Ardern Jacinda: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeArdern Jacinda: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee[Sitting date: 29 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10552. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): My time has come. I will concede that I was not a member of the Education and Science Committee as was my fine colleague Megan Woods who I am sure will probably get a call after me but I did want to seek someclarification because anyone watching the debate at home may not be clear after the Minister of Education’s intervention as to whether exemptions apply for charter schools. It is a straight question for the Minister: are there exemptions for charter schools around the Official Information Act and the Ombudsmen Act? I would really appreciate just a simple yes or no. Are there exemptions for charter schools from the Official Information Act and the Ombudsmen Act?As this Education Amendment Bill currently reads in Part 2 of this bill there are two specific clauses that exempt charter schools. What the Minister stood up and explained to the Committee was that essentially if someone wants to seek information from a charter school they can go to the Ministry of Education. That might sound like a rational argument but what we are arguing is that all it will take is for the ministry to simply take a “don’t ask don’t tell” approach and not seek information from a charter school for there to be no information available to anyone because you cannot go to the school itself and seek that information.Why does that matter? It matters because we have seen examples of where the ministry has behaved in such a way as to try to avoid having to expose information by taking on tactics like “don’t ask don’t tell”. Probably the most recent example has been in Christchurch. In Christchurch there were attempts to try to get information out of the ministry about school closures. The ministry told Christchurch City Council when information was requested of it to deny that it held information that it had. Behaviour like that from a ministry suggests to me that that is only one step removed from telling a charter school: “Don’t give us any information. Don’t tell us. We might have to provide it to the public. You just hold on to it”—Hon Trevor Mallard: Or a parent.JACINDA ARDERN: —or a parent. “You hold on to it because you’ve got an exemption. You have an exemption from the law so don’t give it to us.” The example we saw out of Christchurch tells us that that is entirely possible from the kind of track record that we have unfortunately from the ministry currently.I am not blaming the ministry. Who knows what kind of direction it is getting from the current leadership. Not only that but the ministry told the person who requested information from it to withdraw that request. It told them they might get the information faster that way and it repeatedly denied requests. That was from the ministry. How do we know that it will not manipulate the exemption that exists in this law as it applies to charter schools? Everything in the ministry’s track record tells me that it might indeed do just that.How do we know it did that? How do we know that all of that behaviour occurred? We know because it was investigated by the Ombudsman—because it was investigated by the Ombudsman. Exemption No. 2 in this bill means that not only would we not have uncovered that kind of behaviour but we would not have had the ability to have it investigated by the Ombudsman because of the exemption. It is quite clearly set out. The Ombudsman was clear in his summary conclusions on this issue. I quote from the report from the Ombudsman: “The Ministry’s responses to the Christchurch City Council were wrong.” On issue No. 2 the report stated: “The Ministry was wrong to advise two principals to withdraw their official information requests ...”. Finally on issue 3 the Ombudsman intended “to undertake an investigation into policy and practice of the Ministry of Education regarding …” generally the way it had undertaken the school closures.We know that because of the important access that the Ombudsman had yet this bill exempts charter schools from that. If we were in a high trust situation where we felt there would be absolute transparency then perhaps there would not be that layer of concern but we are not in that environment. I am yet to hear from the Minister thejustification for why charter schools should have this kind of exemption applied to them. The only reason that I can find as to why we might have these kinds of exemptions is that the public should have good reason to question what is going to happen in these schools and good reason to be concerned about the way public money may be used in a school with unregistered teachers with chief executive officer - style principals and where we are starting to teach creationism. These are the schools where we should have absolute transparency even more so than we have in any other school because of how highly experimental they are.