Willis NicolaNICOLA WILLIS (National): This bill is a Trojan Horse. It is not a pay parity bill as the previous Labour speaker acknowledged; rather it is a specific tool to give the Minister of Education the ability to dictate the employment terms and conditions of private businesses' employees. It is a direct intervention from a Government Minister who proudly aligns himself with a union movement that has a stated goal of State control of early childhood education. I want to remind the members opposite of how much New Zealand women in particular but New Zealand families in general have gained from the genuine diversity of the New Zealand early childhood education sector because that is what is at stake here. What we have in New Zealand is a vibrancy that comes from not having simply kindergartens and the union collective agreement that goes with them but also community-led centres privately owned centres Montessori centres Rudolf Steiner centres centres with 20 kids centres with 100 kids centres in the middle of cities and centres with farms. Intrinsic to that and why that has happened is because up and down this country there are mums and dads there are former teachers there are people who have said I'm going to invest my money in an early childhood education business and I'm going to provide what the families in my community want." And when those people make that decision and when they invest in that early childhood education centre I'll tell you what they also do: they decide how best to deliver that service. And yes that includes how much they will pay their staff. And yes that includes under what conditions they will give their staff promotions; under what conditions they will say "I'm going to step you up to the next level of pay". That is a really important part of how those owners manage their businesses and this bill puts that power directly at risk. It authorises the Minister of Education to attach conditions to Government funding to achieve a broad range of employment relations aims.Now I want to be very clear: right now in New Zealand there are too many early childhood teachers who are not getting paid enough. National values their work. We know what a difference they make to the lives of young people and in fact the lifelong difference the work of a good early childhood teacher can do. National supports the notion that actually we need to have more fairness between what a kindergarten teacher gets paid and what a teacher in a non-kindergarten early childhood education service gets paid. And that is why at first reading of this bill we said "Well look we'll take a look at this because in principle we don't have a problem with the idea that the Minister will provide more funding to centres to ensure that teachers are getting fairer pay." But that is not what this bill is because the only way—and Labour speakers opposite have acknowledged it—that teachers will actually be paid more is if the Minister of Education puts in the funding to achieve that.So I want to turn to what early childhood services themselves have told us about what they see in this bill. I thank the more than 550 people and entities who took the time to make a submission on this bill who were given only 14 days to do so who are running businesses that are literally running all hours of the day looking after young children and took the time to submit but who only had two days to actually come and present their submissions because this Minister decided to curtail the process. He did not want a detailed examination of exactly what is going on here. But let me in this House take the opportunity to tell you their concerns. What they say about this bill is that without the funding being guaranteed attached to the employment conditions that the Minister may or may not dictate they are going to be faced with stark choices because if the Minister says "Well from now on you need to step your teachers up to this pay level after they've spent this many years." or "You need to make sure that they are doing this or that." then that comes with a cost and the Minister is not guaranteeing that he will pay for that. So how will the early childhood centres fund that? Well they've got a few choices. One of the choices is lifting the fees that parents pay. Some may choose to do that; it will be just another cost of living increase from a Government who has callous disregard for the fact that its decisions have to be borne by someone. Others won't have that choice actually because others are running early childhood services in communities where there are very few resources in the families whose children attend them. We know this because there has recently been a report which says that New Zealand has some of the most unaffordable early childhood education in the world. We are actually OK on the quality scale according to the international comparisons; where we lack is affordability. So what the services tell us that this bill means for them is that the choice they may be forced to make is that—dictated to about the employment conditions they must provide potentially aligning them with a collective agreement for union requirements—the way that they will have to meet that cost is that they will make cuts to quality. And do you know the number one way they'll do that? They'll say "We can't have as many staff anymore because we can't afford them so we will increase the ratio of children to teachers."I've spent some time reading the evidence of what works in early childhood education and I'll tell you one thing: the more vulnerable you are—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! Keep the Speaker out of it—NICOLA WILLIS: —excuse me Madam Speaker—the more vulnerable a child is the more at risk they are in their home circumstance the more important it is that they have stability in their caregiver and teacher relationships at an early childhood service. It can be very challenging to create continuity in those relationships and stability in those relationships if the ratio of children to teacher gets higher and higher and higher.What we see here in this bill is the inevitability of a trade-off. Members opposite can say "Oh no there's no trade-offs." but we live in the real world and we've listened to the more than 500 submitters who have said "I'm running an early childhood service"—most of them actually run it for passion and for love because they love young children they love teaching they want to make a difference to those kids. And what those owners are saying and we are listening to them is: "If you force me into rigid requirements for how I"—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! Don't bring the Speaker into the debate. NICOLA WILLIS: —sorry Madam Speaker—"If we are forced into rigid requirements then actually we will lose flexibility we will lose dynamism we will lose the ability to do what we do so well. And we are very worried indeed about that."So I want to say again very clearly: National values early childhood teachers. We believe it would be very simple to ensure that their pay is better aligned with kindergarten teachers by increasing the attestation rates for their minimum pay. That is an option that is on the table for the Minister of Education right now. We have heard no good reason why it is necessary for him to introduce new tools which allow him to attach other conditions to achieve employment relations aims. We mark in this House the beginning of a slippery slope we mark the stated intention of this Government's allies to have complete State control of the early childhood education system and we state our opposition to that.To the early childhood services out there who provide diversity who look after their teachers who love teaching kids who have done the great things that have made such a difference to New Zealand culture and society who have extended their hours beyond what kindergarten has ever provided who have provided programmes in school holidays because some people can't get the school holidays off who have said "Actually our parents need to be here at 7 in the morning because they're shift workers." to those private early childhood education services who have innovated we say: we value what you've done we don't want to get rid of you. That's what Labour is up to. This bill is sneaky it's a Trojan Horse and it should not stand."