Swarbrick ChlöeCHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green): E Te Māngai tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare. It is my pleasure to rise and speak to in particular the Supplementary Order Papers in my name to this Education Amendment Bill. I just wanted to address the point made by the last speaker Mr Simeon Brown with regard to his proposition that we are going to see institutions weakened by way of restoring elected members to our tertiary education councils and also actually to refer to his point about how the unions want to have control—complete and utter control—of our education sector to the claims of ideology which of course the Opposition has none in having removed elected members in 2015. This Education Amendment Bill obviously in particular does a broad range of things. But in particular I wanted to speak to the issue of representation on those tertiary councils. There were 481 submissions which commented on clause 12 and clause 14 of this bill around staff and student representation and the composition of those tertiary councils—451 submitters supported guaranteed places and 449 submissions commented that there should be more than one of each. That is more than 90 percent of submitters on the issue of increasing staff and student representation who would like to see more than one of each.On the point of those evil" unions that the Opposition enjoys bashing so much I want to point to the TEU's petition—that is of course the Tertiary Education Union—that I received this morning with 900 signatures from staff at tertiary education institutions calling for more than one staff or student representative on these tertiary education councils. Of course these provisions were removed in 2015 by the Opposition who was then the Government. What we've seen as highlighted actually in the open letter this morning published by another union NZUSA—the New Zealand Union of Students' Association which brought together 14 different student organisations around the country—was a call for that increase in student representation around tertiary councils. They noted in particular that what they were looking for from this legislation was genuine representation around those tertiary councils not check-box tokenism. In particular having more than one—indeed a guaranteed two places around that council table would allow for the discussion of confidential information allowing for robust conclusions and supporting each other in fact in putting those conclusions forward to the council.As has been noted by Opposition members some of these elected members are not necessarily coming with a wide range or breadth of experience. The very reason that they are there is to represent views and perspectives of consumers of education—to use a piece of terminology so frequently bandied about. So that's one of the Supplementary Order Papers that I'm putting forward—No. 104 which would increase student representation from "at least 1" to "at least 2".The second Supplementary Order Paper is No. 136. This one is slightly more technical in that it increases staff representation from at least one to at least two but of those two at least one must be "a permanent member of the teaching staff of the institution" and the other must be "a permanent member of the general staff of the institution". That is kind of technical or more granular in detail thereby providing a guarantee of different perspectives again around that council table—so too what Supplementary Order Paper 136 does which is to increase the size of those councils.I presume in response to that we will hear the Opposition decry that this is a "waste of resources". But indeed what we are doing here is ensuring and guaranteeing that the representation around the council table is a genuine representation of perspectives so critical to the sustainability and long-term thinking around this institutions—decisions that would've been made a whole lot better and more robust had these perspectives been around the table with decisions made over the past three years. Thank you Madam Chair."