Delahunty Catherine: Christ’s College (Canterbury) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Delahunty Catherine: Christ’s College (Canterbury) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:661;Page:9575] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Assistant Speaker. I rise to comment on the Christ’s College (Canterbury) Amendment Bill but I will start by acknowledging a loss to this country—and indeed to Christchurch as well as to the rest of the country—with the passing yesterday of Bevan Tipene-Matua of Ngai Tahu Ngati Kahungunu Rangitane and Raukawa. Bevan was a Green Party member but also a passionate educator who worked for many years in Christchurch before he went back to his home in Porangahau. He was also the first Maori research fellow at the Crop and Food Research agency with a special interest in intellectual property plant variety rights and tikanga Maori. Bevan’s death is a huge loss to education to his hapu and whanau and to the country as a whole. Our hearts go out today to the whanau at Porangahau. It is a loss for the Green Party and it is indeed a loss for us all especially for his whanau and his tamariki. 
However returning to the Christ’s College (Canterbury) Amendment Bill I rise to speak on it because we are actually voting against the bill based on our view that it is not well drafted and lacks sufficient checks and balances when it seeks to change the trust deed. In the past we have supported private legislation to expedite the handling of trusts held by the Anglican Presbyterian Catholic and Methodist Churches and in all of the previous cases we supported that legislation through the House. The tests contained with that legislation closely resemble those found within Part III of the Charitable Trusts Act 1957 except that any change does not require High Court approval and is therefore considerably cheaper to implement. Those tests are sufficient. However unlike previous legislation this bill does not contain significant checks and balances when changes to trust deeds are made. For example sections 10 to 13 of the Methodist Church of New Zealand Trusts Act 2009 provide significant public accountability measures including in section 12 oversight by the Attorney-General. This bill has no similar protective checks or balances. 
It is unfortunate that the school needs to move legislation through the House which is itself an expensive process merely to better expedite the use of property entrusted to it. Christ’s College has a highly specific mandate when compared with the mainstream churches but the powers entrusted to the board must nevertheless be balanced by good process. Is this legislation in the best interests of the school’s beneficiaries? Yes mostly it is. But this is bad law and we will have had little opportunity to improve it because we have no one on the select committee. 
We are also concerned that the Government gave $35 million to private schools at a time when there have been cuts right across the board to the public education system. Even worse is the national standards debacle link with private schools. Private schools such as Christ’s College have resources that many public schools can only dream about. The risk of league tables from national standards may help the private sector schools because they may look good to some parents who can afford to abandon struggling public schools. However this reduces the community to individuals buying education if they can afford it rather than maintaining and building social equity through a strengthened public system. The Green Party firmly opposes any undermining of the public school system in favour of the private system. The entrenchment of educational inequity and the measuring of schools against a rigid educational standard will not address this problem. 
Another question we have with regard to this bill is a deeper question about the benefits to mana whenua. How many impoverished tamariki from local hapu benefit from this school being sited within their rohe? Given that there are major questions around the Kemp purchase in Te Wai Pounamu we can never assume that all land sales to the Crown and then to the churches for private schools—as in this college’s case—can be described as being without the slightest taint of inequity. And have mana whenua been consulted on this bill? 
So although Christ’s College and some other private schools may benefit from issues such as league tables we are not concerned about protecting their business. We are committed to protecting vulnerable children for whom education is a struggle and to supporting schools that do their best with very little. I will never forget when I was a lecturer in many schools visiting a wealthy private school where the students were provided with wetsuits as a matter of course in order to do kayak training in heated swimming pools and it had a library DVD screen that took up a whole beautiful wall whereas last year I visited some students at a public high school near Wellington where the students asked me whether some schools actually had a swimming pool. The gap is already big enough in terms of resources between public schools and the wonderfully resourced private schools that I have referred to. We do not need to increase that gap. 
Although we are not supporting this bill we are taking this opportunity to say we challenge the private school system in terms of the benefits and privileges it confers on those who have access to it. We demand that the Government puts its energy into and emphasis on maintaining and strengthening the public school system. We have raised legal and technical points that may be addressed at the select committee although we will not be there to raise those concerns. But at a deeper level we want to stand for a public education system— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Eric Roy) 
: The member’s time has expired.