Mallard Trevor: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMallard Trevor: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee[Sitting date: 29 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10548. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South): Thank you very much and I—Jacinda Ardern: It’s always the boys.Hon TREVOR MALLARD: It has been a long time since I have been called a boy I think it is fair to say—[Interruption] No no by my colleague who suggested that you tended to pick us Mr Chairman. I want to talk in particular about the amendment in the Education Amendment Bill that provides the exclusion for these organisations these partnership schools from the Official Information Act. I want to explain to members because from my colleague Megan Woods I understand that the Education and Science Committee could well have been misled by officials as to the workings of the Official Information Act. It is an area with which I as a Minister was quite familiar and I have had discussions subsequent to being a Minister on the application of the Act with David McGee and with Beverley Wakem. The point that I do want to make is that where there is a contractual arrangement with for example an independent school or with any early childhood centre and the money is flowing from the Government to that organisation as a result of that what it means is that the information that shows that the organisation is fulfilling its end of the contract is subject to the Official Information Act notwithstanding the fact that that organisation is not a State organisation or a local authority in its own right. So it is a matter of the ability to track that.The question I have is a relatively simple question for the Minister in the chair the Minister of Education and is about the information that sits within the private schools in my electorate—or the independent schools as they prefer to be called. The information is sitting in those schools and is available to the Government because it is something that follows the contractual arrangement and it is something that the Ombudsman has made clear is available to members of the public using that Act and especially to parents using that Act—they have the right to that information if it is an independent school. How can it be right that what we are doing within clause 42 of thisbill is an amendment that makes it the same as—I sort of hate to use the parallel—the Parliamentary Service and the door does not get opened at all? That is the effect—that is the absolute effect—of this. It puts us with—I do not know anything about “mortality review committees” and—Andrew Little: Sounds pretty scary.Hon TREVOR MALLARD: Well it does and there could well be some good reasons for that information.Grant Robertson: If they’re after the Parliamentary Service.Hon TREVOR MALLARD: I know that it is arguable that there are good reasons for the Parliamentary Service as well for some aspects of it. But I cannot see an argument that makes it right that information that is available as a result of a contractual arrangement with an independent school should not be available as a result of the same sort of contractual arrangement with one of these partnership schools. That is the effect of clause 42.I am going to be really interested in the Minister’s response to this. I know that it is a fine point of law and it is a point of law that has been tested only rarely by the Ombudsman in his—in this particular case—application as to the Official Information Act. But it is important because one of the things that I think is vital is that the parents—accepting with a heavy heart that we are going to end up with this sort of school—of children at that school should not have lesser rights to get information from that school than the parents at the State schools.