Reti ShaneDr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): Thank you Mr Speaker. First of all to those with losses today e ngā mate haere e ngā mate haere ki te kāinga tūturu o tō tātou Matua i Te Rangi. Haere haere haere. [Go well oh deceased ones return to the true home of our Father in Heaven. Depart depart farewell.]It's a pleasure to speak to this bill the Education (Pastoral Care) Amendment Bill which has indeed had collegial support across the House for an important issue that came up with some urgency. I want to acknowledge the Education and Workforce Committee led by Dr Parmjeet Parmar and officials and submitters who were able to bring us to this point today where we are at the second reading. We had 22 written submissions and 14 supported the intent of the bill and I think for me the tone was set—maybe it was the second set of submitters—with Universities New Zealand because they're potentially the ones who might have been most affected. We need to remember that under the Residential Tenancies Act residential facilities were carved out by Universities New Zealand or their equivalent who said No leave it with us. We'll do a voluntary code and it will work." and of course that's what brought us to this place because there were failings. It didn't quite work as everyone expected. When Universities New Zealand came in and in their opening submission they said "We accept the inevitability of legislation." I think it was clear then that we were going to have a good degree of consensus for what this bill needed to do. Furthermore their submission was so compelling that two aspects of it which was a seven-year look-back cut-off and some qualification around the words "serious harm" were actually taken into effect. Now when the bill first came to its first reading Treasury had expressed some concerns—six concerns actually—and I think that to some degree we have addressed them through the select committee. I'll very briefly go through them and then I want to address six areas the issues that were there and the solutions that we came up with. The starting issues if you like that Treasury had were around defining the nature and size of the problem asserting that there was a duty of care to all students that the options were somewhat limited the scale and impact of the costs hadn't been assessed. Their fifth item was unintended consequences—should the burden of compliance be so high that providers just withdraw and they'd just say "Oh look these regulations are too hard. We're out of here."—and the sixth concern they had was cream-skimming if you like—that is if this burden of compliance is too high they might only take on what they might perceive as low-maintenance students and those who do have challenges might be left finding residential accommodation. So in my mind the six issues that the select committee dealt with and reached solutions on were as follows. The first was around the development of the domestic code of practice and the concerns raised were that there was a lack of definition of pastoral care; there were some concerns for what "reasonable" and "so far as possible" and protect the "positive experience" might mean and we actually then modified the legislation. One of the recommendations from the select committee was that instead of talking about protecting students we change it to "take all reasonable steps to maintain the well-being of domestic tertiary students;" and that resolved a lot of those issues. It was also commented that in that definition words like "positive experience" and "reasonable steps" are already in legislative parlance so we're consistent with precedents and a differentiation from the word "welfare" was not necessary because institutions already have that obligation. Their scope of practice was a concern because it was also mentioned to us that look they were dealing with young people young adults and adults and it's a continuum of audience if you like and there may well need to be some different regulations between those over 18 who have their majority and are clearly in their adult life with those who are younger and who may need more or less pastoral care. It was commented to us that the Children's Act 2014 actually covers children under 18 to address the concerns that we had. There was also some question around whether the contracting out by a residential facility say from a university to a third-party provider might remove their obligations for responsibility and the answer to that was no. The institutions cannot contract out the code of practice even if their accommodation is contracted out. I think the second area then was around separate domestic and international codes: is there a place to have two codes or is that just increasing the burden of compliance to actually have two codes bearing in mind the international code was the one first established? I think we were reassured that this bill itself futureproofs and gives us the ability to still bring those codes in to one. There are some unique features that international students have and it may be that at some point in the future we do have a code of practice for children but this bill does have the flexibility to do that. Many submitters said that the bill requires consultation with providers in the development of the code but students aren't seen and that was absolutely correct so we changed it. We said that there should be a requirement for the Minister to consult with students family and whānau. There was some discussion around the administration of the code through the code administrators but we mostly addressed those concerns. A large part of certainly the public domain media talked about entry and inspection powers the ability under the code of practice for administrators to just go straight into a student's room and the concerns for student privacy balancing off that supervision requirement that we have. So we made three main changes to that. The first was 24 hours' notice before inspection of a room entry and inspection requires the students' consent and students can consent for them not to be present for entry and inspection. This is what we're expecting the code to encompass when it's formalised and that was well regarded and well considered by everyone.The fourth issue: there were some compliance matters around quality improvement notices and sanctions for the breach. They were mostly administrative and we attended to them. The second to last was around the offence and penalty provisions. The Law Society put forward some very considered thinking around strict liability whether strict liability as an offence was intended and I was glad they were able to define that because it sits a little bit outside my scope of understanding. But we were reassured by officials that it wasn't intended in the bill and as I'll speak to in a moment we amended a part of the bill to say "without reasonable excuse". This helped us reasonably remove a lot of the hurdles that the Law Commission and several others raised of a legalese nature.Serious harm was also raised by many submitters as a concern as being too broad. What did it mean to say you would not cause serious harm? There weren't clear precedents in other legislation for us to anchor on as well. Furthermore the original bill actually gave examples of types of injuries and illness and one of the concerns was that if someone did have one of those injuries or an illness of that type and then presented for treatment as the original bill was written that by definition met the criteria for serious harm and this wasn't what we were intending. If someone had measles chickenpox—call it what you may—and goes for treatment at an emergency room or an A & E that by definition was almost going to be serious harm and it wasn't what we intended. So we encapsulated all of that. We removed the list of examples of injuries and illness and we referred to "serious and detrimental ongoing effects for the welfare of the student". It seemed to be a much better definition.The final area that we talked about which we reached solutions on was around the cost of compliance and impact on costs and we were reassured that officials would take this into account when the code of practice was established. We need to remember that's what this bill does. It permissions officials to establish the code of practice and what we've given them here is sort of riding instructions as to where we think the key points for that code should be. Now in that same context and reassuringly this is a disallowable instrument. The code of practice will be a disallowable instrument.Fundamentally what that means—because on inquiry to the clerk just so I understood furthermore what it meant—is that any member of the Regulations Review Committee at any time can say they want to disallow the code of practice. At that point it automatically comes on to the Order Paper and needs to be debated by the House within 21 days. If it's not the instrument lapses; the code of practice finishes. So this in some degrees is quite a nice safety net which we don't use often. In fact we raised it with the medicinal cannabis bill as being another example of officials doing the regulations—can we have another look at it—and for one reason or another that didn't progress.But in this instance we're passing so much responsibility to officials that I think the fact that this bill enables the code of practice to be a disallowable instrument is a good thing. You might say: what if you don't sit on the Regulations Review Committee? Well it turns out that any member can actually disallow the instrument. It's a much faster process if you're a member of the Regulations Review Committee because then it is brought to the House in a period of time. If you're not a member it just gets placed on the Order Paper and makes its way as the business of the House makes its way.So overall I think the select committee has substantially improved this bill. I think the submitters have added really good contributions that have helped us shape and guide officials as they draw up the code of practice. We've futureproofed the ability for the two codes—because on one level it doesn't really make sense to say "Oh we'll provide pastoral care for international students but we'll have something different for domestic." Why would we do that? There are very very small nuances as to why we'd do that. I like to think that at some point in the future we'll bring it into one code of practice. So a good bill well managed by select committee and I commend it to the House."