Hudson BrettBRETT HUDSON (National): Thank you Madam Chair. It's a pleasure to rise and take a call. Before I come to my question to Minister Chris Hipkins I just want to reflect for a moment on comments he was making in his last contribution. He referred to statements that my colleague Dr Parmar had made. His point was that she was seeking to bind the current Government to policies or actions which a future Government might want to take and he claims that that is either speculative or somehow wrong.Well I just wanted to take this opportunity to remind the Minister that not so many months ago when he and his colleagues sat on this side of the Chamber the Hon David Parker—and I use a technical term here—banged on for months about how the National-led Government should not negotiate in the Trans-Pacific Partnership to allow foreign ownership of residential properties in New Zealand because a future Labour Government might want to legislate that away. There's a non-parliamentary word that describes the Minister's current position tonight and the position that he and his colleagues held in Opposition. Suffice it to say that consistency of former words and current actions is a foreign concept to this Government.But my question for the Minister around this bill and in this part is given that he wants to have registered teachers only principally elect the seven members of various parts of the teaching profession—and although we oppose this bill as my colleague the Hon Nikki Kaye has said our job is to try to panel beat this into the best possible shape it can be even though we ultimately don't support it. If he is so adamant that the teachers should elect the representatives from various parts of the education sector why does he value the knowledge and experience of those teachers so little that he will not allow them to have a voice in the specialist skills that he will appoint to the council? Why can those teachers not make decisions about the people with the best governance skills or appropriate financial management skills or understanding of the Treaty of Waitangi? For instance apparently a registered primary school teacher is able to know who the best secondary school representative on the council is—because I'll get to that—but they can't possibly understand who would have the requisite and proper sort of financial management expertise that they should also sit on the council.So he's limited their voice quite significantly in the structure he's chosen to put in place but it's perhaps slightly more egregious than that because the structure I contend is a lazy structure. Although it allows—well actually it doesn't allow. It states representatives from each part of the education sector—so you'll have a representative from the secondary education sector and a representative from the primary school sector. The actual weight of numbers for electing each of those representatives is not from the registered teachers within that sector because all registered teachers appear to get a vote across all those members. So if you take the collective numbers of registered teachers in early childhood education and primary and the other sectors well they'll outnumber the number of secondary school teachers. So the actual representatives elected will actually be the decision made by the weight of the numbers from outside of that part of the sector. It is I would argue—and I'd ask the Minister why he chose this model—a model which will ultimately elect a representative from each part of the sector but in no way does it guarantee or even give a strong sense of confidence that you'll get the very best of the representatives from each of those sectors.It's odd really I think that a primary school teacher gets to elect a secondary school representative but they don't get a voice in other specialist elements of the council whether it's governance skills leadership and experience or financial skills. I think it's a flawed model. Actually I think the bill's a flawed bill. But certainly if I look within it it looks on the face of it easy but at the heart of it is actually a lazy means to give a headline model which appears to look like it offers some sort of democratic representation but in reality doesn't necessarily deliver the best set of skills from each part of the education sector. I'm kind of keen to hear from the Minister why he chose to adopt that model.