Moroney Sue: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Moroney Sue: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 24 March 2010. Volume:661;Page:9830. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 It is great to have the opportunity to take a second call on Part 1 as a member of the select committee because I want to continue from where the bell caught me out last time round. As we know one of the main features of Part 1 is the introduction of information matching between the New Zealand Teachers Council and the Ministry of Education. The purpose of that is to identify individuals teaching in schools without registration. The point I wanted to make about this amendment is that it could have been a very useful amendment for the early childhood education sector as well had the Government not reneged on the target of having 100 percent qualified staff in that sector. 
This amendment is about the only part of the bill whose application is confined to schools only. Almost all of the other clauses in Part 1 refer to schools and to early childhood education services. This amendment does not refer to early childhood education services because it would be a nonsense to identify people who are on the payroll with the Ministry of Education but who are not registered as teachers with the Teachers Council. The Government now allows that to be the case in early childhood education. I think it is a great shame that that will be the situation. I think that many parents and certainly the sector were looking forward to the ongoing professionalisation of the early childhood education sector because of the strong link between having qualified teachers who know what they are doing and the quality of early childhood education services. 
I will now go on to address some other clauses in Part 1. Colin King was right to say that many of them are very minor. The one that really caught my attention was clause 9 “Amendment of enrolment scheme”. One of the things that one learns to do in this job is to look for gaps in legislation. They may be things that seem quite straightforward at the outset but when one looks at them in conjunction with other policies and other Acts of Parliament one sees what implications they might have. Even though clause 9 seemed like quite an innocent clause I was interested to think about what the amendment to the enrolment scheme might mean because we know that a proposal is coming forward from an Associate Minister of Education to look at having a voucher-type system within the education system. I was a bit concerned to see there was an amendment to the enrolment scheme and I wondered whether it was a sneaky way of getting in that proposal. 
Clause 9 states: “Section 11M(3) is amended by omitting ‘enrolment scheme in order’ and substituting ‘enrolment scheme in order’.” That might seem like a very strange thing to do because what I have just read out is a set of words being omitted and replaced with exactly the same set of words. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Is there a colon there? 
SUE MORONEY 
: There is a comma in the first one and it took me a little while to work out that this was not a sneaky way of bringing in the voucher system. This amendment was in fact about a comma. We are omitting “enrolment scheme in order” with a comma and replacing it with “enrolment scheme in order” with no comma. In clause 9 we have got rid of the scandalous comma and now the principal Act will be much easier to read as a result. 
Apart from some minor amendments—and that is probably at the extreme end I think Mr King would agree of the minor amendments that are proposed in Part 1—some things as I said before are missing from Part 1. One learns to look for the gaps in this job. I think one of the most significant features that is now missing was proposed in Labour’s amendment bill previously. Some things are missing from the board’s functions that are now required to be in this bill. Certainly when this legislation was under Labour’s stewardship the board was required to do a great deal more. That amendment proposed to insert the following responsibilities and some of these have now been removed.