Power Simon: State Sector Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
Power Simon: State Sector Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:616;Page:12172] 
SIMON POWER (National—Rangitikei) 
: 
 I have sat in the Chamber and listened to the contributions that have been made from various parties. I think it is worth making a couple of points of clarification. I must say that like my colleague Pansy Wong I am extremely surprised by the United Future party’s decision to support this legislation through these stages. It seems to me that this bill is a sort of apology from the Minister of Education to the Post Primary Teachers Association and an attempt—[ 
Interruption 
] I have always noticed that about Mr Donnelly: sometimes he was part of the Government in the 1990s and sometimes he was not. It just depends on which piece of legislation we are debating. [ 
Interruption 
] Was that from Rick Barker—“That member will never be in Government.”? Well if the choice is doing that or signing off JP nominations it is a pretty tight call! 
Clause 3 begins: “The purposes of this Act are—(a) to enable the State Services Commissioner in negotiating collective agreements applicable to employees of Boards of Trustees to exercise … the powers available to an employer …”. Lianne Dalziel has contributed to the debate by saying that wages are centrally funded so the commissioner should be able to exercise the rights of an employer during that negotiation. In a strange way Lianne Dalziel has gone right to the heart of the matter because that is the problem. The whole problem is that we are saying to boards of trustees that they are the employers and will take responsibility for the running of schools and the employment of teaching staff but at the same time we are removing the very thing that binds the employer–employee relationship and that is the payment of remuneration. Various members have stated that the opportunity arose from time to time to remove that particular provision and the point has been well made and acknowledged. Let me assure those members who have an interest in this matter that when the Government changes so will some issues around this particular matter. 
What is really going on here is we are removing further individual rights of boards of trustees members and recentralising them 
around the funding arm the State Services Commissioner—effectively a de facto employer standing outside the contractual relationship that should exist directly between the employing board of trustees and the employee teacher. That fact is the difficulty we find ourselves in in every school around the country—that there is a third party butting its nose into the relationship between schools and boards of trustees and the teachers. 
Hon Brian Donnelly 
: It always has been. 
SIMON POWER 
: That does not make it right. The simple fact of the matter is that in order to give a bit of exercise to local parents and local schools these matters should be the subject of negotiation directly between the boards of trustees and the employee teachers themselves. There is no good reason why the Post Primary Teachers Association should be negotiating directly with the State Services Commissioner over issues that are particular to each individual school and the learning requirements of individual children in that school. My colleague Dr Wayne Mapp has made the point very clearly that all that this bill is designed to do is to firm up and protect the collective bargaining arrangement that has existed for far too long between the Post Primary Teachers Association and in this case the State Services Commissioner on behalf of the Government when or if this legislation is introduced. It is high time that schools were left to get on with this business on their own merits. 
This is very confused legislation. On the one hand the Minister is protecting the collective bargaining arrangement of the Post Primary Teachers Association but he is also quietly putting the slipper in in clause 3(d)— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Quietly? 
SIMON POWER 
: That is a fair point. The Minister does not usually do things quietly but in clause 3(d) he is quietly putting the slipper in. To sort of make up for the G3 stuff-up he has slipped into clause 3(d) the purpose “to preclude compensation for technical redundancies”.