Woods Megan: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading[Sitting date: 13 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16699. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram):You have to hand it to this Government for its consistency. There are a couple of areas of consistency that I am going to talk about today. This is a Government that when it does not like what people who are elected to a body are doing simply does away with voting. It has literally taken away votes where I come from in Christchurch—we no longer have an elected regional council. But in education this Government has really taken the knife to the notion of representation. We have seen it with charter schools which are not going to have elected boards of trustees taking away the rights of communities to have a say in how these schools are run. We have seen this with the closures and mergers and the creation of super-schools in Christchurch. Bigger schools mean less community governance and less community representation within our election system.Moving right along this Government is now taking the knife even further into the notion of representation in our education system in the tertiary sector. We are seeing it in the Teachers Council and we are seeing it in our university councils. When this Government does not like something that it is being told it simply gets rid of the elected members. It just does not like it. It just simply appoints some of its friends. It puts into positions some of its friends who will roll and do exactly what they want. We look at Environment Canterbury and water irrigation—put in commissioners who will agree with that. You want things to happen; you appoint your mates who will not put up one murmur of discontent about what is going to happen. This is a Government that has given up on the notion that we elect people through democratic means and that this is an effective way of having governance. This is a Government that has given up on the idea of any type of civic governance it seems in education and simply wants to rule through corporate models.Well newsflash—it is not a company. These are universities these are our schools and corporate governance is not necessarily the best model.Phil Twyford: But Government is business Megan.Dr MEGAN WOODS: “But Government is business.” my colleague tells me. Well that is the way it is being treated by this Government.Let us go through some of that changes that are going to be made. I did say I was going to talk about consistency in two areas from this Government. I just want to go through its capacity to botch - up everything in education. I will take just 1 year—1 year out of the 5 long years nearly 6 long years it has been in Government—and have a look at the number of botch-ups. Let us pick a year any year—2012 will do. In May 2012 larger class sizes were announced. In June this was reversed. The Minister of Education had got it wrong. In August the Minister’s top adviser quits. In September the Canterbury school closures are announced. In October it seems her cousin is behind the charter schools. In November there was the Novopay debacle. In December the Christchurch teachers decide to go on strike. In December Lesley Longstone resigns. This is a Government with the capacity to turn absolutely everything it touches in education to absolute custard.We have that again with this omnibus bill the Education Amendment Bill (No 2) which we have been presented with. This is a bill that came to the House on Monday. We are debating it now on Thursday. It covers off very large areas of disparate bits of our education system. What is it that the Government is trying to hide? What is it that the Government is trying to do? What we have is a very consistent theme. They may be disparate parts of our education system but we have a very consistent theme of an arrogant and out of touch Government that is interested only in appointing its mates to key positions.Let us have a look at the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand and what these changes will do. Well this is a Government that does not believe that the council should be representative of the sector. What we believe in and what we stand for on this side of the House is a democratically elected educational council. Hekia Parata has been heavy-handed in all the decisions she has made and this is another one. I want a Government member to take more than a 1-minute call on this bill and tell us why it is that teachers should not and do not need to be on this council. Why is it that we do not need to have teachers on it?Moving right through to the tertiary sector Steven Joyce is hiding in Hekia Parata’s bill. It must be that he senses a botch-up and knows that one more against Hekia Parata’s name is not going to make a blind bit of difference. So let us have a look. Steven Joyce tells us it is OK because universities can still choose to have students and staff on their governing bodies. Well that is not good enough Mr Joyce. What we say is there needs to be legislative protections so that the governing bodies of our universities will ensure that the people who work in universities and teach in them the colleagues of the collegial body that makes up a university have a voice and a say in how a university is run. We also say there needs to be legislative protection for people who attend those colleges who are taught by those colleagues in these collegial environments to have a say in how universities are run. We have had no justification for why we are going to change an age-old tradition of how a university is run.If you go back to the very reason that democratic councils and bodies were established in universities you go back to the beginning of the 19th century when they were put in place to ensure that we entrenched Enlightenment thinking and teaching within our universities and that we did not hark back to religious tuition within our universities. The only way this could be protected was by having the people with a real stake in it have a say in the running of those universities. We have had absolutely no justification. We have the regulatory impact statement on this aspect of the bill which really cannot give the Minister for Tertiary Education Skills and Employment any arguments that he needs to argue for it.My colleague Grant Robertson has been looking through the size of some of the governing bodies of universities throughout the world. The Minister is telling us we need to make this massive reduction down to 8 to 12 people on our governing bodies so that we can have better universities we can be better at innovating and we can be better academics. Well go tell that to Stanford University with 38 members on its governing body. Go tell that to Harvard with 32. Go tell that to Oxford University with 30. Go tell that to Cambridge University which has 16 places reserved for academic staff members on its governing body. It has a further three places reserved for students because it makes that university a better place. Then we have the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with its 76. Well that university is pretty shoddy at innovation and commercialisation is it not? We must need to change it.Grant Robertson: Hopeless!Dr MEGAN WOODS: It is a hopeless university—need to change that! The Minister will not even talk about the report that he received in 2012 from the Ministry of Education. What was the Minister told in this report that he received in 2012? Well it was noted that internationally even those bodies that were taking a skills-based approach maintained stakeholder representation in their governance—that even if you do want to go to a smaller model you do not have to do away with staff representation and you do not have to do away with student representation.But this Minister has made a decision. This Minister knows that it is the staff who are not putting up with the way in which he sees education as a cost to be cut and that the staff on those councils are not happy with the money that he is taking away from those institutions and the fact that he sees success in tertiary education as dampening down the demand for tertiary education. He certainly does not want students sitting on those governing bodies because heck some of those students might be people who have had their access to allowances and loans cut. This is a Minister who is taking the knife to tertiary education and he does not want to have critics. He does not want universities to carry out their very function as the critics and conscience of society.This is a Government that is continuing its grand tradition now of taking away democratic rights when it does not like what someone is saying. All New Zealanders should be very worried because this is something we are seeing right throughout our country in various places. Elected staff members and students should have a say. Teachers should have a say. Education is too important to leave to Steven Joyce and Hekia Parata.