English Bill: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
English Bill: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:622;Page:18072] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 Well that was a quiet valedictory from that Minister. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Do you want a bet? 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: No I would not bet on it. I just hope like anything that we get Steve Maharey. That would be great we are really looking forward to it! This legislation is quite uncharacteristic of that Minister in that some of it is useful. Some of it is actually quite good. I do not think that anyone would want to stand in the way of simplifying the regulatory regime for early childhood education. 
I just want to draw attention to some of the issues that we will be looking to debate in select committee when it goes through the detailed provisions of this bill. We support a better regime for early childhood education regulation. It is too complicated at the moment there are doubled-up requirements and it is time it was tidied up but the way this bill approaches it does play with fire. I want to draw some of the risks to the attention of the Minister as well as to the attention of the House. The Minister may do well to listen to this regardless of whether he or someone else will see this legislation through. 
There are some real lessons from going down a similar path to the path taken in the health sector. What this legislation imagines it will do is focus on outcomes—not health standards prescriptions—to set some very broad principles and then allow officials to determine by regulation just what the requirements will be for setting up and running an early childhood centre. That is a path we went down with the legislation in the health sector in the mid to late 1990s. I can tell members that there are many potholes on that path. For instance if we do not have much prescription in the legislation there is no constraint on officials. What health providers have discovered is that we can end up with more prescriptive regulations because officials feel free to lay down by regulation anything they like. They have no particular reason to be careful or economic about it. The legislation gives them a free hand. [ 
Interruption 
] I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. 
Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: I think that out of courtesy to the speaker there is far too much talk and people have their backs to the speaker and are not sitting down. I just give that final warning. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: I would have thought that the Government would have— 
Darren Hughes 
: He’s so washed up he’s not worth listening to. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. That was a direct challenge to the ruling you have just made. I take offence at the way the Government members are treating the Speaker in the Chair by turning their backs to her and defying a ruling straight away and I suggest you ask them to withdraw that interjection. 
Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: I think that the member is quite right. I ask the member to stand and withdraw. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: So I hope the Minister will pay attention to the problems that have been created in health by a regime of the type he is proposing. Also in this bill is a change in the way early childhood education will be funded. The legislation sets off down the path of permitting funding to be related to the type of service and to the cost of that service. I say that this is the bit I am most concerned about because the legislation allows the Minister a free hand to determine the entitlement of New Zealand children and we have seen how he is using that free hand at the moment. What the Government should be doing is taking the approach that every New Zealand child has an entitlement to early childhood education. It is not compulsory so parents are free to choose whether to take up that entitlement. 
It is effectively what is in place now but what this legislation will do is validate the approach the Minister has taken. He has decided he likes some kinds of early childhood centres and does not like others. He will bring in a regime that provides a much more significant entitlement for some New Zealand children than for others. That entitlement will not be determined by the need of the children the socio-economic status of their parents social or educational need or citizenship but by which childcare centre the parents decide to send their child to—and that in our current society is pretty much random. Parents have no particular say or choice over whether they have access to the Minister’s preferred early childhood centres which are community-led or teacher-led services. 
He does not like private providers so he will use the flexibility in this legislation to determine that children who go to private providers have a lesser entitlement. That is ridiculous and we will oppose that right through the passage of this bill. We want this legislation to constrain the Minister’s and the bureaucrats’ opportunity to discriminate amongst New Zealand children. I never thought we would need to do that because I thought all politicians in all parties would have the view that if someone is 2 3 or 4 years old that person cannot be blamed for the ideological predispositions of a Government. Those children should have an entitlement that they can access anywhere anytime that is consistent with parents’ choices and preferences about early childhood education. But because of the way the Minister is behaving as it is discriminatory and unfair we believe that this Education Amendment Bill will have to be changed to ensure that every child under the age of 5 has a reasonable entitlement to early childhood education and that every child is treated fairly. 
It does not mean the funding has to be exactly the same for every child but it does mean we want a provision that will prevent significant discrimination on no basis other than the Minister’s personal preferences. We see this exhibited in a story on the front page of the  
Dominion Post  
today where a playcentre in Kelburn was refused funding by this Minister personally to repair its playcentre building clad in raw asbestos. If people rub their hands on it they get asbestos on them. The Minister refused that application for funding at the same time as he funded two centres in his own electorate. One application from his electorate got $70000 more than it applied for—it got $730000 instead of $660000. The Kelburn Playcentre which applied for only $70000 the amount of that difference was turned down. So if he had simply applied fairness to his own electorate the Kelburn Playcentre could have got the money. The playcentre did not get the money because the Minister does not like playcentres. He does not like parents collectively providing early childhood education for their own children. That is why there needs to be some constraint in this bill. 
I want to refer to a couple of other issues. Clause 29 introduces a new provision to the Act about the intimidation of teachers: every person commits an offence and is liable for a fine if he or she intimidates any teacher or member of the staff at a school. I am very worried about this provision. Of course teachers should have the protection of the law in the workplace the same as any other worker but bullying has become a fashionable accusation against school principals who demand performance of their staff. This provision is going to be wielded by the Post Primary Teachers Association in particular as a threat over any senior management in a school who have expectations of their staff and that is a step backwards. In fact that could end up being a huge step backwards and the most significant problem in this legislation and we will want to examine that very closely. We believe that this provision is far too broad that it will be a major constraint on the successful management of schools and that it will have to be changed. 
Finally I want to talk a bit about the National Student Number. We support a National Student Number but the House needs to bear in mind that this will create data about individual pupils on a scale that has never been possible or imagined in New Zealand. The intention of it is that individual pastoral and achievement information can be passed between schools and between schools and the ministry. 
There are many advantages from that but when we ally it when we put it alongside the Minister’s strong preference for the asTTle achievement tool which is all good and quite successful and the accreditation process for information technology systems in schools those who have always opposed testing of pupils and the use of that information need to be aware that this amounts to the infrastructure of any kind of testing anyone could possibly imagine. The information will certainly be created and it will be potentially available to anyone at the level of the individual student. We want to make sure that that part of the legislation is also well scrutinised. It will be an offence to misuse it but the definition of misuse will need a great deal of discussion because it can be used positively or negatively.