Hipkins ChrisHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): I would just encourage members to be careful when they talk about the breakdown in the relationship between the teaching profession and the Teaching Council because of the inherent assumption in that that all of the teaching profession think the same when it comes to the Teaching Council because they don't. As a result of this legislation one of the things that we did do was actually talk to the profession about where some of the leadership functions that the council have at the moment should set including considering whether in fact we should remove them completely. We received representations from the NZEI opposing that from principal groups clearly opposing that from advocates for Māori teachers opposing that and about the only organisation in favour of that was the Post Primary Teachers' Association (PPTA). Now I acknowledge the PPTA have opposed the council's existence in its current form from when it was introduced and when it was established in 2015 and that's a long-held in principle position by the PPTA and I respect that position. I don't happen to agree with it and all of those other organisations that I just mentioned also don't agree with that.In terms of the fees that the council will now have to consult on I make a couple of observations. The first of which is that the council has been in a position where the fees collected have not covered its core functions even prior to when the council was established. So its predecessor organisation the Teachers Council was also in a position where the fees it was collecting were insufficient to meet its statutory responsibilities. So a fee increase has been coming for over a decade now and one of the challenges of course is that successive Governments—I'm responsible for this; my predecessors Nikki Kaye and Hekia Parata were also responsible for this—have continued to defer that. The challenge is that the longer you defer that the bigger the increase becomes when it eventually happens.So what I think we have to do is benchmark what's a reasonable fee increase. So we can look at other comparable professions and actually the fees currently charged by the Teaching Council are actually significantly lower than they are for other comparable professions in terms of the fees that they pay for their regulatory bodies. What can we do to help keep those costs down? Well I think we can do two things. The first is what we're doing in this bill which is to make it very clear that additional leadership functions that the council may take on should be paid for by central government and not paid for by fees or levies. The second is to look at those disciplinary functions again and say Are all of these processes as good as they could be?" because there's no question in all of the advice that I've had from both the Ministry of Education and the council directly that those changes to the disciplinary processes have accounted for a significant increase in the Teaching Council's structural costs and so we can have another look at those. I think we all agree that robust disciplinary processes within the teaching profession are vital. If we have people in the profession who are not upholding the standards of the profession when they are dealing with young vulnerable children then absolutely there should be robust disciplinary processes to deal with that.Having said that it does seem to be that those processes have now become so stringent that they're capturing relatively minor transgressions that shouldn't be going to a disciplinary tribunal proceeding where other means may well be able to deal with those complaints. So I think we will look at that and we'll bring forward further legislation to the House and that will have an impact on the fees."