GERRY BROWNLEE (Deputy Leader—National) Link to this
I move, That the Education (Trustee Ineligibility) Amendment Bill be now read a second time. This bill stands in my name, and it has been the recommendation of the Education and Science Committee that it be discharged. I want to take some time to go through the history of this and to give my views why that is, in my view, an inadequate recommendation from that committee.
The first point is that a bill like this does not come before the Parliament unless there is a reason for it. Back in the time slightly before the bill was introduced some 4 years ago, there was a situation where a person who had quite a considerable record of paedophilia-type crimes against children was elected to a North Island primary school’s board of trustees. The board of trustees in that particular community was unable to remove that person from the board because he had been duly elected and, according to law, was entitled to be there. I think it rather strange that people who have that kind of predilection are able to get themselves elected into a position where the very people they prey on become part of their charge, as far as public office is concerned. So this bill was introduced.
A bill was brought in by the current Government shortly after, and there were some changes to section 103 of the Education Act 1989 that made it more difficult for people in that circumstance to make their way into this sort of elected office. In particular, new section 103(1)(de) was inserted into the Act, which made it impossible, or unacceptable, for someone who is convicted of a sex crime against a child to be either appointed, elected, or co-opted as a trustee for a school if that person has been convicted of a crime with a possible sentence exceeding 2 years—unless, of course, that person had served the sentence. The problem with that in this case is that, generally, if someone does have that kind of predilection, a prison term is not the cure.
So I am disappointed the select committee has gone through the exercise of considering the bill and has decided that section 103(1)(de) does not need to be strengthened, because I think, quite clearly, it does. I know that the people on the select committee did their very best. They did look at it from all angles, but I cannot help feeling that they might have been rolled by the very PC bureaucracy that operates in the Ministry of Education. The officials took the view that of course people who are paedophiles have rights, and if one of those rights is that they should be able to stand as trustees for school boards, then the law should allow it. I do not think anybody in the wider community would agree with that position.
I hope those who served on that select committee, rather than just standing up and saying that the bill should be discharged, actually take the time to show how they have ensured that children in our schools are protected from people who choose to use those schools to groom their next victims. I am pleased that the member over there, Moana Mackey, is nodding her head. It will be interesting to hear what she has to say, because there is nothing in legislation that would give people comfort. Essentially, if someone is convicted of that sort of crime, goes off to prison, serves the sentence, comes out, puts his or her name forward, and gets elected, that person can serve as a trustee on that particular school board. Is that the case?
The member says yes! So how on earth can this bill be discharged, given that there is no protection for those children?
Oh, OK. So now the member will tell me that the principal of a school, knowing that someone had a record like that, would be dopey enough to say, “Come along and run our dance team, come along and run our rugby team, come along and organise our production, come along on the school camp.”—for goodness’ sake! Principals are not as silly as that, I tell Miss Mackey. Until there is something in the legislation that requires these people to disclose their backgrounds, children will be exposed. Labour, of course, will be happy, because it wants paedophiles’ rights to be protected. That is what Labour members have said by discharging a bill like this. I ask the member what the harm would be in passing the bill.
The member has just asked the question across the House—somewhat inappropriately, I might add—as to why I did not turn up to the select committee. Well, I did. I went to the first committee meeting held on this bill in this new Parliament. I heard the various Labour members giving their views on where it should all go. I had numerous discussions with the hapless chair of the select committee, the New Zealand First poodle Brian Donnelly, and it became abundantly clear to me that they had a political agenda that was all about the rights of people who had offended against children being able to have further access to children for more offending against them. There was absolutely no point in wasting time with people who had that mindset.
Well, I hope the member stands up and is still prepared to give an assurance that no one with this sort of predilection will end up being elected, appointed, or co-opted to one of these boards. I tell the member not to run this nonsense that those people can be involved in the sports team, or cultural groups, or anything else, because I do not believe that there is a principal in this country stupid enough to put someone of that sort of persuasion into those positions.
It is very disappointing that members put forward bills because they see them being of use to the community, but then, for sake of political expediency, minor parties, like New Zealand First, completely roll over on their principles and allow a bill like this to be discharged.
The member over there says New Zealand First voted against it. Let me tell Ms Mackey that New Zealand First is propping up the current Government. New Zealand First is directly responsible for propping up a Government that shows no respect for the law of this country and little regard for the needs of children in this country. I look forward to the speech of the Minister of Education, knowing well his liberal views.
Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Minister of Education) Link to this
I thank Gerry Brownlee—the member in charge of the bill, who has just sat down—for his kind introduction. I thought that Mr Brownlee, being a schoolteacher, would probably want us to go to our references first of all. He would say, as he has probably done with his classes: “Before you take the test, please read the question.” So I thought it might be important for us to go back to what the Education and Science Committee said, in the light of his comments at the end of his speech, where he said that the New Zealand First people were a species of dog and that his own people had somehow supported it.
Hon STEVE MAHAREY Link to this
He said they were poodles. What is a poodle? The member does not know species of dogs now?
Hon STEVE MAHAREY Link to this
I think the member meant to say analogous. “Analogious” is not a word. As a university lecturer I know “analogous” is a word and “analogious” is not.
I go back to the select committee report: “We are unanimous in our recommendation that this bill not proceed.” My understanding is that the word “unanimous” means everyone—everyone who was at the committee, everyone who went along—which includes National Party members. They also voted against the bill. I will not spend my time being hard on the member, because I know he wanted to do something productive for schools; I know that. He is a former schoolteacher, and he is probably worried about the issue and thought it was a good idea. But the problem is that everyone came to the conclusion that it was a great idea in theory but it was a bad idea in practice. That is what I think it boils down to.
There is no need for this. There is no need to introduce something that would not actually do anything. Aspiration, fine—top marks for that! As for actual practicality, it is not so good. So having this discussion here, where everyone is labelled as a poodle, or people are PC because they did not agree with the member, means that his own members came to the same conclusion that everybody else did; it is OK as an aspiration but not a great idea for putting into our schools. So those are the comments that, I think, get to the heart of the matter.
At the time of the first reading of the bill, it was agreed by people across the House that it was a narrow bill, and probably flawed. The member should not take too much umbrage at that. We all know that writing our own member’s bill is hard. I can imagine the member toiling away there, at 12 o’clock at night, hunched over his laptop, saying to himself, “Let me tap out the next part.” The task of writing this bill is analogous to quite hard work. We have to excuse it, first of all, in that it is a member’s bill. The member was doing his best—he had to tap it out on his laptop by himself, late at night. That is hard work, and it probably led to this bill being a bit narrow and a bit flawed.
The bill seeks to “ensure that persons convicted of sex offences”—as listed in the bill—“against children or young persons are not eligible to stand for school boards of trustees.” The heart of the matter is that the Education and Science Committee concluded that it did not think that the bill, as drafted, would make anybody safer. The reason, of course, is that there are already a large number of rules in place in the Act that control people who have been convicted of offences, with regard to getting on to school boards of trustees. As the current incumbent Minister of Education, I have the right to remove people, if I do not like them being on a board; if it is brought to my attention that they are the wrong kinds of people. The member needs to understand that his own National Party compatriots said that he had not added anything to what already goes on.
Let me go back to the select committee report itself—because, as I say, Mr Brownlee as a former teacher knows that it is always important to go back to the text and look at what is in there. The report states that the School Trustees Association—made up of the tens of thousands of people across the country who are on the boards of our schools—was not satisfied that it would “contribute to the safety of students.” I think that is an important point.
Hon STEVE MAHAREY Link to this
Well, they are summarised here. The report states: “The School Trustees Association told us that the bill did not contribute to the safety of students.” I know it is hard for the member to take, when this bill is his own baby. He has put it together, tapping on the old laptop late at night; he has been wanting to do something. But it is the view of the people who actually run the schools that this bill will not do the job. It will not make children safer than they already are.
We also know that the bill could place on potential school trustees tighter restrictions than apply to applicants for employment as teachers, even though, in many schools, trustees have little or no contact with students. Trustees of the board usually meet at a school at night-time, when no one is there except other adults like them. Under this bill, trustees would be more constrained than someone who is in the classroom with the children every day—day after day, hour after hour. As a former teacher, the member was in a classroom with kids, so he will know what the vetting procedures are for teachers. They do have to be quite tight. This bill was going to introduce even tighter restrictions for people who were going to be on a board of trustees.
The select committee report goes on to state, in respect of qualifying offences: “The bill lists a number of sex offences, conviction for which would lead to permanent ineligibility to be a trustee. We considered amending the bill so that the offences leading to permanent ineligibility to be a trustee would be either those listed as ‘relevant offences’ ”—under the relevant section of the Act—“or those listed as ‘specified offences’ … While the list of ‘relevant offences’ is more comprehensive, some of those offences could be ‘clean-slated’, which would (at least to some extent) defeat the purpose of the bill. The list of ‘specified offences’ does not include some serious offences, …”.
So, once again, it is the lack of practicality that I think people were getting at. They were saying that they know it is hard—the member was up there, typing, late at night. He had spent the whole day trying to defend his party against corruption charges of policy for money, and all those kinds of things. He took the brunt because the leader was not able to do that for himself, so the member was up on his feet. It was hard work. It was tiring. Then he had to go home, sit in his flat, and tap out the bill himself, so it is no wonder he forgot that there are not the right references in his bill to the kinds of things he was actually trying to prevent in the first place.
Listed under the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act is a whole lot of material that cannot be watched by a person—an individual could be prosecuted for that—but because that offence is not listed in this bill, that person could get on to a board.
Hon STEVE MAHAREY Link to this
Well, let us come to that in a second. The report goes on to state: “The use of either list would require complicated cross-referencing by returning officers to determine the eligibility …”, and that might lead to the kind of anomalous—the word “anomalous” is in there—results, “particularly in relation to offences which could be ‘clean-slated’. To achieve its intention the bill would have to provide for the relevant provisions of the principal Act to override Section 21 of the Criminal Records (Clean Slate) Act 2004, which requires that provisions of other enactments that refer to a person’s criminal record must be interpreted in a way that is consistent with this Act. We are advised that this would be unprecedented.” The member was not thinking small. He was determined to override section 21 of the Criminal Records (Clean Slate) Act 2004. That has never been done before, so I give him top marks for aspiration.
Once again, people were saying that they had traversed all legislative possibilities with serious intent but were unable to find provisions more satisfactory than those that exist. The provisions are already there, so what are we doing passing this law? In relation to police vetting, the Education and Science Committee stated in its report: “Candidates for election as trustees are not required to undergo police vetting. We considered adding such a requirement to the bill, but were advised that this would place a strain on the vetting system. We believe that, because each school is responsible for conducting its own election, the information produced by such a requirement could be used inconsistently.” In other words, there would, once again, be a practical problem.
I think everybody in the House admires the member as someone who is a committed teacher and who works extremely hard on behalf of his party. He is one of the few who is able to give National a kind of warm, caring, concerned face against the harshness that is being projected by his party these days. I have to say that he is a kind of beacon of hope—a beacon of civilisation—who sits across on the Opposition benches. He is a kind of warm glow in the National Party against the cold backdrop of the other members, who are so driven by the kinds of things that have come out today. Bob Clarkson would be another warm, human individual, and that is probably why he has popped down to support the member.
Excepting all of that, we have to say, in the end, that the committee was unanimous—to a person, every single one of them—in its recommendation. The word “unanimous” is analogous to the word “universal”, for example. Virtually everybody was agreed—the police, the School Trustees Association, the National Party, and New Zealand First. Probably even the Exclusive Brethren would agree with the select committee, I would imagine. They would say: “Good try.” In the end, this bill is not workable, so we will vote it down.
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) Link to this
I am happy to take a call on the Education (Trustee Ineligibility) Amendment Bill as the deputy chair of the Education and Science Committee, which in this term of Parliament looked at this bill again. I tell Mr Brownlee, straight up, that all National members of the committee were present on the day we decided unanimously that this bill should not proceed.
I have to say that I was a bit disappointed at Mr Brownlee’s speech, because the Education and Science Committee tried extremely hard to make this bill work. When the bill was first referred to us, we looked at the submission we had received from the School Trustees Association, and we thought that the bill had obviously been introduced because of a specific situation in Christchurch; we thought that people had been very, very upset, so Mr Brownlee had introduced a bill to recognise a problem.
Oh—Palmerston North. We recognised that, but the bill was difficult and unworkable. Submitters said that boards of trustees had far less contact with children than many other people did, and that unless we addressed that, we would create inconsistencies.
Then Brian Donnelly, the chair of the committee, about whom Mr Brownlee has been very uncharitable tonight, said that he thought we should go ahead with the bill. He said we should see whether we could make it work, because he made the very good point that in rural schools, boards of trustees have a lot of contact with children. They do a lot of the hiring. They take on a lot of the roles that, in other schools, teacher aides and other teachers take on. We said that that was a very good point, and that we should go ahead and see whether we could make the bill work. We tried very, very hard to make this bill work.
Judith CollinsJudith Collins was not on the committee and does not know. I am sure she thinks that no committee works nearly as hard as any committee she is on. I would hope she knows, from the various committees we have been on together, that I work very hard to try to make things work that I think are practical, and this bill was one of them.
The committee tried very, very hard to make this bill work but, in the end, every road we went down tended to be quite circular. We came back to the fact that the list of offences in the original bill is not very comprehensive, and that if we were going to outlaw the things listed in the bill—which, indeed, we should—then we should outlaw sexual grooming and many other sexual offences. Once we started to add more and more offences, it became difficult to say where we should draw that line. A lot of us went out and talked to schools about the matter and they said: “Well, we would quite like people with fraud convictions not to be allowed to stand for boards of trustees.” So we ended up with a ballooning group of offences that related only to people standing for boards of trustees.
We looked at police vetting and we thought, maybe, that if we said people had to be police-vetted and then parents had to make up their own minds about it when they voted, that could make a difference. But, of course, if only a certain number of people stand for a board—the same number as there are places—those people will be appointed automatically and there is not an election, which makes it difficult. The problem with police vetting was also that we did not think the police would have the capacity to cope with the thousands and thousands of applications there would be, every time board of trustee elections came around.
We also looked at tying this bill to the Parole Act, in relation to extended supervision orders. I think it is important to note here that the sex offenders that parents are truly worried about are now able to be sentenced to preventive detention on their first offence. But it was certainly a concern that under the law prior to the 2002 changes under the Sentencing Act, the very worst sex offenders could often not be given preventive detention, because it was their first offence. As members of this House well know, it probably was not their first offence; it was just the first one they were caught doing. But in any case they were given a limited sentence, at which point they would be paroled and then released into the community. Now we know that the most serious sex offenders will get preventive detention on their first offence. Preventive detention is a lifelong sentence, so those offenders are automatically ineligible ever to be elected to a board of trustees.
That does not change the fact that currently we are still dealing with those people who are being released from prison now and who did not get preventive detention, even though when we read sentencing notes we can see that judges have said that if preventive detention had been available for those offenders’ sentences, they would have got it. That is why the Hon Phil Goff introduced the amendment to the Parole Act to provide an extended supervision order. Of course, any sex offender under an extended supervision order will not be eligible to stand for a board of trustees.
It was suggested to us that we might want to link this bill to that list, so that if that list were ever enlarged to include more offences, this bill would also include those offences. But we felt that the list, under the amendment to the Parole Act—the extended supervision orders—was not comprehensive enough for what Mr Brownlee was looking to achieve there. Again, even though the list involved the worst offences, it did not involve, for example, some of the offences already in the bill, and many of the others we have mentioned, including sexual grooming, accessing child pornography, and things like that.
So a lot of work went into trying to make this bill work. Some members of the select committee went out and consulted schools in their communities that were concerned about this matter, that had heard about this bill, and that thought it was a great idea. But those members said that when they had gone through the issue and talked about it, they had realised that probably the best route was not to introduce more and more legislation, and more and more restrictions and bureaucracy, if the bill could be made to work without doing that.
One of the things the committee asked for advice on was the kinds of powers boards of trustees themselves had, to make decisions in regard to how they conducted their elections, but we have not received that advice yet. Another thing we looked at was the role the Minister plays in removing people who have been elected. Even under Mr Brownlee’s bill, offenders who have never been caught could be put on to boards of trustees. Currently, if people know there are problems, they can go to the Minister and say they have serious concerns about someone, and that person can be removed.
At the end of the day, I understand that Mr Brownlee is very disappointed that this bill will not proceed, but he can rest assured that we tried very, very hard to make it work. I think it stands to reason that people who are in contact day to day with children, and with young children in particular, should not carry those offences. I know that Mr Brownlee probably does not believe me, but we tried very, very hard to make the bill work. However, it was a unanimous decision of the committee that it should not proceed, but that is not to say that that would be the case if some other member were to introduce a bill that was workable, and that would not just create a massive bureaucracy that would be very difficult to administer—a bill that would not mean that the registrar of electors for boards of trustees would have to go through every single person of the thousands of people who stand for boards of trustees, all at the same time, cross-referencing to find out what offences they had; and that the police, within a very short period of time, would not have to come up with a huge number of police vets, which they simply would not be able to do. If we were able to have a bill in the House that addressed the issue, then I, for one, would be very interested in seeing it, but I am afraid that Mr Brownlee’s bill is not it.
I am sorry that Mr Brownlee felt that Brian Donnelly did such a terrible job. He was the member who, beyond the meeting that Mr Brownlee was able to attend, said initially that we should go ahead with the bill, because of the issue that rural schools had with it. The committee thought that that was a very good point. And Mr Donnelly’s committee members did carry on and bring Mr Brownlee’s wishes to the committee as to how he wished the bill to proceed. The committee looked at all the options it felt were available to it under current law.
But we felt that if we had gone ahead with this bill, despite the fact we thought its intentions were honourable, we would have created bad law and made a lot of problems in the future. We would hate Mr Brownlee to look bad at any point in the future when boards of trustee elections come around, because of the very difficult administrative efforts that would have to be made if his bill were passed.
BARBARA STEWART (NZ First) Link to this
On behalf of New Zealand First, I rise to speak to the Education (Trustee Ineligibility) Amendment Bill. We support the sentiment behind this bill. The bottom line is that if the bill did make it safer for children in our schools, then it would have to be passed. I know that the Hon Brian Donnelly has stated that many times. Children are at the centre of his world, and he would definitely be behind anything to make children safer in the classroom and at school.
But at the end of the day, we must go with the Education and Science Committee’s recommendations, particularly when the select committee states in its report back on the bill: “We are unanimous in our recommendation that this bill not proceed.” As the Minister has said and as the previous speaker said, the select committee worked very hard on this bill. It worked through all of the legislative possibilities, but it was unable to find provisions more satisfactory than those currently in place. The select committee also said that it was not satisfied that the bill as drafted would make schoolchildren here in New Zealand any safer.
We heard from previous speakers that they have sought ways to amend the bill in order to achieve Gerry Brownlee’s intention, but that they were unable to do so without creating inconsistencies in the current law. We also know that at this point in time the principal Act provides the Minister of Education with the power to intervene when it is believed that the welfare of students is at risk. We believe that those powers, as they currently are in the law, are sufficient to address the inappropriate election, appointment, or co-optation of a trustee.
We will support the select committee’s recommendations at this point in time.
TE URUROA FLAVELL (Māori Party—Waiariki) Link to this
Tēnā koe, Mr Deputy Speaker. Tēnā tātou katoa,i tēnei pō. This Education (Trustee Ineligibility) Amendment Bill cuts to the heart of many fundamental principles in our society. Right up there is the right of every child to be free from sexual exploitation and abuse. The fact of even having this bill on the Order Paper highlights the shame of our nation that our babies, our children, are being raped and abused. It demonstrates the unthinkable that sexual offending with children is acceptable.
We in the Māori Party are disappointed today that another bill has been withdrawn—a proposal that looked to follow the lead of the United Kingdom and Canada and introduce a Sex Offenders Registry Bill. Although we are aware of the dangers inherent in establishing such a registry—the risk of provoking vigilante activism and the possible obstacles that may impede rehabilitation—the principle is one still worthy of discussion. In addressing that principle we would do no better than to refer to the comments of Jane Foster, National Director of End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes, who said: “Our children deserve the best protection possible from child sex offenders. … The New Zealand public needs to know what concrete steps are taken to manage the risk offenders pose to children’s safety.”
These issues are deadly serious issues. They threaten the values that are at the core of our national identity. They disturb the myth of safety formerly associated with Aotearoa. Child sexual offending destroys the innocence of our tamariki, it fragments families, and it places communities at risk. The attainment of stability and well-being disintegrates through the actions of offenders who prey on our most vulnerable, and it has lasting consequences for all of those concerned.
For glaring evidence of that, I refer the House to a paper written by Dr Miriam Saphira and Tainui/Maniapoto/Ngāti Paretekawa woman, Averil Herbert. The paper, called Victimisation Among Those Involved in Underage Commercial Sexual, reports on a study of the incidence of violence and childhood sexual abuse amongst those who go on to become involved in underage commercial sexual activity. Although it was a restricted report, surveying only Northland, Auckland, and Waikato, the results were profoundly disturbing. Fifty-nine percent of respondents disclosed child sexual abuse, and for Māori the percentage was even higher. Seventy-four percent of Māori respondents disclosed child sexual abuse, as opposed to 40 percent of Europeans and 60 percent of Pasifika.
These are tragic statistics, and although, as always, there are a whole range of factors in the analysis that one could wrap around this study—such as the results possibly indicating more about the willingness of Māori and Pacific respondents to disclose sensitive information at disproportionate rates—the fact remains that even one child offended against is a tragedy. It is a tragedy of lifelong proportions. The impact of sexual offending scars the soul, wounds self-confidence, and has lasting consequences on the well-being of individuals and their whānau. So the Māori Party comes to this Education (Trustee Ineligibility) Amendment Bill with much hope of addressing and reducing this appalling state of child exploitation and oppression.
It is essential that the law protects children, but other key principles are at play here that also bear discussion. There is the principle of natural justice. As I understand it, in the case of this bill the Ministry of Education was not keen to pursue any amendment to the law. The ministry tended to favour the notion that communities would sort out offenders. I have read through the debate in the first reading of this bill, and I do not share the same optimism that Lynne Pillay has, in her belief that the nature of school elections makes it highly likely that sex offenders are identified by the community, and the issue then resolved through community pressure. Do sex offenders look different from you or me? How would we know whether a sex offender was present in this House today? Could the membership of the Christian Heritage Party identify an offender in their midst? Clearly not! So I am not so convinced that the merits of natural justice should be considered in this debate.
Other themes in the debate around natural justice have implied that as members of boards of trustees are not actually in a teaching role, the issues are not so relevant. But, as the School Trustees Association told the Education and Science Committee, in some communities trustees are also coaches, parent helpers, or involved in school life in other ways. We also know that in small rural schools, members of boards of trustees are more likely to have contact with students than is the case in larger schools. So the risk is still there and this bill does little to reduce that risk. Individuals disbarred by the legislation from becoming trustees would not be prevented from performing other roles associated with children.
Yet another important debate to be had is that around the rehabilitation and restoration of offenders into the community. How do we care for our alienated and our ostracised? How do we reintegrate offenders into caring communities? These again are big issues that this bill does not address.
So what does the bill do? The bill amends the Education Act 1989 to ensure that convicted child sex offenders may not be school trustees. As a member of the Education and Science Committee, I agree with my fellow members of that committee that section 103 of the principal Act already imposes limits on who may become a school trustee. The Education Act 1989 ensures that persons convicted of an offence punishable by imprisonment for a term of 2 years or more, or who have been sentenced to imprisonment for any other offence, are unable to be appointed as trustees. So the Māori Party endorses the advice in the select committee report that there are existing legislative measures to prevent convicted child sex offenders from becoming trustees.
For the purpose of this debate the Māori Party will vote against this bill, supporting the recommendation from the select committee that the bill not proceed. But we must not avoid the responsibility of tackling the crisis that the bill was intended to address. I am told that John F Kennedy would often make reference to the fact that when written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters—one representing danger and the other representing opportunity. I believe that this nation is well aware of the dangers inherent in the crisis of sexual offending against children, but have we truly exhausted all of the options in trying to respond?
This bill presents us with another opportunity to speak out about the safety of children. The select committee has concluded that existing legislation includes sufficient powers to address the inappropriate election, appointment, or co-option of a trustee, and we are led to believe that the Education Act 1989 also provides the Ministry of Education with powers to intervene when the Minister believes the welfare of students to be at risk. These are all good reasons to justify doing nothing in relation to this bill, but we must not do nothing about the children who are harmed by the crisis of sexual abuse.
Tangata whenua too, like the Chinese, are always mindful of opportunities. One of our whakatauāki reminds us: “Ka whati te tai, ka pao te tōrea.”, which means, literally: “When the tide ebbs, the oystercatcher strikes.” So we must not sit by, vote down this bill, and waste an opportunity for this Parliament to pool its collective wisdom in addressing the crisis of sexual offending. If we are truly committed to preserving our tamariki as a natural treasure of this land, we must do all we can to protect them from harm, to promote safety, and to aspire towards well-being. Let us take that opportunity to act. Kia ora tātou.
JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) Link to this
I rise on behalf of United Future to support the recommendation of the Education and Science Committee on the Education (Trustee Ineligibility) Amendment Bill. However, I want to state that we support the original intention of the bill. The motive behind it was extremely worthy, but I suspect that what happened was that a good idea failed to step up to the next notch, to be not just a good idea but a workable one. But the intention was worthwhile.
When I was thinking about this speech, it made me hark back to the issue we faced earlier in this parliamentary term, in relation to taxi drivers. This House had thought through very poorly some provisions in law, and we needed to move very quickly to exclude a group of people who had been unwittingly caught up in those provisions. So it is really important that when we look at legislating in this regard, we think it through very, very carefully, and aim to get it right so that we do not have those situations happening again.
The ongoing issue of safety for New Zealand children while at school should, however, not be allowed to be discharged with this bill. Teachers, parents, and boards of trustees—and, of course, this House—must remain alert to new possibilities to strengthen our protection around children. I like what the previous speaker, Mr Flavell, said—that we must be always alert to new opportunities to do better in that regard. We have a track record that is nothing to be proud of, and United Future will certainly be supportive of any workable initiatives that will strengthen safety around children in our schools. But we support the discharge of this bill.
A party vote was called for on the question,
That the Education (Trustee Ineligibility) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.
Ayes 50
Noes 71
Motion not agreed to.