Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Madam Chair.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Speaker.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Madam Speaker apologies. National will be supporting this bill through the first reading to the select committee in the spirit of bipartisanship that we often seek to extend across the House. The Minister says that the bill has a number of small and non-controversial changes. On the surface of it that seems to be the case. What it shows is that they brought through significant legislation last year and mucked up several elements of it and now within a year they are coming back to fix those where areas where inconsistency and ambiguity exit and tidy up mistakes made last year. We of course note that this does happen from time to time and we will work through them through the select committee and would be very interested to hear advice from professionals working in the sector about the proposals. And you know we see here things being moved into regulations as opposed to the original Act.There is some particular focus on ensuring that former teachers are not automatically enabled to use physical restraint in schools. I'm conscious of the fact that it is quite a technical and difficult area for many schools so we will certainly be looking very closely at views on that proposal from people working at the actual school front and having to deal with very difficult circumstances so as to ensure that that is workable and practicable. We also note in relation to early childhood education around regulation powers again that can be a very fraught area.So I don't see the point of extending the speech on this bill to any great degree beyond the fact that what we have here is the Government tidying up a piece of legislation that they've only just passed dealing with mistakes made in that original piece of legislation. It is an area of inconsistency and ambiguity. As appropriate this will go off to the select committee and at that point there will be the opportunity for people working in the sector dealing with these issues day in day out to have their say and we will listen closely to them and form a judgment as to what we support and don't support. But in the meantime we'll work constructively with the Government to ensure that we have the best legislation that we can given what is proposed.In the meantime we continue to have a truancy crisis in this country. These are the sorts of things that we hope that the Minister will be bending his mind towards. While all this is well and good if we only have 60 percent of students attending regularly as we do at the moment these are massive massive issues for the sector to deal with. I do hope that when he in his first reading speech referred to the fact that there will be more substantial legislation coming through the House he turns his mind to some of those issues because if we are going to deal with falling off the international pace in terms of educational achievement that we are seeing in this country there are a couple of things that need to happen—the first of which is that kids need to be at school and the second of which is that we need to have some way of measuring progress particularly in the primary and intermediate school sector. So I'm hopeful that the next time he comes with some legislation in the education area he'll be addressing some of those issues. Thank you Madam Speaker.