Walker Holly: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWalker Holly: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading[Sitting date: 13 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16703. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]HOLLY WALKER (Green):My colleague Catherine Delahunty has already spoken at length earlier in this debate about the changes to the New Zealand Teachers Council and the changes to the school sector in this bill the Education Amendment Bill (No 2). So I want to focus my contribution on the changes to tertiary governance which include as we have heard reducing the number of members on tertiary governance councils removing the membership requirements for staff student and community representatives and requiring the Minister and the councils to appoint members with governance capability.What we see here of course is the Government pressing ahead with these changes despite the fact that during the so-called consultation period on them almost nobody was in favour of the changes. I went and had a look at the summary of submitters during that consultation period. There were a number of significant concerns that submitters raised consistently throughout those submissions. These were things like the very important need for staff and student perspectives to be taken into account on university and wānanga councils. They were things like the fact that council members need to have the appropriate knowledge of those most affected by the changes in order to be able to make appropriate decisions about those people affected. They were things like the fact that smaller councils would lack the diversity necessary to accurately reflect the professional and student body of the university.With specific reference to universities there were submissions that universities are different from polytechnics. They are different from schools. They are different from wānanga. They are unique institutions and they have evolved with a democratic form of governance that should be honoured and maintained into the future.There were a large number of concerns about the negative impact on institutional autonomy and academic freedom that these changes could have and there was a strong thread running through all of these submissions that insufficient evidence had been provided giving the rationale and the need for these proposals. There has not been sufficient evidence to actually tell us why we need these changes. Even the universities that supported the changes did not want smaller councils and they spoke very strongly in favour of stakeholder representation on the governance boards. So even those universities that perhaps did think specific governance capability was important still did not want their size reduced and they still wanted stakeholders represented on those boards.If you look at the submissions those that were in favour of these changes—very strongly in favour—came from the business sector. Well surprise surprise! My question is: what has the business sector got to do with it? What stake does the business sector have in the way that our tertiary institutions are governed? Why should its submissions on this governance review shape the decision of the Government to press ahead with it when all of the academic submissions all of the submissions from students all of the submissions from staff and many of the submissions from the institutions themselves—even those that were supportive of it—reinforced the need for stakeholder representation on tertiary governance boards? Who have we listened to? We have listened to the business sector which has no direct stake or interest in this whatsoever but of course it probably will in the future under this Government.Never one to let public and stakeholder opinion get in his way Steven Joyce is pressing ahead with the changes in this bill and the Government has already wreaked the same havoc on polytechnic governance boards in 2009 by removing democratically elected representatives. This is simply a continuation and an expansion of that into the university and wānanga sectors. Also of course it follows the attack on student voice that was the introduction of voluntary student membership which was rammed through this Parliament at the behest of the ACT Party last term.If you put these two policies together you get a very clear picture of what this Government thinks about student voice and student participation in these institutions—that is to turn them from institutions of education into institutions where students are passive consumers in degree factories.I just want to make a point about wānanga as well before I finish. The Minister said in his contribution earlier that it was a shame that when wānanga were established they had been lumped in with the way that university governance is put together. Of course this bill does not change that. This lumps wānanga in with universities and gives them exactly the same parameters for governance including the fact that they have to have at least one Māori member on their board. Well is that not nice for wānanga? It is both irrelevant and not helpful.I will leave my contribution at that. There is much more I could say but I think that we should be listening to the submitters.