No legislation should ever be introduced into this House that does not address the issue of what we will do about children who are not learning and about schools that are not making them learn.

The Minister was right when he answered a question I put to him in the House some weeks ago. For the first time, the minimum literacy and numeracy standards in level 1 National Certificate of Educational Achievement give us a measure. That is fine, but what will we do with that measure? How will we change what is happening in schools as a result of the information we are getting? The information we are getting—clearly published in the Herald on Sunday for Auckland schools last Sunday—is that too many of our children are not succeeding.

So even if we take that Education Review Office figure of 20 percent, then look at level 1 students in year 11—I think of it as fifth form—we find that in some schools as few as 40 percent of students are achieving level 1. The Government is going to have to confront a very important issue. How will it explain that in Auckland there is, for example, a decile 4 secondary school whose students are achieving at 15 to 20 points better than the students at a decile 5 school? How can that be? What is the explanation for that? When will we hold schools responsible for their students’ learning? There is no point at all in having an assessment system that is standards based if we do not do that.

There is one thing we must believe above all else, and it is that every child can learn. A child who can learn to talk can be taught to read. There are far too many excuses. I trust that this Government, in the unlikely event that it brings further Education Amendment bills to this House, will begin to address that issue—that it will begin to think about the type of school environment that needs to be created if all children are to learn. That environment is not one that concentrates on the micro-management of process rather than on the analysis of data and on improving teaching and learning for children. The greatest gift any community can give its children is a teacher who makes them learn.

Hon BRIAN DONNELLY (NZ First) Link to this

I want to comment on the three earlier contributions, and I will comment firstly on the one from Allan Peachey. As a little bit of a history lesson on education, I point out that the term “governance” did not enter the educational lexicon in any meaningful form until a paper put out by Russ Ballard, the first chief executive officer of the Ministry of Education, called Governance and Management. But that paper did not arrive on the scene until well after the Picot report, well after the policy on Tomorrow’s Schools was put forward, well after the legislation and, in fact, well after boards of trustees were put in place. We then have to ask what the purpose of boards of trustees was in the first place. I happen to believe that he has got it right, but we need to look at the actual chronological sequence of events.

The second thing—and I am loath to do this—is that Moana Mackey stated that our early childhood sector has lagged behind internationally. I have to question that. In fact, New Zealand has been at the cutting edge in many of the developments in early childhood education. The Reggio Emilia approach in Italy certainly led for part of the way, but in some areas—for example, putting in place an early childhood curriculum—New Zealand was first. The most critical point in the Before Five policy was that we cannot separate out care from education. This philosophy has actually been bought into by all parties in this House, with one exception that I know of—ACT. We were world leaders.

I say to Bill English, who has talked about standards, that when we came on board in the first coalition Government in 1996 National’s view on educational standards was to give two half-hour pencil and paper tests in literacy and numeracy to years 4 and 8. Those tests were going to be devised by the New South Wales testing agency, and that agency was then going to rank schools in terms of performance. If that is what Mr English believes are educational standards, then I am sorry but I do not believe in educational standards in that particular manner.

This is an omnibus bill—it goes across a whole pile of territories. But I guess the part that has been most misunderstood is the development of the regulatory framework for early childhood education. The bill actually replaces section 26 of the principal Act with a new regulatory regime for the early childhood sector. Members, particularly from National, have said that this will mean a whole lot more regulation. In fact, it will mean the opposite. Through the 1990s we had an ad hoc development of licensing procedures, chartering procedures, Te Whāriki, and the statement of Desirable Objectives and Practices. The latter were very stringent in terms of the regulations.

I will give members one example of the regulations that went through the Desirable Objectives and Practices. They required early childhood centres to keep a record of everything fed to children at lunchtime on every day they were there. That is the sort of regulation, I think, that is probably going overboard, but the philosophy of the time was to be quite tight and then to loosen up. That is what this process is to be about—a process to bring it into one more rational framework and to ask whether we really need that stringency, that level of prescribed criteria. I have to say that the National spokesperson on early childhood education actually sat around the Cabinet table when the last version of the Desirable Objectives and Practices went through, and that version was very stringent.

Now, the people in the sector are talking about this whole process as a process to collapse the Desirable Objectives and Practices. In fact, it is to remove the level of prescription in the regulations as they exist at the moment, and we certainly hope that that will be the outcome. I think in one of my earliest speeches I talked about the process—which they have been going through for 2 years—and the terms “described” and “prescribed”. However, it would also be fair to say that the way the legislation was worded opened up opportunities for bureaucracy to go mad. That was pointed out by myself in the second reading debate. New Zealand First said we would try to do something about it, and we believe we have done something about it.

We have in fact put in the amendments that will overcome the potentially—and only potentially—Draconian aspects of the legislation, where the prescribed criteria would be set by the Secretary for Education, or, in other words, the bureaucrats, and, as I pointed out in one of my earlier speeches, someone could come along and say all early childhood centres had to be painted blue and if a provider did not do that, it would be fined up to $5,000, etc. I do not believe there was any intention of that happening, but the legislation provided for it, so it was bad legislation. We believe that we have put in place provisions that will overcome that by ensuring, first, that the Minister will actually prescribe the criteria and, second, that the criteria will go before the Regulations Review Committee. So Parliament will in fact scrutinise those prescribed criteria, and we believe that that provides a level of protection against over-zealous bureaucrats.

The House became tied down in one or two other issues, and I want to talk about those. One is the issue of teachers being insulted and intimidated in front of students. I must admit that we looked at that issue in quite a bit of detail because of some of the matters around our teachers and principals in some of our more isolated rural communities, where they are living in anxiety about the outcomes of the P epidemic and asking what we can do about it. However, once we explored the legislation, we found that the relevant provision was already in the Education Act of 1964. All this legislation was trying to do was to extend that provision down to the early childhood sector. We recognise that it was about protecting children from being exposed to observing that intimidation or insulting behaviour towards their teachers while in their presence. It was not actually aimed at protecting adults, because they are protected under the Crimes Act. Therefore, we looked at it and asked about whether the law that has been there since 1964 would apply to the students in a school. Of course, our advisers came back and said that, yes, it would. The provision has never been used. In fact, schools have greater powers and authority to use, within their own means. By the way, what those schools use within their own powers are not open to judicial review anyhow, as a result of the Maddever case. We said we have to make sure that what we are applying that to is clear, but that we will ensure greater penalties. So the penalties go, I think, from something like $40 to $1,000. In that respect, there is additional protection for teachers.

The other issue that came up, which I think was a very genuine issue on the part of National and Bill English, had to do with the reporting issue. This bill was intended to get rid of the provision for the requirement for boards of trustees to have an annual general meeting. There is no need for an annual general meeting as boards already have to report annually through other means. All we have to do is make sure that communities have available to them the knowledge that the reports are there, and that they can go along and read them. So there is no rationale for having an annual general meeting. It is basically just a pain in the butt. It is an unnecessary procedure, and no office bearers are elected at those particular meetings.

However, Mr English used the opportunity—and I do not believe that he was talking about national testing—to ask whether we could actually get boards, during this process, to report on how well students were going in literacy and numeracy. There is a problem, because the requirements of boards to report at the moment, in terms of their financial reporting, do not require that level of reporting. So that is a problem in itself. Secondly, the means of how that is to be done really does require a fair bit of discussion. But the idea, the concept, is not to be dismissed out of hand. Therefore, although we rejected the notion we still think there is some merit in some of the ideas, or the concept of it.

Finally, I want to make a quick mention of the extension of the use of the national student number. I am really quite surprised that the Greens have not raised this issue more strongly. We really do have a problem in this country, since Tomorrow’s Schools and boards of trustees took over, with students falling through the cracks. We just do not have that system of keeping a good track of our students, for a whole range of necessary information, to ensure that they are in fact getting their rights—particularly transient students or students between one level of schooling and another. The unique national student numbers will give a greater opportunity for us to be able to provide what we in New Zealand First believe is the required level of supervision for all young New Zealanders, for the benefit of meeting their rights to an education.

Dr PITA SHARPLES (Co-Leader—Māori Party) Link to this

Here I am, speaking on the third reading of the Education Amendment Bill. Just a few days ago I came to the House with much enthusiasm, to speak to our Māori Party’s Supplementary Order Paper on this bill at its second reading. I came with enthusiasm and with high expectations that the House, in the interests of advancing education, would adopt our entire Supplementary Order Paper. I must tell members that my enthusiasm was not just a case of “cross my fingers and hope like hell” stuff, but it was based on earlier discussions the Māori Party had had with members of other parties.

How wrong I was—what a learning curve! Clause by clause I heard our Supplementary Order Paper being defeated—60 votes for, 61 votes against. It was definitely a bloc vote, dealing to all our proposals. It was a vote against the Māori Party and not against the proposed amendments. We might as well have taken all our clauses in one vote, because it was obvious that, in voting, those who voted no to each clause did so without knowing which of our amendments they were declining.

If our amendments were all about the same issue, or if they were trivial, like the odd word change, one might expect a full Chamber of Noes. Instead, we proposed, for instance, that Māori owners who gave their land for education purposes last century and which land is no longer required by the Minister should be offered back to the Māori owners. If the land was gifted, it should be returned at no cost. If it was not gifted, then the chief executive of Land Information New Zealand must take into account the circumstances under which the land was acquired from the Māori owner. The circumstances are critical, because many hapū or whānau gave the land because of the importance of education. It was not about getting paid for it, thus it was not a sale contract in the normal sense. I ask members in this House today what is not fair about gifted land being returned to the donor, or bought land being offered at a fair rate to the owners who made it available for education. Why did 61 people vote against that?

Then we had a very important amendment to protect the special character of kura kaupapa Māori. Te Ururoa Flavell and I visited the office of the Minister of Education and discussed our proposed changes with him and with his staff. At that meeting, we suggested an amendment to the Minister’s clause, new section 154A(5). At the Minister’s office, I actually wrote out the amendment proposed by the parent body for all kura kaupapa Māori to retain control of their special character. The Minister appeared to understand the reasons for the amendment, and actually led me to believe that he was quite happy with the change. I was wrong. The vote was 60:61.

When I report this to my two electorates, which cover almost the whole of Auckland City and the whole of the East Coast from Cape Runaway, south to Palliser Bay, they will be upset. My people will be upset because they have established kura kaupapa Māori at enormous effort to their whānau and to their hapū. To build a kura, one has first to convince ones’s kōhanga reo to be courageous and virtually go to war with one’s local school, and of course, with the ministry, both of whom will tell one not to build a kura but to set up a Māori language classroom within the local school. It is a war. Kotuku kura in Auckland has been waiting for its facilities for 12 years. It has gone from marae to marae to a used warehouse to an abandoned factory, such is its dedication as it waits upon the ministry.

The very first of all kura—built at Hoani Waititi Marae—had to operate outside of mainstream funding for 5 years. It began with a visit to the Department of Education in 1984. It went like this: “Knock, knock, kia ora, we want to build a school.” “Well, you can’t. We build schools, not you.” “But we want to build a school which teaches in Māori language and that has Māori kaupapa upon which the curriculum is based.” “Well, we don’t have that kind of school, I’m sorry.” “No, we know that. That is why we want to create one. So tell us, what do we need to do to qualify to be a school?” “But there is no such school type, you had better go to Māori Affairs.” So then it was: “Knock, knock, kia ora Māori Affairs, we want to build a school—a school that will teach our Māori language and carry all our customs.” The reply: “That sounds good. How can we help?”. “Well, we have no money for the building, equipment, or a teacher, so we’ve come to you.” “No, we don’t fund schools. You need to go to the education department.”, and so it went on. We had to convince Māori educationist Dr Kāterina Te Heikōkō Mataira to move to Auckland for 2 years and start our school type, and it meant getting a deputy principal Aroha Paenga to resign from her post and join the team. Both these people were working for a third of their normal salary. To thank them, we let them design their own curriculum, write their own books, build their own cupboards, clean their own building—an old company showroom that we purchased and moved on to the marae—and so on.

No, our people will not be happy. When they ask me whether the other Māori in Parliament supported me, I will tell them that those in the Greens and the National Party did so—that Tau Henare and Metiria Turei made strong speeches in support of the amendment to save the special character of kura kaupapa Māori. But what am I to say to them when they ask me whether our Minister of Māori Affairs supported us, or whether those Māori in Government—in Labour and New Zealand First—supported their kura’s special character? I will tell them the truth. No, the Minister did not vote to save the special character of our kura. No, the Māori members of Government did not support the kura kaupapa Māori amendment. In fact, they were not even in the Chamber when I put forward the Supplementary Order Paper.

To those Māori members I ask what I should tell the people when they ask me why that was. What do I say? Do I say that those members all have mokopuna and other relations attending kura kaupapa Māori? Do I say that the nature of party politics is to put the party before Māori, that the members’ primary reason for being in Parliament is to support their party’s wishes and not to advance the aspirations of their people, thousands of whom voted for them? I am brand new in Parliament. This is my first experience with a Supplementary Order Paper, and I am gutted. I believed I had the Minister’s support, and I expected to have Māori members’ support. I was wrong—60:61. I am gutted, and members might say that I am new and that I will get used to it. I hope not; I do not want to get used to it. But I remain hopeful that cooperation for the good of our country can become a reality in this Parliament, that things can happen across parties, that the cross-party group that we have set up to look into prisons can yield some fruit, and that Māori in Parliament may be able to work together to propose bills and to jointly support amendments that will advance Māori aspirations.

I repeat here today the Māori Party mandate that we are here to serve our electorates, to promote the aspirations of Māori, and to promote the well-being of all New Zealanders—uniting to build a strong nation.

JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) Link to this

I rise to speak for United Future on the third reading of the Education Amendment Bill, and I want to focus briefly in this reading on two significant parts of the bill. Although the bill covers a lot of issues, in the commentary two are identified as being of the greatest significance.

The first is the new regulatory regime for the early childhood sector. As United Future does not have anybody on the Education and Science Committee, we were very much guided by the summaries provided of the submissions and by our talking to members of the committee. At this stage I want to thank that committee, because I do not think I have ever experienced a situation with a bill where we did not have ready information. But we were really given a huge amount of help from a variety of members, including early advice on Supplementary Order Papers that gave us plenty of time to consider those papers, to ring and consult with key stakeholders in the education sector, and to get their advice and opinions on those matters. It was really helpful, and I thank them for that.

There were certainly some early concerns with the regulatory regime for the early childhood sector from stakeholders within that sector. They were concerned that regulations would be made in a way that seemed to be very unaccountable. Concern was also expressed that that lack of accountability would mean that bureaucrats would go wild and become very zealous, and that the outcome would be threatening to the financial survival of some centres. So we had a talk with members of the committee, we had a look at some of the issues that had been raised by submitters, and we looked at the Supplementary Order Papers that had been tabled by the Māori Party, the National Party, and the Hon Brian Donnelly.

It became clear it was very important that one of our intentions should be to differentiate between regulations that are prescriptive and those that are descriptive. The example that was given to me when I talked to members of the committee was that a regulation, for instance, that requires the gate to an early childhood centre to be self-locking, needs to be clearly prescriptive. However, the provision of a sickbay or sickroom for children who are off colour during the day may be able to be made, and meet the requirements, in a variety of ways that prescriptive regulations could make unnecessarily expensive, and that could also restrict a centre from finding the innovative solutions that would meet with parental approval. Whether or not it was intentional, many efforts to correct the concerns failed to take into account the fact that some regulations can and should be prescriptive, regardless of the cost, and that others should allow for the variety of interpretations that can be applied. So for that reason, United Future chose to support an amendment put forward by the Hon Brian Donnelly to see the Regulations Review Committee properly engaged with the monitoring of developments in that regard.

The second issue that we think is of importance is the extension of the National Student Number system to the compulsory and the early childhood education sectors. First of all, we think that that is a very good idea for all the reasons that people who have spoken so far have outlined. But I personally wrestled with the opportunity to table a Supplementary Order Paper at the Committee stage, because I had some concerns when I read about the proposal. I have a tendency, if I am honest, to be a little bit twitchy about Order in Council provisions when they appear in legislation. I understand their usefulness, but in this particular case the Governor-General can make regulations that identify any agency or body as an authorised user of the National Student Number system, and all that the legislation requires is that the Governor-General must consult the Privacy Commissioner. Having consulted and met that obligation, the Governor-General is under no obligation under this legislation to actually do anything with the Privacy Commissioner’s recommendations before making an Order in Council. The Governor-General just has to say that he or she has consulted—and I think that is dangerous.

I want to thank the Parliamentary Counsel Office for putting up with me, because we went backwards and forwards on that matter a number of times as I tried to design a Supplementary Order Paper that would take into account situations where the Privacy Commissioner might say not to do something, yet the Governor-General would be able, by Order in Council, to go ahead anyway. We wanted to know whether there was any way we could tie the actions of the Governor-General to, I guess, permission from the Privacy Commissioner. The advice I received, no matter which way we worded it, was that we could not actually do that, and to try to do so would have created some legal problems. So after wrestling with the problem I came to the conclusion that rather than put up with something flawed and unworkable, it was better if I dropped the issue and let it proceed as it was written in the legislation.

I am mentioning that, because I have some ongoing concerns that we need to keep a close watch on this legislation as it is rolled out and put into practice. I think that situations could arise where interests groups might apply to be allowed to have access to the information contained on that database where those groups should not have that information, and the reasons why they want it might not be in the best interests of the students whose numbers are represented. I have concerns that under this current legislation that issue has not been properly scrutinised. I would like to ensure that we keep a close eye on that issue and do not let it get away on us like a horse that has bolted out of the starting gate. So I signal our concern about that matter. It does not affect our support of the bill, overall, but I am concerned about that issue. I could not find a way of appropriately addressing it through a Supplementary Order Paper, so we will have to watch that situation; certainly, we may need to revisit it at some time.

I will leave it at that and just say that we are happy to support this amendment bill. We look forward to seeing its implementation.

Hon TAU HENARE (National) Link to this

Crikey dick! Boy, it never ceases to amaze me what sort of twaddle is spoken in this House. United Future is the party that sucked up to the Government like nobody’s business. United Future members promised to support the amendment that was put forward by the Māori Party on behalf of the Early Childhood Council, and what happened? They bailed out because they were under pressure. That is what happened. So it is rich for those members to get up in the House and pontificate about what a lovely job they are doing in the early childhood education sector. Well, they have not done anything yet, but they could have—they could have been revolutionary. They could have helped the sector, but, oh no, they fell in behind Helen Clark and her mob.

Does it surprise “Uncle Pita”—and I will call him “Uncle Pita”; I have such reverence for that member—that United Future did not support his amendments? In a way, it must. But it does not surprise me that none of the Māori members of the Labour Government, or New Zealand First, for that matter, supported what were essentially reasoned amendments. To top it all off, they were led down the garden path by the Hon Steve Maharey, who said he would support the amendment from the Māori Party. Then at the last minute he got the willies, got the heebie-jeebies, bolted for the doors, and said: “No, we can’t support it.”