Coddington Deborah: State Sector Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
Coddington Deborah: State Sector Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:616;Page:12169] 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT) 
: 
 In talking in the Committee stage and addressing Part 1 of this bill I say the ACT party will vote against this legislation all the way through. We have heard a lot of argument about why we should not be opposed to this bill removing the right of employers to pay employees who are on strike. If that is the situation Labour and New Zealand First believe in why do they not bring in legislation that would remove that power from private employers too? Private employers can still choose to pay or remunerate their employees in some way if they want to reward them—if they have some sympathy for the reason they are on strike. They can do that. A lot of boards of trustees did not pay striking teachers. The actual figure is not available because as usual this Minister does not bother about detail when he brings in legislation like this. I have tried to get details of the actual number of boards of trustees that continued to pay teachers when they went on strike but we do not know that so we do not even know whether this legislation is necessary. 
Of course that is not the real reason we are bringing in this legislation. The real reason is that this Minister wants to overturn Tomorrow’s Schools. He has commissioned research that shows the ideal situation is to have one board of trustees for every 200 schools. That is a de facto education board situation. Even now parents who are on boards of trustees tell us that they are having less and less say in the actual running of their school. They are required more and more to deal with form filling and they have to make sure that their school complies with over a dozen pieces of legislation. When Brian Picot came up with the idea of Tomorrow’s Schools based on very sound research from a Labour Government—which is now being overturned by another Labour Government—we had the situation whereby more power and control was to be devolved to communities and parents to run their schools. This legislation will rip more of that decision making away from parents and boards of trustees. 
In trying to overcome the issue of teachers double-dipping when a school is closed or merged the Minister has got himself into a pickle. In trying to get himself out of that pickle he is further reducing choice. To try to get away from the situation in which a teacher is made redundant because a school closes and then gets a job at another school down the road or at the newly merged school but still receives a redundancy payment as well as being paid for the new job he is reducing the right of schools within that locality—that is the exact wording in the bill—to be able to choose the best teacher for the job. They will be caught between a rock and a hard place. They may not take the teacher that the State Services Commissioner directs should go there who will otherwise not be compensated for losing his or her job because there may be a better applicant. If it is a small rural locality or provincial area the schools will probably know the people concerned personally. They will know their families. They will have to decide whether to put that person out on the street or to take the best teacher for the job. 
That is exactly why there should not be central control. People in Wellington do not know what is best for people at Blackball on the West Coast or at Russell in Northland. They do not know what is best for those people I say to the Minister in the chair Trevor Mallard. The Minister does not know that and nor do the bureaucrats. The only people who know what is best for those communities are the people who live there—the parents the principals the boards of trustees and the teachers. If we could just go back to bulk funding we would not need this bill.