Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Look we in the National Party won't be supporting this legislation as we haven't throughout. The memorable moment for me in the select committee process the very highly truncated select committee process that didn't give the teaching profession much of a chance to have a say about this legislation was one teacher who had—remember what happened is this bill was introduced went off to select committee for a very short period of time when we were all in lockdown. So we had a whole lot of very angry teachers who had been trying to teach through Zoom or some other temporary way during the lockdown were harassed and slightly irritated then having to find the time to make a submission again by Zoom on this legislation.The memorable one was from one teacher who said Well it appears that this bill is because the Teaching Council is short of money. Well I've got a message for you and the committee: I'm short of money too and I don't see why we should be rushing through this legislation to save them a few bob while I'm struggling here in lockdown and having a bad time." I have to say we had a fair bit of sympathy for him because notwithstanding the real concerns that we have about the mathematical skills in the education system across the board I think everybody could work out that paying $220 once every three years was not improved very much if you went to $157 every year—$157 × 3 is a little bit more than $220! So these teachers were quite rightly not very happy with the proposed hefty increase in fees which was the stimulus for the court case which is the stimulus for this legislation.So what we were left with given the pickle that the Teaching Council had got themselves into was this Government's rush to bring in this legislation to try and tidy up the mess that had been created by the Teaching Council. We have some sympathy for the need for them to collect their levies and we absolutely support the mandated role that the council needs to perform. It's about ensuring that teachers are properly registered that they're certified and that the disciplinary side of things is dealt with. You know there's an argument that the National Party stood in the last election saying that there shouldn't be fees this should be something that's covered by Government and we campaigned on that. This Government hasn't picked that up and that's up to them and there's a perfectly plausible argument that the profession should pay for this independently in order to have a sense that this is something that they as a profession pay for like many other professions do. So OK we'll make that decision; that carries on and people support that. But where it got very messy was the extension of the Teaching Council into a whole raft of other things and we're all familiar with Unteach Racism and the professional development side of things.Now the Minister quite often pointed out that well yes but a lot of that is funded separately and it's not necessarily being paid for by the teachers. But what we saw was a huge gulf in understanding between the profession who were paying these levies and the soothing words coming from officialdom which pointed towards the overarching lack of trust that seems to have developed. And so the issue that we face of course is well it's not going to help that relationship of trust if when a problem arises because of decisions made by the Teaching Council there's a court case the Government rushes through legislation and doesn't go through a proper process in order to sort it out and reassure the sector and the teachers themselves that what is being done is appropriate. Instead during a lockdown when everybody's under pressure they rush it through and tidy it up as quickly as they can without resolving the broader issues.The broader issue that needs to be resolved and discussed properly is exactly how do we ensure that the Teaching Council doesn't have a bad case of elephantiasis and is sort of getting into all sorts of other stuff? Because what we've seen—Hon Member: You leave elephantiasis alone.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Well that's right. What we've seen is a steady and significant increase in the costs of the Teaching Council. Its estimates for its operating costs in 2021 were $18.3 million. How they broke that down—the problem is that their fees are only $4.9 million and therein lies the problem. They've increased their spending and staff very considerably. So it's all a bit sort of murky. What's all this about? Is it about the basic registration and certification and disciplinary side of things? Or are they getting into all sorts of other nice-to-haves which if the Government wants to the Government can pay for if they think it's a priority?By the way I don't think their priorities in education spending are very good. They're all over the place. If I was to say that there's a priority the priority should be making sure that the kids actually go to school. That's a very good place to start. And you know having only three out of five attending regularly is not a good place to start and it's where we are. So that would be my priority. But this Government has all sorts of other priorities—telling people what they should think on various topics and getting side-tracked by strange curriculum reviews. That is why there is a little bit of disquiet I suppose across the board.So here we get to the situation that we're at the third reading. Every other party in the House doesn't agree with this piece of legislation but this Government is ramming it through under urgency—well under a truncated process. The problem with that and where they sadly haven't sort of learnt their lesson is that we're here because we're trying to fix up a legislative kink and a mistake made by a bureaucracy. Isn't there a very high chance now that this Government has come and brought in legislation very quickly to fix it under a short select committee process—the Minister halfway through has come up with what's called an SOP a Supplementary Order Paper and changes has fiddled around with it because the bill that they introduced didn't do the job. So they fiddled around and they've made a few other changes to try and tighten things up. And they've sort of put something in here and a little bit there and they've tweaked it a bit.I can almost guarantee—almost guarantee—that some time next year we'll be back again fixing up the mistake that the Government has made this time because once again they're rushing it through and not taking the time to get it right all because of the problems created by the Teaching Council. So look we're not all out to make life difficult for the Teaching Council—good people doing good work—but there is a sort of a sense that they're being let off the hook rather easily with rushed legislation poor consultation and an atmosphere of distrust with the profession itself.It created a slightly unusual dynamic I'm bound to say. We found ourselves very much on the side of the Post Primary Teachers' Association (PPTA) and I think that's important in terms of a sense of bipartisanship across the board. Quite often people assume that there is not a meeting of minds between the National Party and the PPTA but you'll find quite often that indeed there are many things that we agree on. We certainly agree on the importance of getting children to school for example and that's a topic that we've had many fruitful discussions on and there's much work to be done.And on this issue we understood their overarching concerns about the sense that the profession is not being valued as much as it should be by this Government. They had high hopes when they came in. They had high hopes that that education and teaching would be a real focus. As it's turned out not much has happened really. There's been a lot of reviews—a lot of reviews—a lot of working groups a lot of proposals a lot of change started rolling but not much in the way of completion. This piece of legislation unfortunately is all they've come up with and all they're going to soon deliver on and I'm not sure that it's going to help a great deal. Thank you very much."