Donnelly Brian: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Donnelly Brian: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:630;Page:2661] 
Hon BRIAN DONNELLY (NZ First) 
: 
 This is a broad-ranging bill and we have not traversed many of the areas it covers—for example the area of school housing and the effect of that on rural schooling. Colin King has referred to student numbers but not necessarily to the element of why they were brought in and some of the benefits even notwithstanding the fact that Supplementary Order Paper amendments were not passed. So I hope people will indulge me on this. 
First of all I say to Allan Peachey who criticised the Education Standards Act that when that legislation went to the Committee stage it was called an Education Amendment Bill. A member of the National caucus recommended that the legislation be renamed the Education Standards Bill. So enamoured was he with that particular bill that he put a motion and the House voted in favour of it. The person’s name happened to be Alec Neill. I never could quite work out how that rush of blood went to his head. 
However first of all I will cover a couple of areas around the so-called potential over-regulation. At the moment we have the  
Revised Statement of Desirable Objectives and Practices (DOPs) for Chartered Early Childhood Services in New Zealand 
. That will go through Cabinet and through Order in Council etc. I can tell members here and now that within that one thing requires all early childhood providers to keep a record of every meal that is delivered at lunchtime on every day to every child. Now that set of Desirable Objectives and Practices actually went through Cabinet in 1998 when a certain Tau Henare sat around the table and agreed to approve that particular level of regulation. It exists at the moment. The whole idea behind this was in fact to collapse the Desirable Objectives and Practices—to relook at the whole licensing criteria in a much more rational fashion. A process has been going on for 2 years whereby all the Desirable Objectives and Practices have been looked at and the question asked of whether they are still current and still necessary. In fact we are trying to rationalise the whole thing. So rather than increase the regulation this bill actually has the potential to reduce the amount of regulation if the consultation process is gone through correctly. I am very pleased that a couple of amendments that I got through will take out the most draconian risk that exists in the way the legislation is drawn up. But I am comfortable that the process will not lead to smothering levels of regulation within the early childhood sector. 
I mention student numbers which have been only briefly referred to. The bill introduces student numbers down into the compulsory and early childhood sectors. One of the real problems we have at the moment particularly in the compulsory sector is keeping track of students—the students who fall between the cracks between one level of schooling and the other or between moving from one place to the other. Our major problem in this country is not truancy; it is transiency. It is when people move from one school to the other and often have a number of weeks’ break. There is no way under the present system of keeping track of those students. There used to be a system of white cards if members recall—anyone who was in the system would know it. Now there is not and those students simply fall through the cracks. This legislation actually gives a lot more power to agencies to be able to put in place mechanisms to look after that major problem that we have in our society. 
 I also mention school housing. One of the most disastrous things that any Government ever did to rural education in this country was to bring in market rentals of school houses in the 1980s. At the area school I was at I think we had something like 12 teachers in school houses. We were absolutely dependent on school houses. Within 6 months we had one teacher left in a school house. The school houses were left to go to rack and ruin because they were handed over to property management groups that did not give two hoots about them. The groups did not maintain them so teachers did not want to go into them anyhow. Now of course the houses have been transferred over. The ideal opportunity for them to be transferred over to boards of trustees to operate was in 1989. They were not and as a result of that we have not only lost a lot of those school houses but alienated teachers in rural areas. 
In my time school houses were a great incentive to get teachers into rural areas. There was a salary bar as well. Once teachers were in rural areas some people like myself loved it and stayed teaching in rural areas; others spent 2 or 3 years there maybe 5 saved up their money and went back and bought a house in the city. But it certainly fed the rural areas with staff and we have had continuous problems in terms of that ever since the Government got rid of school houses in rural areas. The Government has handed over the houses to boards of trustees albeit far too late and as I said in a deplorable state. But it also wants to establish some mechanism for renting them and New Zealand First agrees with that.