Woods Megan: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 December 2014. Volume:702;Page:1053. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram):I want to take a short call particularly around clause 2 “Commencement”. My colleague Chris Hipkins has talked about what this means in terms of a number of the provisions particularly in relation to the primary and secondary sector. I want to talk particularly about what the commencement is going to do in the tertiary sector.Of course the commencement of this legislation also triggers schedule 1 inserting new schedule 19 of this legislation and brings it into play. What we have here is a schedule that shows really what lies at the anti-democratic heart of this Government. If we have a look at the sequence of commencement and timings that went through under schedule 1 or new schedule 19 inserted into the legislation—we had some very learned contributions on this around what springing this into action and the commencement of this schedule would be. So what does this schedule do? Well essentially what it does is it puts in place some transitional arrangements for the universities.Actually the changes that this legislation is proposing for the governance of our universities as we have talked about in other stages of this bill are fundamental. Quite complex transitional arrangements need to be put into play because of course there are a range of constitutional rules that govern our universities and in order to change those rules there is a complex set of constitutional arrangements that need to be worked through institution by institution which will differ from institution to institution.The dates that were put on this really show how at the heart of the Government’s thinking there is an absolute commitment to stripping our institutions of their democratic functions and taking away representative functions. The dates that were imposed on our institutions were simply not doable. We had an incredibly good submission from the Auckland University of Technology on just this point which showed in the case of its institution not only its institution but a number of institutions that putting through the required constitutional amendments in the institutions—the statutes that would need to go through and the elections that would have to be held under the various courts of convocation to elect council members—simply was not workable within the time frames that the bill was setting out. These are the time frames that will spring into force by the commencement of this legislation.If we think about what a court of convocation is many New Zealanders are enfranchised through this body. I am enfranchised at the University of Canterbury and I am sure many members of this Committee are enfranchised at various institutions around this country. One of the democratic functions of a university is that any graduate of that university has a right to vote for the members of that council. What we have in the main part of the legislation in Part 1 is the Government reducing the size of those councils—with the ministerial appointments presently until this bill is passed sitting at around 20 to 33 percent of most of our institutional governance arrangements but under this new bill rising to between 33 and 40 percent.My colleague the Hon David Parker has already at previous stages of this bill talked about what this would mean in the commercial world and about what having a 40 percent representation on a commercial board would mean—it is getting pretty close to a hostile takeover if you had that kind of level of representation on a commercial board. You already have the ability of elected members being stripped away by the substance of this bill. The very commencement dates put in place under this schedule show that in the thinking of the members opposite there is a lack of commitment to democratic processes.The courts of convocation are something that have evolved through our university systems over a number of decades and a number of centuries and they are there for a very important function. They are there because the graduates of an institution should have a say in the way an institution is governed. This legislation is content to not only place all that power in the hands of the Minister but also to make it nigh on impossible for the universities to get their constitutional arrangements up and running in time for the commencement of this legislation. This is not something that is tolerable. These are the very reasons why we are opposing it.