Maharey Steve: Education (School Boards of Trustees Single Transferable Vote Option) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Maharey Steve: Education (School Boards of Trustees Single Transferable Vote Option) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:620;Page:15486] 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Minister for Social Development and Employment) 
: 
 I begin my remarks on the Education (School Boards of Trustees Single Transferable Vote Option) Amendment Bill which is sponsored by Mr Donald by saying that he and I share a view about electoral reform. We are both supporters of proportional representation. I would probably say that I am not that much of an enthusiast for MMP as a particular form of proportional representation but because it was the one—[ 
Interruption 
] I say to Mr Power that I always know what I say on these core issues because they are issues I have championed and worked a lot on unlike himself. Once we had decided on MMP—it was the system that was clearly going to gain support—and because I support proportional representation that was the system I supported. 
However I say to the member that I respect his points of view on this issue. Like me he has been a long-term supporter of electoral change and I respect his point of view on the particular effort he has put up today. But unfortunately I have to tell him much to the glee of Mr Power that the Government will not support this legislation. Because of that because of our respect for Mr Donald because of his longstanding track record on this issue and because we do not want him to think we are opposing the bill for any other reason than an evidence base that tells us it is not a good idea I will spend a few minutes on saying why the Government will not support this bill. 
First of all the bill is unnecessary. It is not supported by members of the School Trustees Association. That is a test that I think we do have to apply. If those people wanted it then we would want to listen but they do not. 
The bill would clearly add compliance costs. It would not add them so much to the voting process because I think—I will come back to this point in a second—voters would find the process as simple as the member said and as it states on his T-shirt. Everyone knows how to list in order of preference who they want to vote for. The problem of course is the compliance costs that would come out when the vote was counted. That is the big issue and the big problem we face here. 
Frankly I am afraid that I cannot see how the single transferable vote (STV) would improve the democratic running of our 2600 schools. If I could I would urge Government members to think again. 
Let us get the flavour of this bill. School board elections are on the whole pretty low key. They are the responsibility of the school boards that administer them. The last lot of elections cost $5.4 million to run. If we introduced STV we would introduce a large number of administration changes that would fall on schools trustees and the Government. 
Rod Donald 
: How much? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: I will come back to that because I think the figure is reasonably easy to arrive at in terms of all this. But whatever the system was it would cost more money and if we were to pay more money for it we would want to see some real benefits. 
At the moment there are a whole range of things school boards can do if they want to make things more appropriate. If they want skill levels increased or representation increased they can stagger elections. They can co-opt if they want to. They can request organisations to appoint trustees. They can request a Minister to intervene to make sure things are done in a kosher way. They have all those options at the present time in terms of trying to make their boards work. 
We would have to decide which type of STV system we would use. There is not only one model of STV of course. It would be a nonsense if different boards were allowed to use different forms of STV because that would cause confusion. There is already flexibility in the legislation to allow people to do different things in terms of their voting system. So we would end up with a whole range of added complexities for school boards when really they already have a lot of tools to try in order to make themselves skill-based and representative to make sure things are done in a professional way and to change things if they want to. 
STV is about encouraging proportional representation. I heard the member say that he does not want parties running for board places—thank goodness! He does not want ethnicities running thank goodness. Basically then we should ask ourselves how representative school boards are now. If we flick through the figures we see that it is pretty hard to say that they are not representative. If they are not then we can make them so because the tools already exist to do that in a purposeful kind of way. So why go to a whole new system when as the member said there is no problem now? What are we trying to fix? Right now it is certainly not the core question that proportional representation usually tries to adopt—that is would we get different electoral outcomes from this bill? Not really; I do not think so. I do not think we would end up with a more representative system. 
Rod Donald 
: Give it a try. 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: I think there are a lot of things we want to give a try in life but this bill would affect 2600 schools and a lot of people who volunteer their time. We are talking about taxpayers’ money. I am all for trying things—that is why we pilot things all the time—but I do not think the member is serious when he says just to give this system a whirl. Basically we would want to try it only if we could rack up good positive reasons for doing so. In the end the key question asks whether we would get different electoral outcomes. I really do not think the issues stack up to say: “Yes we would and it would be really worth going through all this.” 
STV is a more costly form of voting. The member himself will know that instead of being able to sit down with a piece of paper which under current arrangements one can and just by hand count up the votes for one’s local school—so that it costs basically a biro some time and a piece of paper—it would be very difficult to do that without computing if we were to use STV. Nobody who uses STV does not also use some computer-based form of counting to get the result in a reasonable period of time. Local governments hospitals and so on that use that kind of voting all have computer-based systems. I have no doubt that we would end up with the same pressure for that if we were to introduce STV for school board elections. 
I do not think that voters would have any difficulty in understanding STV. As I said before it is the complexity of handling their votes that would cause issues for us and in relation to 2600 schools and a computer-based system it would all come down to saying that all that is being loaded in for no real reason. 
I do not want to labour the point today because as I said at the beginning I respect Mr Donald’s commitment to proportional representation issues. He wants to pitch forward that argument into what ought to be the good democratic environment of the running of our schools. That is why Tomorrow’s Schools was introduced in the 1980s and that is why we all stick to it now. We want community involvement. 
But frankly I have to say that we already have good community involvement. The current system is cheap to run and simple to understand. I have not heard people complaining that they want to move to a proportional representation system where in the end we would have greater compliance and regulatory costs without any real gain in terms of what we were doing with the system. So I say to Mr Donald that I am sorry but on this occasion we will have to agree to disagree. The Government will vote against this bill.