Mallard Trevor: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Mallard Trevor: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:662;Page:10299] 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South) 
: 
 In my previous call I focused on the amendments in the name of Mr Grant Robertson. On this call I will focus on the bill the Education Amendment Bill most of which we are quite supportive of. There are a few specific points. I think there will be amusement amongst senior members on this side of the Chamber at clause 8 of the bill where there is a change from “which” to “that”. The thing that most members will not understand is that former Prime Minister Helen Clark would have seen that as a bit of a direct attack. I think it is fair to say that Helen Clark had a view. I do numeracy I do the numbers. I do not pretend to be an English language expert but it is fair to say that Helen had a view of “which” and “that” that was not shared by the parliamentary drafters at all times. I think that this might be a case of them getting their revenge and doing a reversal. 
I have a question for the Minister of Education on clause 15 with regard to the Education Review Office reports for private schools. I ask why they are to be given to the chief executive and managers. I think there might be a mistake because the chief executive is the manager of a school. 
Through the Minister I would ask the officials to look very carefully and tell me whether she means the trustees or the governors of the school rather than the managers. By stating “the school’s principal (or other chief executive) and managers.” we have stated the same class of person twice when obviously if an adverse Education Review Office report reflects on the principal it is very important that the report goes to the trustees. My understanding is that reports go to trustees of State schools. Therefore I ask why there is a difference. 
I will plead guilty now: I would have looked at this clause eight or 10 times over the consideration of the bill at the Education and Science Committee as I was looking at the submissions going through and I did not pick this up before. I take some responsibility as a select committee member for that. But I think that if the Minister can get some advice on it it would not be a big thing if I am right that we did get it wrong coming out of the select committee and we could put forward a quick amendment in order to correct the position. 
I may be wrong; managers may be a class of people in private schools that we do not have in other schools. I met quite recently with the Independent Schools Association. Although I do not know well the three I think schools in Auckland that are for-profit schools generally speaking private schools have fairly traditional boards. Sometimes they have a proprietors’ board as well as a trustees’ board in the way that integrated schools do but they always have an equivalent of a board of trustees whose role is to appoint the principal and to run the school and so forth. 
I am slightly stretching this in order for the advice to come to the Minister. I will move on and if necessary I will come back to that point. 
There is a degree of unanimity on the vetting question. Although my colleague Mr Robertson has brought in a number of amendments to the Minister’s bill that look back to the legislation of the previous Labour Government I want to make it clear that I prefer this Minister’s bill in the area of vetting especially at the point we have got to on the legislation as amended by the select committee. We have come to the point of compromise where there is a degree of unanimity on it. This bill is now better than both the bill that Labour introduced and this bill as it was introduced. We have worked together to get this right. 
On the question of limited statutory managers again this is a very interesting case of a select committee working under MMP. I ask members to remember that I have not been a member of a select committee for a decade and I think that MMP has evolved. It was very interesting to see members of the select committee develop alliances on particular issues sometimes coming from quite different perspectives in order to get to a particular position. On clauses 22 and 23 the committee got to the point where the alliance that formed between the Green Party ACT and the Labour Party outvoted the National members on the select committee. I understand that the National Government has now adopted the position that it had opposed in the select committee. 
It is fair to say that even within the Labour Party the reasons for getting to the position that we did varied. My view as someone who has had some experience as a Minister dealing with these matters is that it is very important—not on a frequent basis but where necessary—to pick up the phone and talk to the person who is responsible for what is effectively the statutory management whether it is a commissioner or the limited statutory manager of a school. With the way that provision was introduced one would have been ringing Ernst and Young or PricewaterhouseCoopers. Well that is all very well but as we know—even as the Minister of Commerce who has responsibility for matters to do with the statutory management of companies knows—liquidators and receivers are always named even if they are effectively a front-person for an accounting company. That is the practice. I think it is important firstly to have the contact and secondly in order to have someone who is held responsible. That is the position that Roger Douglas came to and that is the reason he was supportive of this provision. 
It is fair to say that the Green Party saw the ability to have statutory managers as privatisation. I might say that one or two of my colleagues were slightly suspicious in that area. I have been around long enough to know that if we really want to privatise that is probably not the route that we would take. Having said that the Greens were supportive of the Labour Party position—and we now have the then spokesperson for the Greens and member of the select committee Metiria Turei in the Chamber. For a wide range of reasons we got the balance of opinion of the select committee to the point where it supported this particular clause and that is useful. 
The select committee also did well on the question of splitting the establishment boards. It is my view that this area can be fraught especially where an establishment board is developing a number of schools—as is happening at the moment in the Botany area for example where there is a lot of new development. It is fair to say that both the Minister and I have had more experience of closing schools than of opening them but we know that when we are opening a school it will last for a long time and it is important to get it right at the beginning. It is important to leave the Minister with flexibility on how we split the schools off and flexibility as to whether we even do that. Where we generally have quite innovative schools in those new areas that are testing different shapes models and approaches to education we need to keep on thinking about the governance models a bit more than we have done. For example both in the Albany and the Botany situation I probably would have preferred to keep one board for those schools and see whether that worked. 
I think we might have an answer to the question that I have been delaying for.