Simmonds PennyPENNY SIMMONDS (National—Invercargill): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise to speak in opposition of this Education and Training (Grants—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill. This amendment concerns the funding of our early childhood services and as my colleague has said this bill is very typical of what this Government likes to do plenty of and that is gaining tighter control. Even though these early childhood services are privately owned or community-run playgroups the Minister wants more control.I'd like it to be seen in the context of some of the other things that the Minister has done in the education sector. Let's have a look at the review of vocational education where the Minister has decided he needs to have a much greater level of control. I find it fascinating the arrogance of a Minister who has never taught who has never managed who has never been involved in an educational institution feels he has the expertise to exert this level of control. I listened to Mr Baillie the member of the ACT Party who talked about the arrogance of ignoring submitters.I'd like to give a little bit of an example to put it again in context of what that Minister did around the review of vocational education submitters. The Minister who clearly needs a little bit of remedial maths said that he had an overwhelming majority of submitters who supported his review. Well it was 46 percent and I don't think that's even a majority let alone an overwhelming majority. But wait—there's more. That 46 percent was if you took the 800 submissions opposed that came from Southland and you say They're all from Southland. They're pretty much the same. I'll only count them as one submission." So if you don't allow that to happen actually the overwhelming majority of submissions in support is actually 29 percent. So I think a little bit of remedial numeracy support for the Minister would not go amiss.What we see in this bill is as my colleague has said a continuation of the Minister wanting to exert control and he is wanting to essentially expand the reach of a collective agreement into private businesses. Early childhood education is incredibly important so please we mustn't dismiss the importance of it. Even though we are not supporting this bill we want to make it very very clear that we understand the importance of the early childhood education centres in the development and the wellbeing of our young tamariki.I want to just talk to you a little bit about my history at the Southern Institute of Technology where one of my first jobs as a senior manager was to build a new centre for our early childhood centre. Now that facility and the environment and the equipment was really really important. We spent a lot of time making sure that we got the best possible physical environment that we could for that centre and it was incredibly important to the teachers to the parents to the young children but it was nowhere near as important as the staff that were in that centre.I want to tell you about a wonderful centre manager that we had for over 25 years—in fact I may be doing her a disservice; I think she was there for more than 30 years—Anne Golding. She was an outstanding early childhood teacher. She was an outstanding manager. She taught my children and then my grandchildren and rumour has it she retired very shortly after my grandchildren started. That may have tipped the balance! However that woman was an outstanding teacher and an outstanding manager and so I absolutely know the importance of having wonderful staff at these centres both for the children and for the parents who leave their children in that care. It is an absolute blessing to have good staff in an early childhood centre.But this bill is not about rewarding great staff; this bill is about requiring pay parity and the acceptance of pay scales and that imposition on our privately owned centres of the kindergarten collective agreement with its terms and conditions. Now that mightn't be so bad if the funding that went with it enabled these centres to achieve that parity but it doesn't allow that. It puts them in this no-win situation where they can reward some of the newest staff but then they lose the parity of their more senior staff. It puts them in the difficult position of having had better ratios for example than some other centres and they won't be able to do that or they will have to choose whether they do that or whether they try and keep that parity there of their more experienced staff. That's a terrible position for us to be putting our centres in our centres that genuinely want to have conditions that enhance the quality of the services that they provide.My colleague said earlier that this is about the Minister setting employment conditions on privately owned businesses. This is an ideologically driven agenda from the Government. A member on the opposite side of the House said "No nothing to see here. This is just a technical change." This is not a technical change; this is a deeply fundamental ideological agenda being driven on to private businesses but they are at the same time continuing to pay these centres at a lower rate putting the centres in this most dreadful situation of having to weigh up do they increase fees do they increase ratios do they leave their more experienced staff without the parity that they should have against less experienced staff. It is a very very difficult situation these centres are being put into and the poor consultation around it proves that this is not just a technical change.This was rushed through to try and avoid the submitters being able to have a meaningful impact on this bill. Despite that despite putting this through urgency and having such a limited amount of time 550 submitters wanted to have their voice heard but they didn't because this Minister as I said from the review of vocational education has a history of not taking any notice of submitters. He has a history of downplaying submitters. How else do you explain taking 800 submissions and saying "Oh they're really similar. I'll just call them one."? He has a history of devaluing the input that comes from people who are out in the industry and he has a history of dismissing the value of their contribution.So to those 550 submitters that took the time when they only had a limited number of days and they were still trying to run business as usual in their centres—I want to thank them for putting that effort in to put submissions through and I want to apologise for how much they were disrespected and completely ignored in the issues that they brought up. I think that we owe people a much much greater respect if they go to the time of putting submissions in on this. So it is not a technical change. This is deeply fundamentally ideologically driven. It is imposing something on to our private centres that it should not be doing while at the same time restricting their funding so we vehemently oppose this bill."