Kaye NikkiHon NIKKI KAYE (National—Auckland Central): I rise to speak on this Education (Pastoral Care) Amendment Bill. Firstly can I just acknowledge all members of the House on this issue. Too often we talk about the need to have cross-party agreement in many areas of education and this is an area where my colleague Shane Reti has worked with the Minister to ensure that we get adequate select committee time on such an important bill. But also all members of the House stand here or sit here and think of the family of Mason Pendrous. What a heartbreaking situation to have a situation where this young person lay deceased and undiscovered for nearly eight weeks. So to have all members from this side of the House and the Government members wanting to change the situation in New Zealand is really important and our heart goes out to Mason's family and friends. We say very clearly in this House we are going to change the situation and the law because it is totally unacceptable that this has occurred.I want to acknowledge the history and the genesis of this bill—and it's been articulated again by speakers on the other side but also Shane Reti—around the fact that we've had this code of practice but that this is about ensuring that we have absolute confidence as Jan has just mentioned in our pastoral care system in tertiary education—be that pastoral care but also the quality of accommodation.I like many members of this House was a young student once at tertiary education and some of the things that occurred actually when I was a student would not be put up with now. I was a student down in Otago. I actually saw some things that weren't right. My view is that to have all political parties signalling actually to this unregulated area that we need to have change is a really positive thing for many young people in New Zealand but also for many parents out there.A number of times I've had a conversation with a parent who said My little baby's just leaving the nest." It's a really difficult time and what we're saying to those parents is actually there is kaitiaki there is guardianship; there is a role here of the State to do better.In terms of the bill look we do acknowledge some of the issues that have been raised by Treasury in terms of you know the speed at which—but we do understand that this is a pretty serious situation and so Parliament wants to move. Shane has already covered off in his speech some of those issues raised by Treasury. I just want to articulate one of them that we do care very strongly about on the side of the House: $100000 fine—really?—for a major tertiary institution. Look we're quite focused on the fact that we think there can actually be stronger penalties. We'll debate that as part of the select committee process but the key thing is here there does have to be a bit of stick on these tertiary institutions to ensure that we have better pastoral care.As I have already mentioned look there is a real balance here between independent living and the freedom of young people. We're certainly going to have some of those debates in the select committee area but overall National is very proud to be supporting this bill and I just do acknowledge again the fact that Shane has worked with the Hon Chris Hipkins to extend the process to ensure that we do hear from the tertiary institutions. We don't buy this argument that there's going to be this exorbitant amount of cost but we want to hear the detail from the tertiary institutions if they think that is the case. We do want to hear from young people as well—this balance of freedom versus the State taking a greater role. We want them to actually submit in terms of the select committee.I'm not going to speak for very long but I just want to again reiterate that our heart goes out to Mason's family and friends and to let them know that absolutely in this Parliament we're going to work cross-party to ensure that this situation never occurs again and that we lift the standard of care for young people in New Zealand. Thank you."