Martin Tracey: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMartin Tracey: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading[Sitting date: 13 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16697. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]TRACEY MARTIN (NZ First):Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. I would like to acknowledge Dr Cam Calder who is the chair of the Education and Science Committee. He is a lovely man and he is going to have a hell of a time on that committee around the Education Amendment Bill (No 2). I want to acknowledge Dr Calder now because I want to make sure he understands that although I appreciate his collegial manner on the select committee it will not last with this bill.I would like to start at the beginning. Let us just note bullet point No. 2 in the general policy statement which says: “to create a regulatory framework that promotes accountability and high standards within the education sector;”. The National Government just cannot seem to help itself. Either that or it just does not realise how insulting that truly is to hard-working professionals inside education in this country. Statements like that suggest to the public that there currently is not any accountability or that the profession does not already have high standards otherwise the bill would not say to create them. Any Minister with actual knowledge of this sector would have known that that statement is demonstrably false and would not have allowed the staff to use that language.It is farcical to suggest later in this bill that one of the purposes of creating the new Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand is to raise the status of the teaching profession. It is farcical because it is this Government that has done more damage to the status of the teaching profession than any other single incident or entity since it began using attacks on this profession for political purposes in 2008. This Government makes these sorts of derogatory statements inside legislation which places them on the permanent historical record of this House and then it has the audacity to try to kiss up to teachers by launching a website where people write on it about their personal favourite teacher.The Government has announced a top-down bribe of $359 million in an attempt to get teachers to forget the number of times the Government has kicked them in the guts over the close to 6 years that we have had this National Government. The Government appears to hope that teachers will be so busy trying to figure out their payslips from Novopay that they will not notice that legislation like this will remove their representation on a body that they will be paying for. According to Treasury papers they will be paying more for the privilege of having this Government take away their ability to elect their representatives.If this bill is not about raising the status of the sector then what is the purpose of these changes? The Minister of Education has been very helpful in her publicly recorded statements. This is unusual but she has. Ms Parata uses dog whistle politics when she makes statements such as: “There will be less chance of dodgy teachers resurfacing at other schools under this legislation.” What absolute rubbish. The Minister knows that one of the worst convicted sex offenders was found to have completely bypassed the teacher registration process so nothing inside this bill will stop that from happening again.The Minister seeks to remove the basic rights of teachers around being innocent until proven guilty through clauses in this legislation. Teachers are humans too. They deserve the right to be able to have complaints against them heard away from the public until it is shown that that complaint has a basis in truth. Teachers will be pursued under this legislation and the Minister is using that to try to create turmoil and a voting base for the National Party just as it did when it scaremongered in 2008 and just as it did when it scaremongered in 2011. The Minister knows that it is more likely that improvements to the front end of teacher training through the screening of potential teacher trainee candidates and the continual screening of candidates around a holistic matrix would have more effect as opposed to the current “bums on seats” mismanagement of teacher supply in practice under this Government.The Minister knows that her Government has left a gap that one could drive a truck through. It specifically puts our children at risk in recent charter school amendments to this same bill that allow anyone with a Ministry of Justice check into those charter school classrooms. The fact that the Ministry of Justice checks cover only New Zealand convictions and not those from overseas has been ignored by this Minister and by this Government. The fact that should any incident arise in a charter school around any of these individuals where there is no central record to track them from one charter school to another puts our children at risk. But the Minister does not want the New Zealand public to focus on that.This Government prefers to have another go at the professional body that actually takes the educating of our young people seriously. If I have a criticism of members of the teaching profession in New Zealand it is that they are too reasonable. They try too hard to accommodate the many choices that this Government says it wants for our children. If there is a criticism I have of them it is that they are so invested in the children of this country that they put themselves so far second and they have allowed this Government to ride roughshod over them.But they do stand up so why do the Minister and the Government pursue this legislation? It is about the fact that the teaching profession is still fighting back. Teachers still stand up no matter how battered and bruised they are and they fight for their students to be judged as a whole person on holistic criteria as opposed to the narrow robotic view the National Party would like. The National Party believes only in winners and losers. That is its reality. Given a chance we believe this Government would bring back the “scale to fail” of the 1970s. We believe that this Government would have primary school children held back year upon year if they did not meet the national standards.We have seen no money being put into the front end of the spend to support students who have been clearly identified which is what the purpose of national standards was supposed to be when it was sold to this country in 2008. Not a single cent of the close to $40 million spent to date on national standards has touched a child at the front end and given more resources with regard to our dyslexic children our dyspraxic children and our children who need any other support—not a single cent. If this is not about protecting our children and it is not about lifting the status of the profession what is it actually about? Again Minister Parata has articulated this—mistakenly perhaps but none the less she has put it into the public domain. This is about control. This is about removing any elected official from the body of the profession and giving the Minister total control of all appointments. The Minister has quite clearly told the educational representation bodies that her ultimate goal is that this new council will be the only body that she or any future Minister of Education will have to consult when they start the next tranche of privatisation and performance pay amendments to our education system.But Minister Parata is not the only member of this Government who is hell-bent on removing democracy and the need to consult from the education sector so let us move on to the amendments in the bill under Mr Steven Joyce’s area. We have seen that it is about removing what this Government finds most annoying. It is about the requirement to consult and removing it. We have seen time and time again from this Government—and it is an arrogance that is inherent in the National Party—a disdain to enter into constructive dialogue. This is why this party actually finds it most difficult to get its head around MMP. MMP is actually about entering into constructive dialogue and this party finds it very difficult to do so.Well we all know that it is much easier for people to just do as they are told. We know that. But that is called a dictatorship and history has shown us time and time again that the people will stand a dictatorship for only so long before they will demand to have their views and their voice heard and we hope that the New Zealand public will demand that their voice be heard later this year. Mr Joyce is basically saying that we should trust him with his ministerial appointments and I am sure my Opposition colleagues will address this further as they go on.I want to have a look today in the last few minutes at the performance of this particular Minister. Information provided to us about the make-up of the current ministerial appointments to councils show that he cannot be trusted to actually provide the diversity that is required to keep these councils representative. At the moment only 16 percent of his appointments are women only one Māori and no Pasifika. Two-thirds of his appointments have been chief executive officers company directors or accountants; a further 20 percent are commercial lawyers; and only four come from some other professional background. And this is despite 90 percent of graduates actually heading into professions and vocations other than those.The bill is a mishmash and we will stop it.