Hipkins Chris: Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Hipkins Chris: Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:675;Page:21095] 
CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 If National and ACT members actually believe the rhetoric they have been espousing during the debate on the Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill—if they actually believe what they have been saying—they will be voting in favour of Grant Robertson’s proposed new clause 10 “Review of Sections 229A to 229CA”. They have argued that if the bill is passed all of the services all of the representation and all of the things that we on this side of the Committee have argued will be at risk are in fact not at risk and will still continue to be provided. 
They will therefore be quite happy to have a review in 5 years’ time and demonstrate all of those things. They will be quite happy for the Ministry of Education to take the politics out of it and to review it and say “Yes this service is still being provided this service is gone and this is the way institutions are choosing to manage student representation.” or that student representation has disappeared altogether. An independent review—and I think the Ministry of Education would be sufficiently independent—would establish whether the rhetoric being put forward by National and ACT members is true or whether it has simply been a move by them to remove from the political process and the democratic process organisations that have in the past been very vocally opposed to many of the changes they have tried to make. I would certainly argue the latter whereas they have argued the former. 
The reason I would argue that is if we look at the limited experience we have had in New Zealand of voluntary students association membership—and it has been limited because overwhelmingly when students have been given the choice as to whether they have a voluntary or a universal system of students association membership they have opted for the universal system—we see that many of the services previously offered have disappeared. At Waikato University the students lost just about everything so much so that they opted to go back to a compulsory system because the students at that institution valued those services and wanted to see them restored. 
I think there is a really good cause to say that if we pass this bill today in 5 years’ time we should reflect on it. As a matter of fact I think that as a broader principle for the House in general it would be very useful for us to review much of the legislation that we pass 5 years after enactment to consider whether the laws are working in the way they were intended to or whether the House needs to reconsider them. I think it is probably quite good practice for Parliament to make sure that laws are reviewed regularly to determine whether they have had the desired effect. I do not think anybody should be afraid of this amendment. I think that if National and ACT members believe the things they have been arguing through the debate of this bill then they will be very happy to support this new clause. 
What the new clause would do is allow the Ministry of Education to report to the Minister of Education and the Minister for Tertiary Education with the terms of reference for the review set out by the Minister of Education. The review would assess the impact of the provisions on students and the tertiary sector in accordance with the terms of reference that would be established. I guess it is important to note that this review would be 5 years after the date on which the bill receives the Royal assent. We are not talking about something that would come into effect straight away. It would allow a period of time for the claims that have been made by the people proposing this bill to be tested. A review would allow students the institutions and other interested parties to have a say on whether the claims made by National and ACT were in fact true or whether they were misguided as I think they must be. 
It would also allow the consideration of evidence from international jurisdictions. There is probably more evidence from Australia on the impact of voluntary student membership than there is in New Zealand. Like I say the New Zealand experience in universities has been relatively limited to simply the association at Waikato University which has gone back to a universal system of membership and the association at Auckland University which built up a very large asset base under a compulsory membership system. That is one of the things that has helped that association get through despite having voluntary membership. It would be interesting in this review to consider for example the respective positions that students associations go into the voluntary system in. Some of the university students associations have very large asset bases. 
The associations at Canterbury University and Auckland University have large bodies of assets and large cash flows from trading operations with which they will go into this voluntary regime; others such as the association at Victoria University go into it with very few assets and therefore the impact of a voluntary system on them may be significantly greater. They will lose their revenue very quickly. They do not have trading activities to support them that they can continue to cross-subsidise from. A review in 5 years’ time would allow those impacts to be assessed. Although I am very strongly in favour of this amendment by Grant Robertson he probably should have given us a few options. Rather than a 5-year review it would have been useful to have some options as to whether it should be after a year 2 years or 5 years. I strongly contend that for the associations that I have mentioned that have a very low asset base and no trading activities the impact will be quite immediate. For the associations that have a large asset base and have built up large reserves the impact will potentially be felt in the longer term. 
One of the things that a review after 1 year would do is assess how associations that have built up those large asset bases and large reserves have behaved and what they have put those assets towards. One of the things I am a little concerned about—it has not actually been touched on much at all in the debate—is the potential under a voluntary system for asset stripping of the students associations once they become voluntary. It is quite possible that when we move from a system where membership of these associations is totally universal to one where a very small number of students could effectively take over a students association they could asset-strip them spend the money however they choose to change the constitutions of those organisations and spend up the money at large and not necessarily for the purposes for which it was originally collected. This bill does not make any provision for that. That is one of the reasons why I think it is very important that there be some systematic form of review. In fact I argue that 5 years is too long to wait to do that. 
We are not talking about inconsiderable sums of money; it is in the millions for some of the larger university students associations. They have assets and reserves in the millions and there is no protection of those once this bill passes. There are no transitional measures that mandate for example any democratic process or any protection in terms of what happens to those assets once these organisations become voluntary. That has not been canvassed in the debate by any Government member or by the member proposing the bill. I am genuinely concerned about that. These assets have been built up over a number of years. 
In the case of my old students association the Victoria University of Wellington Students Association it has been in existence for about 110 years—maybe 111 years I think—and a lot of assets have been built up over that period of time. A lot of interests have been built up over that period of time that are not immediately tangible assets and we potentially need to think about how they would be transitioned to a voluntary membership environment. For example the student union building at Victoria University does not belong to the students association because the students association in its benevolence gifted it to the institution but the association continues to have a significant interest in that building. That is based of course on the current settings where all students are members of that association. What happens to the beneficial interest in that building that the students association currently has when it no longer represents all of the students at the institution? How will the institution manage that? There is no mention of that in this bill and no systematic process is set up in this bill for addressing those issues. 
I think that is a good justification for there being a fairly thorough and comprehensive review of it. Again I argue that 5 years is too late but at least after 5 years we would be able to establish where some of the money has gone if in fact it has disappeared. At the moment it is quite possible that the money will disappear and we will never hear anything more of it because there will be no review to determine where the money has gone. I am very concerned about the significant asset base that these associations have built up about how they could potentially be abused and about the fact that this bill does not make any provision whatsoever for dealing with that issue. 
So a review after 5 years—as set out in new clause 10 proposed by my colleague Grant Robertson—is a very prudent and sensible move and I think that National and ACT would be very well advised to vote in favour of this provision. It is a sensible provision and it will not delay the progress of the bill.