Lees-Galloway Iain: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee[Sitting date: 27 November 2014. Volume:702;Page:970. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North):That member over there Jono Naylor will never be the member of Parliament for Palmerston North if the only contribution he can make on a debate about tertiary education is to try to shut it down.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): What the member is doing now is out of order because he is referring to a ruling that I have made. That is gone; we will speak to the bill.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: If members opposite are wondering why so many members on this side of the Chamber are taking an interest in the provisions in this legislation that refer to the governance of universities it is because neither the Minister of Education nor any member on that side of the Chamber has been able to provide a shred of evidence as to why these measures are necessary.Grant Robertson: Not one.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: Not one. Not the Minister—the Minister who seems to have spent most of her time on her phone looking at her texts possibly deleting them. Not one of the members opposite has got to their feet and told us what the evidence base is. What is the evidence base? What is the international evidence? What is the domestic evidence? Where did this idea come from? Why is it in the interests of our universities to reduce the size of their councils? If we could have just one member give us one piece of evidence—Hon Nanaia Mahuta: For 1 minute.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: They do not even need to speak for 5 minutes. If they could just stand up and give us 1 minute on why this is a good idea maybe members on this side would not keep asking the Minister to give us their contribution. This is important to Massey University and to the Universal College of Learning the major tertiary education providers in my electorate of Palmerston North. It has a particular effect on those institutions and institutions like them because they are multi-campus institutions.When you have to get representation at a governance level that covers the variety of communities of a multi-campus institution that immediately restricts the ability to get the other ranges of experience and representation that are required on a council. We have already seen it with the Universal College of Learning council. When that council was reduced to eight members the student representation went and the staff representation went. That was not a decision that either the governance or the management of Universal College of Learning wanted to make. Nobody in that institution thought that it was a good idea to remove student and staff representation on their council but they were in a bind because they have a campus in Palmerston North they have a campus in Masterton and they have a campus in Wanganui.By the time the Minister’s appointments had been made and they got appropriate representation from those different campuses and ensured that they had the mix of skills that a governance board requires there was no room left—no room left—for the student or staff representation. According to everybody whom I have spoken to at the Universal College of Learning that is to the detriment of that institution and to the detriment of its ability to show leadership and governance that is in the interests of ensuring that that institution can provide to their community.If members opposite—and one member in particular—think that I am wrong they should get to their feet and tell us why that is wrong. They should stand up and tell us why that is wrong but they have failed to do so—absolutely failed to do so. That is why the Massey University council came to the Education and Science Committee and gave its submission absolutely in opposition to this legislation. It opened by saying there is no hard evidence—there is absolutely no evidence—that reducing the size of the council will have the effect of making the council more efficient or more effective making the institution more effective or delivering better educational outcomes for the students who study at those institutions. The council said that it would create difficulties in achieving the balance of interests and skills. Massey University will face the same challenge as the Universal College of Learning faced because it has a campus in Palmerston North a campus in Wellington and a campus in Auckland.They are very different communities that require very different types of representation—the representation that is encouraged in this legislation. Councils are encouraged in this legislation to make sure they have a mixture of representation that represents the communities that they operate in yet at the same time what this legislation principally does is restricts the ability to ensure that they can do that.Hon David Parker: They say one thing and do another.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: They do always say one thing and do another. Then of course we have got the point that the Hon David Parker and others have made that the proportion of representation provided—