Ardern Jacinda: Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Ardern Jacinda: Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:657;Page:6830] 
JACINDA ARDERN (Labour) 
: 
 It is my pleasure to take a call on this Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill. I question though why we are having this debate in the first place. Last time I checked I had not seen any students marching on to the forecourt of Parliament to request that this bill be put before the House. In fact the last time that I saw students marching on Parliament it was about astronomical student debt not about student union membership. 
This is a misguided and unnecessary bill which has been brought before us by Sir Roger Douglas and I wonder what his motives were. Perhaps Mr Douglas reviewed the hall of fame of other members of Parliament who have put forward this measure before. Let us just run through that hall of fame. First there was Tony Steel MP who suggested that we should have such a measure then ironically it was Donna Awatere Huata who put forward this measure and then—wait for it—Michael Laws suggested that we do the same thing. And now we have Roger Douglas who has also suggested it. I will give that group of MPs the charity of my silence and not comment on their past careers. 
This bill is not about choice. This bill is not about choice because if it were students would have been asked to some degree about their level of support for it. This bill is not about rights. If it were about rights we would be discussing an issue like free education or we might be discussing an issue like the right to lifelong learning which has also been stripped away and undermined by this House and by this Government. This bill is about neither of those arguments. It is about ACT’s ideology plain and simple and the Nats have jumped on the bandwagon. 
Unlike the member who is in charge of this bill I can speak from some experience having attended a university that looked at voluntary student union membership. I was at Waikato University in the 1990s. I was not a student politician—I want to make that clear—I was a student. I was an observer of what happened and I voted in the election that eventually led to that university being the first in 70 years I believe to go voluntary. I inform members of this House that it was the first university to go back to universal membership because it learnt that it was a disaster to move to a voluntary system. 
But I would also like members to reflect on the fact that this happened only after all of the services that those students had benefited from had collapsed. Those were services that Roger Douglas would not have required when he attended university. When Mr Douglas used the education system tertiary education was free. Student debt was not astronomical. When Mr Douglas was at university young people were not accessing food banks students were not seeking emergency housing and students were not accessing a hardship fund. Students did not require the services that they require today. That is the utter hypocrisy of this bill. All of these services are now provided by students associations because they are necessary and they are services that that member never ever needed. 
This bill is not about choice. Students have choice already and universities have demonstrated that they are fully able to exercise that choice when and if they require it. I say again that they have learnt the lesson that the system they have is working for them. If they make the choice to have a referendum and they stick with universal student union membership then that is a collective choice that they have made together. After they have made that collective choice all of the services that then flow from it benefit that collective and that choice is still there. That is democracy at work plain and simple. The idea of collectivism might be a bit complex for members opposite to grasp but it works. 
It is an absolute shame that we are debating this bill in the House. It is a shame that we are distracted from the real issues in tertiary education that we should be discussing. It is a shame that that member sees fit to impose on students without giving them a choice and without giving them a debate a shameful bill like this one.