Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeIndustry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 April 2014. Volume:697;Page:16951. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment BillIn CommitteePart 1 Amendments to principal ActThe CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): The question is that Part 1 stand part. It is a debate on clauses 4 through to 23 and includes schedules 1 and 2.Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram):It is useful that we have come to the time to debate this bill in a very detailed way as we go through the Committee stage of the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill because the reason why Labour opposes this bill is really in the detail. So let me set out very clearly the two reasons that Labour opposes this bill. Both of these reasons are contained in Part 1 of this bill—specifically in clause 15 of the bill. The major problem with the bill as we see it is the proposal to allow organisations other than industry training organisations to be directly funded by the Government to organise and undertake industry training. That is our first major concern. Our second major concern with this piece of legislation is the proposal to remove the skills leadership function from our industry training organisations and what that is going to mean for the sector. We have some very real concern about what that will be.So if we have a look at clause 15 of this bill this is where a lot of the problems for us are embedded. It is also where a lot of the problems that the many many many submitters who came to the Education and Science Committee and voiced their opposition to this bill and their concern with this piece of legislation focused their attention. We have spoken at previous readings of this bill about how we had submitter after submitter from a range of organisations come in and tell the committee that this was not a bill that was going to fulfil the purposes that it set out in its purpose statement to do—that this was not a bill that was going to enhance industry training in New Zealand and add to the environment that we have.If we have a look at clause 15 and the proposal that persons other than industry training organisations may receive funding for industry training this is nothing more than this Government’s privatisation agenda in the education sector. This is rolling out privatisation into our industry training sector and siphoning out bits of money. Does the industry want this? No. The industry came and very clearly told members at the select committee that this was not something it saw as adding anything to how we deliver skills training in this country.So direct funding is going to bypass industry training organisations and introduce competition. The tender process is already under way even before we pass this legislation I note.If we take one example to consider how this legislation is going to play out for a given industry there is a very large player in the aged-care sector that is currently tendering to have direct funding under this legislation and to be something other than an industry training organisation that delivers the skills training. The danger here is that what we are going to have is delivery of skills training that suits that business rather than suiting the industry as a whole. It will be training that is directed at one particular business. Some people might say that there is no problem with a business training to suit the needs of its business but the problem for us is that this is using public money to do it. It is not simply a private organisation deciding that it is going to do some professional development with its workforce and train those people to suit the needs of its business. This is using industry training money that can potentially be put into the business of one person.The other major problem that we have with this is that private providers of industry training can cherry-pick the businesses that they deal with. We heard very clearly from the submitters who came to us at the select committee that one of their major concerns about this is that small and medium sized enterprises would miss out under this model and that private providers of industry training would go to the very easy business model of dealing with large organisations. Business-to-business costs would be much lower and it would be a much cleaner business model for them to deal with. But when it came to the very real need to be delivering industry training for our small and medium sized enterprises we heard that this is not going to work. On this side of the Chamber we believe that denying good industry training and good skills training to our small and medium sized enterprises is not a way forward for a better New Zealand.We know that so many of our young people are entering small construction firms small manufacturing businesses—all kinds of smaller organisations—with say fewer than 50 employees. Actually yesterday I had the good fortune to visit one of these construction companies in the Wigram electorate and I talked to the owner about what it needed through skills training. What it needs is a very clear plan of what skills training is and a strategic direction from the Government not a continuation of a privatisation agenda as in clause 15 of the bill which inserts new section 11A in the principal Act.We also have some further concerns about clause 15. It is not just concern about removing the ability to have direct funding going solely to industry training organisations; there is also the skills leadership role that industry training organisations currently fulfil. Under new section 11A in clause 15 what we have is the industry leadership function being withdrawn. Call us old-fashioned but on this side of the Chamber we think that industry has a role to play in determining what skills are needed by industry. We do not believe that the Government is the sole best person to make that decision. Government members of the select committee thought that they were much better placed to make decisions about what the needs of industry were in terms of its skills training than those who are on the ground working in the industries trying to build the houses trying to run manufacturing companies and trying to run aged care facilities. But no this is a Government that is so arrogant and so out of touch that it does not believe that those on the ground working in these industries should be funded to play a part in determining what skills are needed in this country. That produced a great deal of concern to us—as well as no need to cry over spilt water now that I have spilt mine.The concerns about Part 1 did not even stop with clause 15. Some other very real concerns were brought to us by the National Council of Women about what this legislation is really missing the opportunity to do. We have some woeful figures in this country around women’s participation in many of our trades in this country. The National Council of Women came to the select committee with a very elegant solution. It just asked for the word “women” to be included in a priority group of people who could receive skills training. Would Government members listen to that? No they would not. They are not willing to do anything to address the very real gender gap—and therefore pay gap—that we have because of our skills training.So for us on this side of the Chamber it is a real disappointment that the Government has not taken the chance to further enhance our industry training sector. In fact it has just pursued its ideological commitment to privatising our education system. Not content with charter schools and public-private partnerships and the tendering out of levels 1 and 2 funding within our polytechnic sector the Government is now seeking to fund money out of the public purse and into private companies through our industry training sector. This did not come as any great surprise to us because on this side of the Chamber we know that this is a Government that has no real commitment to apprenticeship training and skills training. It is a Government that has cut funding. It was a National Government that gave up on apprenticeships in the 1990s and that was yet another of the things that the Labour-led Government of 1999 had to reintroduce.We on this side of the Chamber have a real commitment to skills training and apprenticeships training. We certainly would not have done what this Government did and leave the bulk of the $42 million allocated for the Skills for Canterbury training sitting in the bank for 2 years while our young people went untrained. There is nothing in this legislation—there is nothing in this bill—that is going to turn that round. There is nothing to signal that this Government has a renewed commitment. Instead what we are seeing is a continuation of a walking away from the Government’s need to really back the fact that the way for New Zealanders and New Zealand to get ahead is for us to have comprehensive and good skills training in this country.I want to hear the Minister in the chair take a call and tell us why it is that the National Government does not think that industry should have a role in skills leadership. I would also like to hear from the Minister in the chair why it is that the Government thinks that despite what industry and all the players in the sector have told us private providers are better placed to deliver the training.The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): I call Grant Robertson.GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central):It would appear you have only one option Mr Chair.The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): I’m looking forward to it.GRANT ROBERTSON: Thank you; so am I. I want to pick up from where my colleague Megan Woods was although perhaps not in the spectacular water display that we just saw over here and talk about the two main concerns that the Labour Party has about Part 1 of the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill. In order to do that it is important for those watching to remind ourselves what the purpose of industry training is and why the Government funds it. Essentially industry training organisations since they have been developed have had three main roles. Those roles have been to set the standards for industry training to organise industry training and administer industry training and to ensure that the skills leadership function that is so desperately required in our workforce planning is undertaken.What does skills leadership mean? What skills leadership means is working to identify where the skills needs are in a particular industry and ensuring that we have programmes and courses that match up with those skills needs. Under this piece of legislation that third of those industry training jobs has been taken away from industry training organisations. It was a remarkable thing in the Education and Science Committee to be presented with a sort of nihilistic view of the world—some sort of anarcho-syndicalist view of the world—that skills leadership would just happen that it would just occur and that no one would need to be in charge of it; it would just magically happen and some Government agencies would do some things and other industry groups would step up to the plate. That was one of the things we heard.Well that is just nonsense. From my point of view and from the Labour Party’s point of view industry training organisations are the peak bodies of industry. This is the place where we can learn the most about what is required in the future in terms of skills. Yes by all means Government departments have a role in making sure that they are feeding into that exercise of saying what the next wave of skills are that are needed in industry but the leadership role in that surely must come from the industry itself.It was as my colleague Dr Woods said very odd for us on the Labour Party side to be told by the National Party members that the Government should pick this up when we were saying no no actually this is where industry should be leading. Industry knows best what is needed in terms of those skills. So we are very disappointed to see that in Part 1 of this bill the skills leadership function disappears from the role of industry training organisations.We are disappointed that we cannot support this bill because there is no doubt that there was and has been a need for industry training organisations to recalibrate themselves. Over a period of time a number of them had grown to such an extent that they perhaps were not servicing the exact needs of their industries were not servicing the needs of the businesses within the industries and certainly were not always servicing the needs of trainees. People were complaining that they were seeing a lot of flash cars being driven by industry training organisation staff but not the outcomes on the ground in terms of delivery of training. We accept that there was a need for some rationalisation of industry training organisations and that has happened. Businesses have now bought back into the model so it seems very odd to bring a piece of legislation to the House we believe that breaks that up. Just as things are getting better the Government comes along and makes some quite fundamental changes that are contained here in Part 1.On the Labour Party side of the Chamber we strongly support industry training. It is so critical as part of the lifelong learning and the build-up of skills that make for a productive economy that we have as many workers as possible engaged in industry training and a system that organises that in a way that meets the skills needs and allows people to develop their own skills and get transferable skills that can take them from one business to another and be recognised for that with qualifications. All of that is good. All of that is in the bill but then it is broken apart by the two key clauses here: the removal of the skills leadership function and the opening up of funding for industry training to non - industry training organisations. Those two clauses are the reason why the Labour Party cannot support this bill.When we look at the regulatory impact statement that has been provided for this bill it is quite instructive. It talks about why the Government funds industry training. It says: “The availability of common transferable qualifications and a training organisation considering the needs of the industry as a whole is akin to a ‘public good’ which is unlikely to emerge without government intervention particularly in industries with a high proportion of small firms.” That is the nub of the matter. That is the reason why industry training is funded by the Government—not because an individual business needs to train its workers to do the particular jobs. That is the responsibility of an individual business and it will—and in most cases does—go about doing that. What industry training says is that we want a broadly skilled workforce that can move from one business to another and from one industry to another with recognised qualifications and skills that are transferable.That is actually what the regulatory impact statement says yet the Government in new section 11A opens up the funding of industry training to non - industry training organisations effectively to individual businesses. It says to them that they can go off and do this. Every single submitter bar one which I will come back to said that they did not believe that this was the way to go. We had the remarkable situation of the Contractors Federation sitting down at the table—in fact I think the speakers were still standing up when they said it. They said that they agreed with everything that the Council of Trade Unions had just said. What the Council of Trade Unions had just said was: “Do not do this. Do not break up industry training. Do not effectively privatise industry training because getting those transferable skills those skills that are for an industry not a specific business is important to our future productivity. It will also fundamentally undermine the industry training organisations themselves.”In that quote from the regulatory impact statement I mentioned the reference to the fact that need for Government intervention is “particularly in industries with a high proportion of small firms.” It is the small firms that will miss out under this process because it is the small firms that will be left behind.Dr David Clark: Why does National hate small businesses?GRANT ROBERTSON: A big firm goes off and decides to run its own industry training but small businesses will be left with increased costs to keep their industry training organisations going and there will be further burdens on them as small businesses. My colleague Dr Clark knows from his travels around the country talking to small-business people that they are already struggling and here will be an additional burden. Here will be an additional cost. That is another problem. Not only will we end up with training that is not industry wide but business specific but it will also undermine small businesses and increase their costs.There is already flexibility for employers to move from one industry training organisation to another. They are not stuck in the industry training organisation they are in now and we have seen quite a bit of that in recent times. The argument that this opening up of industry training under new section 11A somehow or other will lead to increased flexibility is just plain wrong. The flexibility is in the system already.The only organisation that came to the select committee and said “Yes we think this might be OK.” was Business New Zealand but it would be fair to say that Business New Zealand’s endorsement was a little on the lukewarm side. It in fact told the committee that it was not opposed to the idea. It said that it was “cautiously supportive” but it wanted to make sure that the approach was “independently evaluated to ensure that it results in learning outcomes linked to industry needs”. That is what it said. Business New Zealand was worried that this opening up of industry training to individual businesses would mean that we would not have industry-wide skills and qualifications. Business New Zealand does not really like this either. That is the truth. Every other submitter—from the Contractors Federation to the Council of Trade Unions Careerforce the Amalgamated Engineering Printing and Manufacturing Union and the National Council of Women—said there is no justification for opening up industry training to be funded to individual businesses.It is hard to escape the view that it is simply in this bill as part of a wider agenda of privatisation be it charter schools or be it public-private partnerships. It is all in the same direction and it is the wrong direction. We want a strong public education system that delivers skills training and education that is applicable right across the board. That is why the Government should fund these things. We support strong funding for industry training and apprenticeships but under this bill and under this part of the bill that is consistently undermined.It seems remarkable that in trying to consolidate and improve some bits of industry training if this bill passes in the form that it is in now it will fundamentally undermine industry training. I challenge the National Party members on the other side of the Chamber to get up and tell us why industry training funding should be delivered to specific businesses to deliver training that is only relevant to them. Why should we not have a situation where we fund as a Government only skills that go across an industry rather than specific businesses?Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister of Conservation):I am pleased to take a call on the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill firstly to make the point that Labour members should hang their heads in shame in respect of their record on industry training. You see when National came to Government less than 50 percent of the people who were undertaking apprenticeships had acquired 5 years later any qualification or credit from their programme of work—less than half. I make no apologies for being part of a Government that is about reforming industry training to make sure it is of quality and to make sure it is not just about bums on seats which was the driver of policy under the previous Government.The speaker who just resumed his seat Grant Robertson has got this ideological block about any organisation other than a public body being able to provide training. We differ. Can I give the member an analogy. Can I give him an analogy. In my community in Nelson we have an institute called the Cawthron Institute. It provides excellent science. But Labour policy said it had science being done only at Crown research institutes not at the Cawthron Institute. It is this Government that says no we will provide funding to the Cawthron Institute on exactly the same grounds as to a Crown research institute.Dr Megan Woods: That’s not true.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Dr Megan Woods has said that is not true. Let me be very clear: under Labour there was no capacity funding for organisations unless they were a Crown research institute.The Cawthron Institute was the Cinderella of the science community until we came into Government and said no it is about the quality of the science not who owns the bricks and mortar. When it comes to industry training our Government simply says that we should contract to provide industry training from whoever can provide quality.Let me give an example. Many members of this House will have been to the Westport Deep Sea Fishing School. It is an outstanding institute. It provides training for people in the most important industry in my area. We have ideological opposition from Labour members who say: “Oh no no no. Because it is not owned by the State we cannot provide it with funding for training.” We say that that is an ideological block that is a nonsense and that we should be able to provide funding to organisations that provide training based on the quality of their programmes not on who owns the bricks and mortar. We apply that to our science policy. We apply that to upper tertiary education we apply it to trades training and we apply it to science because we are a pragmatic Government that is about getting the best results for the Kiwi taxpayer and we are not going to let ideology get in the way of what makes sense.DAVID CLENDON (Green):I am pleased to make a few comments on what could have been a very good bill and a bill that the Green Party actually supported at its first reading to the Education and Science Committee because we saw some good things in it. Unfortunately there are two deal-breakers in the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill for us and I think we share the concerns of the Labour Party.I was interested to hear just now from the Minister in the chair the Minister of Conservation. He seems to be conflating opposition to this bill with opposition to the private provision of education science and much else. That is clearly nonsense. I mean yes most certainly we support the public tertiary sector. We also see a very legitimate place for private training establishments and the Cawthron Institute an organisation with a splendid history and hopefully an equally splendid future. What we push back against is the unnecessary privatisation of services that are better located within the public sector meaning you get an unreasonable level an unfair level of competition. We are seeing this with the push to contract out the provision of education such as we have seen at Unitec and we are now seeing in action at Lincoln University.To return more specifically to this piece of legislation as I said we would have been happy to support it but for these two issues that have been identified one of them being the removal of the skills leadership function. It is interesting to note that the 30-odd submissions to this legislation were for the most part supportive but were almost universally opposed to the notion that skills leadership should be left to who knows whom. There seems to be a pious hope embedded in this legislation that somebody somewhere will pick up the ball and indeed in some industries that may be the case.The Building and Construction Industry Training Organisation was very strong on the issue. It made the very valid point that within its industry within building and construction something like 90 percent of apprentices are trained by companies with fewer than 20 employees and in many cases fewer than 10. It is simply disingenuous to think that companies and businesses of that size of that scale are somehow going to collaborate to provide skills leadership in any sort of meaningful way. It is actually going to make the task of the Government and all of those various groups that collectively want to direct and ensure that we have a good sense of what skills are required in the future—what are the best training programmes and mechanisms to put in place—much more difficult if they are not to have that reliable feedback.Initially as I said when we first saw the bill we thought: “Oh that’s interesting. They want to take skills leadership away from the industry training organisations.” We thought that it would be interesting to see which agency which mechanism and by what means the Government was seeking to improve leadership. Sadly disappointed we were when we discovered that in fact no—it was just being left to somebody out there. As I said there is this pious hope that somebody some organisation will both be willing and critically be able to provide leadership within whichever industry it may be at the moment.The other issue of course is the matter of public funding being directed to single companies to single organisations. The point has been made that even Business New Zealand which is typically quite pro-business and quite pro the private sector gave very very qualified support—qualified to the extent that it asked the very sensible question: “Well if not the industry training organisations then who?”. That question has clearly not been answered in this legislation; nor has it been answered I would hazard to suggest by the Minister in the chair’s last contribution.There is Supplementary Order Paper 426 in my name which would seek to remedy the two issues that the Greens have with this legislation and that I believe our Labour colleagues share. It would seek to reinsert the provisions that assign skills leadership responsibility to the industry training organisations where it ought to rest and it would delete the section that allows public funding to go to private entities. Even with the best will in the world a private organisation—a company producing whatever goods or service—would inevitably tailor the training and the education it provided to the needs of its specific activity. It is the nature of business—it is human nature indeed—to be a little bit self-interested and it is difficult to imagine a situation where a private provider of that sort could actually be relied upon to deliver the breadth and depth of skills awareness information ability and so on that is really required of people coming into the trades.CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):I want to begin by just responding to one or two of the comments that Nick Smith made in his earlier contribution about completion rates because that is something that I spent some time in a previous life looking into. If anyone should be hanging their heads in shame about that it should actually be the former National Government in the late 1990s which established the industry training system in the first place. Actually the genesis of all of that was around the original passage of that legislation and the desire of Bill Birch who was the Minister in charge at the time to basically say to industries no matter where they were: “Anyone can have an industry training organisation. Set up your own industry training organisation. We’ll slosh all this money around.” That effectively is where it all started.By the time it had reached its kind of peak of growth there was some work that needed to be done but there was another area—which was a design flaw again—that the previous National Government was directly responsible for. It was that when people enrolled in programmes in many cases they enrolled in those programmes never with the intention of completing them because they only ever wanted to do a part of the programme in the first place. But the funding system was so inflexible that a business that wanted someone to study a particular area which say might have been a health and safety area had to sign that person up with an industry training organisation for a whole programme even if it never wanted that person to do the whole programme. It was a design flaw.So what we found industry training organisations doing for example was that over time they moved to establishing limited credit packages which they were able to fund and which allowed businesses to target that investment more strategically and that did lead to people being more inclined to complete those limited credit packages than to complete whole qualifications. So it was actually a fault of the system that was designed and implemented by the previous National Government. So before Nick Smith says that anyone should be hanging their heads in shame he might want to actually get his facts right and consider who it is who should be hanging their head in shame because actually Ministers in the previous National Government were the ones responsible for designing that entire system.I worked in the industry training sector. I worked under contract for a couple of large companies in the oil and gas industry that used New Zealand’s industry training framework—Grant Robertson: Big oil.CHRIS HIPKINS: —big oil that is right—to provide some of the training needs for their staff. I am very concerned that some of the provisions in this bill will create significant loopholes that first of all will allow the Government funding of industry training to be exploited by large multinational companies. Rather than creating workers who are equipped for the New Zealand workforce it will actually create workers who are equipped and ready for the export market—basically to go and work elsewhere within the multinational corporation’s areas of operation rather than being able to move seamlessly throughout New Zealand. The New Zealand Qualifications Framework is designed to ensure the portability of qualifications within New Zealand. We have this system so that if someone is doing structured on-job industry training for one large employer and they receive qualifications as part of that they should be able to take those qualifications down the road if they go and get a job with another employer. It is one of the great virtues of our system—its qualifications portability.However if you take a large industry like the oil and gas industry increasingly what I found when working in that industry is that the large companies are far more interested in portability within their company’s operations than in portability across the country. So they were saying: “If we have got an oil rig here in New Zealand we do want someone to be able to operate that but we also want them to be able to operate an oil rig run by our company to the same standard somewhere else in the world. We do not really care whether they can operate something else in New Zealand for a different company.”They were interested in supporting their companies’ own interests not the interests of the employee necessarily and certainly not qualification portability.One of the reasons I raise that and I am concerned about that is that the wording in this bill around whether or not the training being delivered and being paid for by the Government has to be part of the Qualifications Framework is incredibly sloppy. The businesses delivering training under this bill will have a lower standard of compliance with the Qualifications Framework than what an industry training organisation has to have. So effectively what we could end up doing is subsidising corporate training for large corporate companies that is not aligned to the New Zealand Qualifications Framework and that is purely in the interests of that company not in the interests of the individual employee who is receiving the training. Ultimately that is not a wise or a prudent use of New Zealand taxpayer funding. If New Zealand taxpayers are going to be putting money into industry training it should not be purely for the benefit of a large corporate company which should be paying for that training anyway.One of the areas where we could see this happening quite a bit is around the provision of health and safety training. Businesses should be providing health and safety training to their employees anyway. That is part of the cost of their doing business. What this bill does is it allows large corporates large companies to say: “Well we have to do health and safety training anyway so let us get the taxpayer to pay for it.” rather than them paying for it. They should be paying for that. That is part of the cost of their doing business and actually what this bill effectively amounts to—and we should not be surprised because it is a National Government bill—is that it now creates another loophole. Big businesses predominantly can basically get more money out of the taxpayer for doing what they should be doing anyway.It is yet another example of the National Government throwing potentially huge volumes of taxpayer money at large corporates. That is effectively the loophole that this bill creates. Otherwise why would the Government as it is doing in this bill create a lower standard of compliance for a business delivering industry training to what it creates for an industry training organisation? No answer from the Government. No one on the Government side is willing to even speak about it. There is simply no justification for it because the Government knows that this is creating another rort. This is opening up another loophole that can be totally and utterly rorted.Dr Megan Woods: Like a charter school.CHRIS HIPKINS: Like a charter school as Dr Woods is saying. The second question I have among many is: who is going to now take over the function of skills leadership for an industry if an industry training organisation is not going to do it? This is actually a big challenge for New Zealand. We have been really really bad in New Zealand’s history particularly our recent history of matching training and education to the actual skill needs of industry and the actual workforce needs that we have out there. One of the reasons that industry training organisations were given this leadership role in determining what skills industry required is so that we could get more strategic investment so that we would not fund people to train in a whole lot of areas where we did not need them to be trained and so that we could actually target the investment into the areas where we needed it. And who are the best people to make those decisions? It is the industry itself through the industry training organisation.But the industry is going to have competing interests. If you take an industry that is dominated by large corporates—and the oil and gas industry is the one that I am most familiar with—the players in that are going to have competing interests. There needs to be some way of reconciling those and that is actually one of the core roles of an industry training organisation. It is basically to get the big players together and say: “Well across the industry this is what we think the skill needs are going to be in the next 10 to 20 years and this is how we are going to make that real and how we are going to deliver on those things.” The Government taking that function away from industry training organisations begs the question of who is going to do it. Because if the industry training organisation is not going to do it and there is no guarantee that anyone else is going to pick up that responsibility the end result is that the taxpayer—the good old Kiwi taxpayer—will end up forking out a whole lot more money for training that is potentially in the longer term completely irrelevant.We could end up training more people in areas where they are unable to get work or where the scope of their work is so narrow that when they leave the job that they are in at the moment they are unemployable by anyone else. That is something that the New Zealand taxpayer should not be forking out for. If a company wants to train an employee for a specific niche role in its business it should pay for that. The New Zealand taxpayer should be paying for transportable portable skills that can work across industry in a number of businesses that actually give people choice and opportunity. Narrowing it down so that industry training can be specifically targeted to the narrow interests of one individual business is not a prudent use of the taxpayer’s funding. It is a corporate subsidy—nothing short of that. That is wrong. If we are funding industry training and we should fund industry training it should be for the benefit of those employees and for the benefit of New Zealand as a whole. It should not be seen as a taxpayer subsidy to one individual company.That is the loophole that this bill creates and it does that in two ways: by allowing businesses to be funded directly rather than through the industry training organisations and by removing the skill leadership function from industry training organisations that helps to ensure that those skills that people are being trained in are portable and are what the whole industry needs rather than what one individual player within that industry needs. So those are some of the reasons why the Labour Party will be voting against this.TRACEY MARTIN (NZ First):Kia ora Mr Chair. There are two sides to the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill. One is the apprenticeships side and the other is the industry training side. Just to be clear some of the rhetoric that has gone on in the Committee today has made it sound as if when young people are in industry training—actually I take that back. It is not just young people and that is one of the positives in the bill. One of the positives in the bill is that the same amount of support will be provided to all apprentices so we are pleased to see the ageism around apprenticeships being taken away. But young people and people in industry training also gain a debt. They also have to pay a certain amount to gain the industry training whether it be in hairdressing or in building or whatever. The industry training organisations’ services although subsidised by the State are not 100 percent free. That needs to be made clear because it sounds as if this is all just an argument about a Government gift and it is not an argument about a Government gift.Some of the changes that were made to the industry training organisations previously—and this is the end of a long period of change for the industry training organisations—were around minimising the industry training organisations getting some clarity for both employers and young people in apprenticeships and industry training and their families and ensuring that the qualifications they were gaining had value out there in the market place across the board. And therein lies one of the major concerns about this shift or the proposal in this bill to hand industry training money to business. That is a complete contradiction to the controls around making sure that we can quantifiably say that the qualifications that those apprentices and industry training individuals gain are quality. We start to lose that ability to truly say that they are quality because as my colleagues from the Labour Party said there are lower criteria a lower threshold for those businesses. It is relatively silent actually with regard to those criteria.It is very very interesting that none of the proponents for the ability for industry to be funded in this way came to the Education and Science Committee to submit—not one. One has to ask oneself why that is. Is it because it is actually not that important? Or is it because actually they knew they did not have to? Is it because they already knew that it was going through anyway and that it did not matter whether it was supported or not—that the Government was just going to put it through? Why did those in industry not then bring their voice and add the reasons why they wanted it? Not a single one did. You have to ask yourself then why if nobody came and asked for it it is still here. Why when most of the submitters said: “This is a problem and we don’t recommend it. This is of concern to us.” did the members of the National Party on the select committee just shrug their shoulders and say: “Oh well why not?”.There has never been any argument put forward by the Government members on the select committee as to why this needs to be there. It did come out of a review—absolutely as did many other steps that have been taken—but there was no support in the submissions and yet from those members there was just a shrug of the shoulders and: “Oh well never mind we will do it.” That is exactly the same response that the Government members on the select committee had to charter schools—“Oh well why not?”. New Zealand First is not confident that that is a good way to create legislation—“Well why not? Let us just do it anyway whether or not we need it. Let us do it anyway whether or not industry wants it.” We are in a dilemma around that. The Minister in the chair might be able to answer it or perhaps one of the members from the Government benches on the select committee could stand and answer that question. Why exactly is it still in the bill? To date those members have not been able to answer that.I think the comments Nick Smith made with regard to apprenticeships industry training and so on and so forth were very interesting. He gave the impression that the Opposition is opposing the bill because it does not like any money to go to private training providers. Obviously anybody who has spoken to any of the Opposition members—and believe me many many many people in education are speaking to Opposition members as we move towards the election date—will know that private training establishments are strongly supported by the Opposition parties and that there is much discussion going on around their role in training. That is just to make sure that that little sound bite from the Minister does not stay out there in the ether because that is certainly not the case.The other point that New Zealand First would like to make with regard to this particular bill is probably the lost opportunity here. There are continual contradictions with the National Government in the way it deals with anything to do with education actually. In this bill on the one hand you have a large subsidy for industry or businesses if they want to tap into the education dollar and train people specifically for their specific industry as opposed to on the other hand the Government supporting vocational pathways—supporting that there should be a generalised education pathway towards the vocations and that it should be wide so that young people people in this sort of training can change through companies as we go forward. We all know that the whole area of employment is going to change and we cannot pick winners and losers in this environment as we move forward into the 21st century.But the other thing that has happened is that on the one hand we have got this subsidy for large business now being written into the bill and at the same time small and medium sized business—and we have heard it before—still have a financial barrier to taking on apprentices. A hairdresser for example who wants to take on an apprentice has to pay $500 a year—$500 a year—for every year that that hairdressing apprentice wants to be there. How do the small and medium sized businesses in rural communities that want to participate with the educational advancement of their young people and the educational and economic development of their areas manage? It may not sound like much but how does a single hairdresser who works in a sole-chair outlet in their small town and who wants to support a young person into industry training or an apprenticeship cover that fee? It would be our suggestion that rather than subsidising big business there was an opportunity in this bill to take away some of the financial barriers to small and medium sized businesses so that they can support their communities.The Government would argue that the industries should have skin in the game. The industries do have skin in the game. The industries have skin in the game on the boards of the industry training organisations and in the setting of the direction around the skills which comes now to the setting of the skills standards and the removal of the name of anyone to be responsible for it. If there is nobody responsible whom is the Government going to hold accountable? If there is nobody’s name on that job whom will the Government hold accountable? At the end of the day somebody is going to do it but if nobody is identified as that somebody you cannot hold them accountable. You cannot take their funding. You cannot say they should have done it. You cannot do anything. You have to put a name on it and then through accountability measures you make them responsible.You might have picked up that New Zealand First will not be supporting the bill. There are some very smart things in this bill and it is a shame that the two things—and New Zealand First will be supporting the amendments on David Clendon’s Supplementary Order Paper 426. We ask that the Government consider supporting them also and then there would be agreement across the House. They are amending the two small yet very important things in this bill that New Zealand First cannot support.CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour):Like my colleagues I am rising to speak in opposition to this Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill. I have to say like a couple of people who have mentioned this that this is a lost opportunity. I just want to explain before I speak specifically on clause 15 of the bill—and particularly in relation to new sections 11A and 11B around industry training organisations and also persons other than industry training organisations receiving funding for industry training—that the reason this is a missed opportunity is that we had a real chance to get a bill that dealt with something as important as industry training and apprenticeships to have support across the House. That would have been I think a very important signal.In some regards this is one of the key structural problems in our economy—the skill shortages that we have in trades and technical areas—and the fact is that we have high unemployment especially for young people at a time when we are having to import people into Christchurch to rebuild that city because we do not have enough skilled tradespeople. When there is a change of Government and we get a real building programme going in Auckland for affordable housing we will have the problem of a shortage of tradespeople to do that work.That is a really important structural problem in our economy. It is absolutely disgraceful that we are not dealing with that and we could have. There was an opportunity with this bill to get real consensus on something as important as industry training and apprenticeships. I think the public of New Zealand want to see this issue sorted out because people know that it is important in our economy to have the people who can do that skilled work. It does not necessarily require them going to university to get a degree but it does require them going through what is a time-tested and very very worthwhile process and that is an apprenticeship—an apprenticeship to get a skill that is really important and valued in our country. But in fact what we have done here is miss that opportunity. We have missed that opportunity.As others have said we will be voting against this bill. The Government will force through a bill that actually potentially undermines those important needs that I have just outlined. Our first reason for thinking that that is an issue of concern is this almost I think ideological provision. So instead of industry training organisations being able to get about and do their job we are going to enable funding to go to others to do this. Who will those others be? Those others will be large businesses. They will not be small businesses and they will not necessarily be delivering the industry training that we need delivered which is to provide people with the sorts of skills that are transferable—the sorts of skills that we need across a whole industry and that are not specific to a particular business.When the industry training scheme started I was on the board of an industry training organisation and at that stage that was clearly what happened with the funding. The funding came in and it basically went out to the larger businesses in that industry to do training that actually in all honesty they should have been doing themselves—business-specific training.This industry training and apprenticeship money is not to do the training that businesses need for their own specific needs. That is a cost of doing business as is health and safety training. Those things actually pay real dividends to a company. There is no question about it. Any good employer knows that if you invest in training and if you teach people what they need to do you will get better outcomes. Productivity will rise. There is research evidence after research evidence on that.But the question here is what are the things that are particular to that individual business and what the things are that we need for people who are going to be tradespeople in a particular area. What are the things that they need to have that will mean that they can operate at that business at another business at a different business again? That is the question here and by providing the opportunity for particular companies to get funding to do industry training we think there is a real risk there that what will in fact happen is business-specific training. It is yet another example of the commitment to privatisation. So we are very concerned about that provision in new section 11A set out in clause 15.In some ways ironically—before I go on—this is undermining what has actually been some reasonably good work in terms of reviewing industry training. We have not been ideologically opposed to the need to look at how industry training organisations have operated. We have said: “OK yes there are things that need to change.” and there has been some work done there. Industry training organisations have gone through a significant period of restructuring and are well tooled up potentially to go forward here but now ironically the Government is legislating to undermine their ability to do their job. That seems just absolutely ridiculous.The funding—just to summarise—going to those specific businesses potentially benefits individual large businesses at the cost potentially of small businesses. It will undermine the good work that has gone into restructuring and it potentially means that we do not deal with the real industry skills needs that we have in this country.This leads me nicely into my second point and the second major concern we have had which is about removing the skills leadership role of industry training organisations. It is almost like there is a pathological opposition across the Chamber to being strategic or to planning for anything. It is like somehow the invisible hand will tell you where there are skills shortages and what the needs going into the future of a particular industry might be. Well actually that is an absolute nonsense. We do need to collaborate at an industry level and to get together to say what the emerging trends in this industry are what the changes to technology that are happening in this industry are what we are seeing in terms of the people coming into the industry and whether we need to broaden the pool of talent that we are accessing—and I am going to come to that point in a minute. But that happens at an industry level not an individual business level and that skills leadership role for industry training is being taken off industry training organisations. That is just a complete and utter sham and a nonsense.We have skills shortages. I absolutely challenge somebody opposite to stand up and tell this Committee that there are not major skills shortages in this country. I know that none of the members opposite can do that because we know it to be true. The public know it to be true and to do something about that we need to be strategic and we need to plan.I do have to mention one particular thing that my colleague Dr Megan Woods touched on and it was that under new section 11B “Obligations of industry training organisations” one of the obligations is to “have regard to the needs of Māori and other population groups”. It is critically important that we deal with the absolute gap that there is in industry training and that is the lack of women in industry training. When 1 percent of the trainees in building and construction are women and it is 6 percent in infrastructure and 7 percent in electrical supply there is a problem here. As was mentioned the National Council of Women came up with a very sensible suggestion about dealing with this which could also have been part of this bill and that was to put women specifically in there as one of those targets if you like. We are talking about the majority of the population. We are therefore reducing the opportunities available to women but this is also meaning that businesses are not necessarily accessing the full pool of talent.Supposedly the Government strategy is to have greater economic independence for women. Rather than paying our aged-care workers what they are worth and dealing with pay equity the strategy of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs is that women will move into higher-paid roles and get better incomes that way—including in non-traditional jobs like those in trades and technical industries. Well that has been a resounding failure and an opportunity to really push that in this bill has been missed.I think again if we are looking at ensuring that our economy has the trained people that we need in those trades and technical areas but also flipping it over if we are making sure that people in this country have an opportunity to get good-quality skilled work that provides a range of opportunities for them and their families then there is a real problem here. There is a real failure to address that in this bill.COLIN KING (National—Kaikōura):I move That the question be now put.GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central):I am sad that the contributions from members of the Education and Science Committee on the other side of the Chamber have been so limited today because they heard the same submissions that we did on this side of the Chamber. I want to come to a couple of matters that have not been covered yet by speakers. In particular I want to talk about clause 9 of the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill which talks about training contracts and apprenticeship training agreements being part of employment agreements. I want to mention that in this stage of the debate because it was raised as a concern by a number of submitters who came to the select committee that we would be limiting in some way or another the ability of people who were volunteers or people who were contractors to be part of apprenticeship training or industry training.I want to make sure it is on the record of the House that officials were very clear with us that that was not the case and that there was no limitation here. What it effectively means is that whatever the employment arrangements in place with an employee that is where we will find the arrangements for training. That is essentially what they said. It is very important because a number of industry training organisations that are involved in the training of both volunteers and contractors appeared before the committee. We heard from the Primary Industry Training Organisation that there are a large number of contractors within that industry who have very important training needs—health and safety type training needs but broader training needs as well. This bill still allows for the training to be a component of the agreement that they have to perform that task.Equally this also applies among volunteers. There is actually some very important work being done in terms of search and rescue training at the moment that involves volunteers and we would not want a piece of legislation passed in this House that would unintentionally limit in some way or another the ability of those people to get that training. We have been assured that new section 3 in clause 9 does not do that and I wanted to make sure that that was on the record of the House.The other area that caused quite a lot of controversy from the submitters was around the role of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority alongside industry training organisations. This is covered in numerous clauses in the bill but the one that I want to refer to is one that the committee amended and that is new section 13 in the bill as set out in clause 16 and in particular on the expanded role that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority has. The heading of new section 13B is “Qualifications Authority may prescribe quality assurance requirements”. This caused concern. There was a feeling among industry training organisations that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority already had a fairly stringent oversight of the industry training organisations and that this would move that from being about the quality of the training that was being arranged and about the quality of the standards that were being set more to the point to being about governance. They questioned why the authority should have that increased role.The committee picked up on this concern—and I want to pay tribute to the chair of the committee Cam Calder because he picked up on this concern particularly—and new section 13B has been amended by the select committee to ensure in section 13B(d) the ability of industry training organisations to acquire and to maintain New Zealand Qualifications Authority approval for programmes or training schemes and consent to assess students and that the governance arrangements for this can be part of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority’s work only where it is relevant to those skills standards and that organisational training. So it is not carte blanche for the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to wade into an industry training organisation and say that it thinks the organisation has got the wrong number of people on the board or that it wants to change the governance arrangements. But rather where it is relevant to the standards setting and to the organisation of training that can be a matter that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority is interested in.From our point of view on the Labour Party side of the Chamber—and I think this goes for Green and New Zealand First Party members as well—that satisfied us that the concerns that were being raised about the authority’s role had been met.None of us wants the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to be overreaching here and making life more difficult for industry training organisations. What we do want is taxpayers—who are paying money for industry training to be organised and for skills standards to be set—to know that that money has been well spent. The New Zealand Qualifications Authority does have an important role in that so we want to maintain that role without increasing it and enhancing it. I thought it was important to make sure that those two points given that Government members seem not to be interested in their own bill were put on the table.I want to return though to a little bit more detail around the skills leadership function because I think it is important given that this is something that has been in place for more than 20 years now that this role is there for—JAMI-LEE ROSS (Junior Whip—National):I move That the question be now put.The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): The question is that the question be now put. Those of that opinion will say Aye; to the contrary No. A party vote—the Clerk will conduct a party vote.GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central):I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I think there is a process here. I am not sure that anyone had actually called for a party vote. There is a process that we go through—The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): So the member does not want a party vote?GRANT ROBERTSON: I do want a party vote but you did not actually ask for one.The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): Well exactly. Now we will conduct one.GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central):I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I do not want to be pedantic but there is a process in this House for how we call for party votes and I think it is important that we stick to that process at all times because if we vary from it that can cause confusion. The process—say in this case when we went one way and the Government members went the other—is that you would normally then ask whether there should be a party vote. I just ask that we stick to the process.The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): I acknowledge the member’s point of view and I acknowledge the energy that was put into the “No” call. I looked across and said “Party vote” and then proceeded to call it because I presumed that would be the case. If that has caused offence I apologise. But I think my perception was correct and that a party vote is required—Grant Robertson: Yes it is thank you.The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): Thank you. We will now have a party vote.A party votewas called for on the questionThat the question be now put.Ayes64New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 3; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes56New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.Motion agreed to.The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 426 in the name of David Clendon to clause 11 be agreed to.A party votewas called for on the questionThat the amendment be agreed to.Ayes56New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.Noes64New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 3; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Amendment not agreed to.The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 426 in the name of David Clendon to clause 15 be agreed to.A party votewas called for on the questionThat the amendment be agreed to.Ayes56New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.Noes64New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 3; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Amendment not agreed to.A party votewas called for on the questionThat Part 1 be agreed to.Ayes64New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 3; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes56New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.Part 1 agreed to.Part 2 Amendments to Education Act 1989GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central):Part 2 of the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill is essentially three clauses that amend the Education Act. It is not a particularly long part but it is an important part because this is the bit where we move on from the previous way in which these industry training and apprenticeships have been managed. It is important that when we are doing so we look at the history of what was good about industry training and apprenticeships under this legislation and ensure that we are not changing it in such a way that it undermines the purpose of industry training.The biggest issue here when this was debated round the Education and Science Committee table was the question of fees and the payment of fees for the registration of industry training. There was a concern raised by several submitters that the fees that were being paid may increase and may become significant enough that they would impact on trainees themselves. Clearly we do not want to see that. We want to make sure that industry training remains as open as possible to all those who want to undertake it. That is covered by clauses 25 and 26 which amend aspects of the Education Act around the way in which registration fees will be set and how they will be paid.It is important to note that when the New Zealand Qualifications Authority comes in to undertake quality assurance activities—and this is in clause 26 of the bill—those fees do not represent a huge burden upon the industry training organisations. Several of the industry training organisations and related bodies that came to the select committee were concerned that there was the potential for this to become a very open clause. We were again assured by the officials that that would not be the case.It is a concern for a lot of people that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority performs an important role in our system but equally is perceived I think by many people as merely coming along and extracting money from those organisations rather than providing a huge amount of value. It is important in this case that there is absolute transparency around what it is that the authority is doing and why a body might be paying fees to it as they are required to under clause 26 of this bill.We heard from submitters that they were concerned that often the New Zealand Qualifications Authority coming in and working with them was some kind of tick-box exercise. It was some kind of simply filling in a form and that was enough. There has to be more than that in terms of added value from the authority’s involvement with industry training organisations. There needs to be a sense that the authority is supporting the delivery of high-quality training through the setting of high-quality standards. That is the purpose.If the authority comes in and has conversations like that with the bodies that are paying fees to it then there will not be any grudge held about paying that fee. The problem arises where the industry training organisations feel that they are simply part of a bureaucratic exercise that is about filling in forms and the authority does not seem to add value. The concern that was expressed to us in the select committee about Part 2 of the bill was what the added value is here from the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. It was a little disturbing I think to see the level of cynicism among a number of those representing industry training organisations about the authority and what it would do. I think we have to take that cynicism seriously.As I said in my earlier contribution by no means do I believe that industry training organisations should be without scrutiny by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. It is a large amount of taxpayer funding that is going to industry training organisations and even more concerning would be when this money was directed to individual businesses under the clauses that have just been passed. That would be of even greater concern and we would need the authority in there making sure that there is a level of quality assurance available. That is what the fees are paid for under clause 26. We want to see as much transparency as possible in what the authority does so that those fees can be justified. It is important that the authority take heed of the things that were said about this during the select committee process.We do believe that the fees are justifiable because the authority is performing a service but it must be able to show the added value there and unfortunately—Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram):I just want to pick up on where my colleague Grant Robertson left off in terms of Part 2 of the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill specifically clauses 25 and 26. As my colleague has raised this is the part of the bill where the Education Act is amended and the fees are set. I just want to consider what some of the submitters came and talked about. They talked about how it was that those fees were going to be utilised. My colleague Grant Robertson has set out very well what the function of and the relationship between the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the industry training organisations is. I think we heard some very considered responses to what that relationship is how these fees that are gathered under Part 2 of the bill are going to be used and what the regulatory concern about that is. In fact it would be fair to say that part of the concern that we expressed in relation to Part 1 of the bill in terms of how it was that non - industry training organisations were going to be able to have access to the direct funding that had previously been solely for industry training organisations is actually about the lack of regulatory compliance and the lesser amount of regulatory requirement that is there for non - industry training organisations.Returning to Part 2 and specifically what this bit of the legislation is doing I think one of the most powerful statements was when we had one of the industry training organisations come to us and talk about the nature of the relationship between an industry training organisation—Careerforce in this case—and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. It talked in a very compelling way about the need for a partnership between these two organisations. My colleague Grant Robertson has already talked very eloquently about the need for there to be this scrutiny and transparency of our industry training organisations and I do not think that is something we would ever question but I think that one of the things that we are seeing is that the industry training organisations really had a considered way in which they were going to work in with the authority.I think another very compelling submission we heard on this was from the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions which had some very interesting things to say about the legislation. As we have already talked about in the debate on Part 1 of this bill the other aspects of its submission are something the Contractors Federation agreed with absolutely wholeheartedly. The council talked about whether or not “the Bill provides that the NZQA can set quality assurance requirements ‘without limitation’ in respect of the management operation and governance of ITOs. These provisions come on top of requirements already in the Act in respect of governance and other matters.” The council considered that that was a step too far. Its main concern was that this provision represented a tipping point for industry training. Given the significant restructuring of industry training organisations that has already occurred and that we have seen over a number of years the new performance standards that are in place for industry training organisations the reduced funding and now a major review that in many ways some of the changes that we are seeing in this legislation are coming out of there is a risk that the visibility of industry training organisations as an organisation is now under threat. That is what the council argued.It was in this context that the council proposed that the quality assurance aspect that role of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority should be less burdensome for the industry training organisations should have less discretion and should not duplicate or extend quality assurance requirements that are already provided for in the Industry Training Act or through the role of the Tertiary Education Commission. So in the rush to open this up and let other players in there is a real danger that in the words of the Careerforce submission we are going to lose that partnership that we really need to be seeing between our industry training organisations and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority.If we are going to have quality skills training in New Zealand and if we are going to have quality apprenticeship training in New Zealand I think all of us in this House agree that there has to be some rigorous monitoring of what that teaching is—as with any part of our education system—and that there are standards. We need to be assured that people who are undertaking that education are being taught according to that standard and that there is a monitoring authority. It is simply the way in which we prefer to see education run in this country. But it is not clear what role the New Zealand Qualifications Authority will have in respect of quality assurance in relation to the funding agreements of the non - industry training organisations. I think that that is something that is a real concern for us and something I would like to hear a Government member take a call on.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I will call the other doctor Dr David Clark.Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North):Very kind Mr Chair. Thank you for the call. Of course we should reiterate that Labour opposes the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill. A lot of the reasons come down to the fact that this is privatisation by stealth effectively of the sector. It undermines the quality assurance that we have become used to. It undermines the industry training organisations’ restructure which is being bedded in. To my mind Part 2 really does get to that issue when it comes down to the annual registration fee and the prescribing of quality assurance requirements. This is the nuts and bolts this is where rubber hits road and this is where we ask what the value-add of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority is where we ask whether the regulatory oversight is adequate for industry training.Let us ask ourselves what would happen if there was no fee. What would happen if there was no quality assurance in the sector? I think what we all know is that that would not be a desirable situation for New Zealand. We already witness a lack of workforce training. We see it in Christchurch where there is a real skills shortage for an urgently needed rebuild—a lost opportunity. We see it in many places around New Zealand. I myself think of Dunedin where we know that only 45 percent of the nurses who trained last year were in positions where they could further train and get their practical skills training because the Government did not have in place a channel for them to carry on in their studies. They did not have work placement. That tells you that this Government has not got a priority on proper workforce training with pathways into the workforce. Likewise with medical students—280 medical students trained for 100 places we are told. There are some real pipeline issues and they are not being looked out for by this Government. It is kind of letting everyone sign up and the market decide at the end.Well that is not working because young New Zealanders are following their passions and they do not always have the necessary information to make a decision about what the future workforce needs are. It is a role of the Government to assist with that process to make sure that New Zealanders are training for the future benefit of this country. That also means that they are then appropriately trained to make the most of their skills so they earn a decent living to better their own lives and the lives of those around them. Here in this bill we have the assurance that there will be a fee charged and we have the assurance that there will be some level of industry oversight but we need to ask whether that is adequate.We on this side of the Chamber contend that this move that is going ahead really is not adequate. It is not forward-looking enough. We have seen it in the track record of the Government with the drop in the number of Modern Apprentices over the last 5 years and the 37 percent drop in the number of industry trainees. Can you have any vision for a better education sector and for a better future for New Zealand and can you have the kind of opportunity for all New Zealanders that Labour would want if you do not have a proper industry training organisations sector? This bill unfortunately is a step backwards because what it does is remove the skills leadership function from the purpose of the industry training organisations. Without that skill leadership function without that oversight nobody really is looking at the bigger picture.Labour is committed to ensuring that New Zealand does have the skilled workforce it needs and we are committed to making sure that the shortage of skilled tradespeople in New Zealand is addressed and that means investing in apprenticeships and industry training. That means making sure that this annual registration fee is going the right way as the funding that comes out of the sector to support quality assurance and support appropriate workforce training—that it is directed in the right area.The question I posed at the beginning of my contribution was: what if there was no fee? What if there was no quality assurance? This is the track that we seem to be heading down and that is the concern that I have. I am concerned that if we do not have proper oversight and if we do not have a skills leadership function we will end up in a situation where we have loads and loads and loads of some professions that are more accessible and of which we already have too many. We know for example that in New Zealand we train far too many hairdressers. We need hairdressers. Hairdressers are good people. I do not need a hairdresser—Grant Robertson: Some of us do.Dr DAVID CLARK: —but many people do. But we need only so many hairdressers and there has got to be skills leadership around choosing just which people we need.CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour):Part 2 of the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill is obviously a very small part of what is a very significant bill. As I added in my earlier contribution I believe this is a very significant bill and one that is a real lost opportunity one where we could have had real consensus about something as important as industry training and skills in our country which are vital to provide decent jobs and vital to ensure our economy works to its best capacity. In Part 2 we are looking specifically at amendments to the Education Act 1989. There are only three clauses there: clause 24 which actually states that “This Part amends the Education Act …”; and clause 25 which empowers the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to make rules “prescribing quality assurance requirements for industry training organisations”. That bit was actually amended following the work of the Education and Science Committee. The select committee amended clause 25 to introduce into section 253 of the Education Act the necessary authorisation for the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to charge an annual fee to industry training organisations. That was important I think to cover the costs of issuing quality assurance improvement notices in addition to covering other costs. That change was recommended from the select committee work.Clause 26 amends section 254 of the Education Act to empower the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to charge fees for quality assurance activities undertaken in accordance with its function under the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Act 1992. The important thing here—and I was not a member of the select committee so I did not get to hear all of the submitters on this. But what I do understand is that the relationship between industry training organisations and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority is important and none of us in this House I am sure would dispute the requirement for robustness and the requirement to ensure that we do have good quality. We want to have a very robust high-quality industry training system. In fact ironically the recent review has actually led to some good improvements—improvements that we acknowledge needed to be made.We do believe this bill overall particularly in allowing funding to non - industry training organisations namely large businesses to deliver industry training has the potential to undermine that good work and the robustness and the quality of our industry training system. But the relationship between industry training organisations and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority is an important one as is quality assurance as is mentioned in this part.One of the things I would be interested in knowing and I am sure the Minister in the chair the Minister for the Environment would love to clarify this for me is how these provisions around quality assurance apply to the non - industry training organisations that will be providing industry training because as I have said this bill opens up industry training effectively privatising it so that individual businesses will be able to be funded to deliver so-called industry training. What I want to know—and it may already be clear to those who were on the select committee and if that is so please excuse me. If the Minister could take a call—because there has been an absence I have to say an absolute absence of Government members commenting on what is a very important bill—and please let me know how these quality assurance provisions will apply to non - industry training organisations providing industry training.The other thing I guess is whether they will be subject to the same fees if these provisions do apply. Will they be subject to the same fees that are flagged up in these clauses 24 to 26 here in Part 2? I am hoping the Minister will feel moved to get up and comment or perhaps a member opposite who was on the select committee might be able to answer my question for me. We are disappointed to be in the situation of opposing this bill. We had supported the bill to select committee because we did see there was an opportunity here to work on improving industry training which is so vital to our economy. There are such major skill gaps at the moment. We really did want to see an improvement in this space but unfortunately the Government in its wisdom has gone with two measures that are absolutely of fundamental concern to us: the privatising of industry training and the removal of the skills leadership role for industry training organisations.A party votewas called for on the questionThat Part 2 be agreed to.Ayes64New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 3; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes56New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.Part 2 agreed to.Schedule 1A party votewas called for on the questionThat schedule 1 be agreed to.Ayes64New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 3; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes56New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.Schedule 1 agreed to.Schedule 2A party votewas called for on the questionThat schedule 2 be agreed to.Ayes64New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 3; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes56New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.Schedule 2 agreed to.Clauses 1 to 3GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central):I want to talk about both clauses 1 and 3 in this particular set of calls that I want to make here. The first is that we on this side have focused as is our job on the bits of the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill that we oppose and therefore the reason we oppose the bill as a whole. But I do want to talk about something where the Government has made some changes that impact on the title of this bill and also on clause 3 “Principal Act”.Actually this bill repeals the Modern Apprenticeship Training Act. The Labour Party is actually very proud of the introduction of Modern Apprenticeships when we came into Government at the end of 1999. The reason that we are proud of that and why I think we should note it today as this bill repeals that Act is that in the 1990s the system of apprenticeships that New Zealanders had come to know over many decades was dismantled by the then National Government. It took away the idea that many New Zealanders had experienced that you would come up through an industry—it was often in those days a Government-run one like the railway workshops or somewhere like that—and you would learn your trade. You would become an apprentice you would get the skills that you would then take into your later life you would add a lot of value to your community and you had a career.We were proud of the fact that when Labour came into Government in 2000 and had seen the destruction of that apprenticeship system through the 1990s we said enough was enough. We brought in the Modern Apprenticeships scheme. We tried to put it in the context of that old value of learning a trade getting an apprenticeship doing the hard yards and then going off and working perhaps for yourself or for another business. We took that into a modern era. We said there would need to be a range of different apprenticeship options for young New Zealanders and thereby we created the Modern Apprenticeships system. Over 15000 people went through that Modern Apprenticeships system in the first 8 years of that decade. The Labour Party knows that those 15000 New Zealanders received high-quality training within the New Zealand Qualifications Framework and got their start in their chosen career.But we also acknowledge that having done that it was time for a review of that system. The incoming National Government mucked around for a couple of years and did not do much at all. It was a critical period to be mucking around in because it was the period in which we had to deal with the Christchurch earthquakes. But then after that the Government finally got its act together and brought in the New Zealand Apprenticeships scheme which brings together all of the different types of apprenticeships there are. That is what this bill establishes.I think it is important to note that the Labour Party does support the idea of New Zealand Apprenticeships. We like the idea of a more coordinated process. We like the idea that the pastoral care aspects that were so critical to Modern Apprenticeships are now seen right across the board in the tertiary funding that the current Government has put in place. So the Youth Guarantee scheme is an example now of the idea that you cannot just set someone off on an apprenticeship and hope for the best. That is now understood. That is what lay behind Modern Apprenticeships—the idea that you would have a coordinator somebody who was responsible for making sure that the training actually took place and the young people involved appreciated that. That is now understood and shared across the board.But we also accept that in the changing employment market that we now have apprenticeships are not just about those aged under 24. That is what Modern Apprenticeships were targeted at. So we actually agree with the idea of broadening that out. My colleague Carol Beaumont has already mentioned the lack of women in industry training and apprenticeships. One of the ways of breaking through that is to lift that age barrier or get rid of the age barrier and say that women who may need to retrain and go into a new area could do that through an apprenticeship-based system. That was not possible under Modern Apprenticeships; it is now possible under this new legislation.I think it is important to put that on the table. It is inherent in the proposed title of the Act the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Act because what it does is repeal the Modern Apprenticeship Training Act and changes what was called the Industry Training Act 1992. I want to put on the table that there are aspects of this bill that we do actually support. It would have been nice to be able to say we support this whole bill because there are those aspects that we thought were good but we could not do that because this bill fundamentally undermines the Act that it claims to amend in clause 3 the Industry Training Act. The essence of the Industry Training Act the principal Act under clause 3 is that that Act is about organising industry training across an industry not providing funding for individual businesses to do business-specific training.Why should the Government fund that? We have not had a single Government member stand up in this Chamber today and say why they are fundamentally changing the nature of industry training with this legislation. Why would a Government that is supposedly all about fiscal discipline and looking after the taxpayer decide that it is a good idea to provide funding for industry training to people who are not industry training organisations or to businesses who may well simply train for their own skills? Even Business New Zealand the greatest ally of this Government came to the Education and Science Committee and said it was not sure about this. It was “cautiously supportive” but said there needs to be a review really quickly to make sure that industry training money is not going into activities that businesses should be doing themselves.And then we again wondered why the Government would fundamentally undermine the Industry Training Act in clause 3 by taking away one of the three core responsibilities of industry training organisations which is skills leadership. Skills leadership is vitally important in the role of industry training because it is business identifying the skills needs that are out there. One of the main reasons we decide to fund industry training is to ensure that we are looking ahead. What are the skills that are needed in the future? Under this bill we have a situation where no one is responsible for skills leadership. Is that not an amazing thing? The Government has brought a bill to the House to make nobody responsible for looking ahead to what skills New Zealand needs. How absolutely ridiculous short-sighted and without any strategic plan.Tracey Martin: Typical.GRANT ROBERTSON: As Tracey Martin says it is typical. It is typical of a Government that cannot see past today.What we need is industry training organisations doing more work in terms of skills leadership. We heard from Careerforce a very high-functioning industry training organisation about the fact that it had sat down with Health Workforce New Zealand the Government’s body for finding a strategic way forward for the health workforce to identify the needs of those health care workers who are often forgotten: the people working in rest homes the people providing in-home care. They need training. They are looking after our grandparents and our parents. They have been left out too often when industry skill plans are developed. So Careerforce has been right in there with Health Workforce New Zealand providing that skills leadership. That is gone under this bill. It is gone. It is now no one’s responsibility. But the officials came and said that the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment is going to be doing a lot of work and it is going to be talking to industry. This should be industry-led. Why is the Government saying it wants no one to be responsible and the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment will have a little bit more of an oversight? It is not good enough and undermines the very purpose of industry training.So in two hits—the opening-up of funding for industry training to non - industry training organisations and to specific businesses and in taking away the skills leadership function—very sadly this bill is wrongly titled. It is not the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill; it is the “Privatisation Agenda Bill”. It is furthering the privatisation of education this time in the industry training sector. Steven Joyce the Minister for Tertiary Education Skills and Employment who is responsible for this bill has an ideological commitment to privatisation. He does not know why it is a good idea in this instance he is just doing it just as is being done right across the education sector. It is wrong. Education is primarily a public good. We all benefit from it. We should all have a role in making sure it is a quality system. We should all have a role in making sure that the taxpayer funding is being well spent.This bill goes in the wrong direction it undermines industry training and it is fundamentally flawed. I wish we were voting for it because I believe that apprenticeships and industry training represent a key part of our future productivity and wealth as a nation but we cannot vote for a bill that is driven by such narrow-minded ideology and that takes away one of the core parts of industry training and skills leadership. The Labour Party will be opposing this legislation.Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram):I would like in this call to address clauses 1 2 and 3 in reverse order. I want to pick up where my colleague Grant Robertson left off in acknowledging where this piece of legislation the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill sits within the tapestry that is the history of industry apprenticeships and skills training in this country. I think that it is a big missed opportunity as we have been saying throughout our speeches on this bill at every reading. We have really missed an opportunity to add something to that history. We are immensely proud of what the Labour-led Government coming in in 1999 did in terms of reinstating apprenticeships training in this country because it is so critical to us being the country that we want to be and the country that we can be.I do notice—if I flick very briefly to schedule 2 which lists out the consequential amendments to the principal Act that is referred to in clause 3 of the bill—that one of those pieces of legislation that is amended is the Maori Housing Act of 1938. I just want to acknowledge the proud history we have in this country of Māori trade training and how that has been such an important part of our history. What we did during and after World War II in terms of training a workforce and producing a stock of good houses for this country is something that we can rightly be proud of.Grant Robertson: Someone ought to write a thesis on this.Dr MEGAN WOODS: My colleague tells me that someone should write a thesis on this. As I referred to in other readings of this legislation this was the subject of my PhD thesis. It is an area that I am incredibly interested in. It has shown me the potential of what a well-crafted trade training scheme can be and this is not it.What we have heard about from submitters on this bill if we are thinking about the Acts that have gone before it and about the legislation that we are amending here today is the lack of pastoral care that this bill contains. What we know from history if we do look at history is that pastoral care is absolutely critical to the success of any apprenticeship training scheme. We know that the success of the Māori trade training scheme of the mid-20th century was as much about the technical skills that the largely young men were able to gain in terms of framing and plastering and all those kinds of things as it was about the matrons in the hostels who were absolutely critical to the success of those schemes. The fact that the Government is passing legislation that completely does away with the emphasis on pastoral care is not something in which I can have any faith that we are enacting a piece of legislation today that is going to stand us in good stead and set us up with the kinds of skills and apprenticeship training that we need to be the kind of innovative country we need to be in the 21st century.I said I was going to do it in reverse order so I will talk about clause 2 of this legislation. Of course I note the commencement date of this legislation in terms of the Act coming into force on the day after the date on which it receives the Royal assent. What we do know is that already the tender process for the privatisation of training has occurred. We already have four tenders in for non - industry training organisation providers of skills training. I spoke in the debate on Part 1 of this bill about seeing a large health-care provider that is one of these tenderers—surprise surprise—and that we are in real danger of having business specific training put in place rather than industry-specific training. That is something that is absolutely critical. It is critical when we are using public money when we are spending taxpayer funding that we are doing stuff for the industry good and we are doing stuff to make New Zealand a better place not subsidising what a large corporation would otherwise pay for itself.What we are doing here today is shameful. We are taking money away from the public provision of industry training which is the absolute underpinning of the economy that we have in order to be in the 21st century and putting it into the pockets of private businesses which will absolutely leave out small to medium sized businesses. What we are seeing is not the small to medium sized enterprises that are already tendering before this legislation has its commencement date under clause 2. What we are seeing are large corporations. Small to medium sized enterprises are going to be potentially left behind in this. In Labour we want to back our small to medium sized businesses. We do not want to back just the big end of town. The fact is that we had businesses come to us at the Education and Science Committee and tell us that this bill was going to be to their detriment because there is a Government that is absolutely content at looking after its mates and backing the big end of town and that is absolutely shameful. We are in danger of undermining our skills in industry training in this country because of ideological commitment on the part of this Government in an absolute blinkeredness to anything but big business. Well small businesses mean something to the New Zealand Labour Party. They always have and they always will.David Bennett: Oh yeah right—get real.Dr MEGAN WOODS: The fact is that that member sits there and chirps but never takes a call. He will sit there and pipe up from time to time but when business came and told the committee how detrimental it was going to be there was not one murmur from the Government members on that committee. I would like to hear a call from a Government member on that committee that addresses small to medium sized businesses are going to fare under this legislation. So rather than just the squeakings of that member over there perhaps we could have a substantial contribution.Before I conclude I want to turn to clause 1 of this bill—the title. I think one of the very interesting things that a submitter came to us and said was that it is debatable whether the bill could include the words “industry training” if other organisations can qualify for funding in this way. The very substance of this legislation belies the title of this bill. The Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill perhaps does not seem apt when in our minds this is a piece of legislation that undermines what industry training is about. It undermines the industry good that we need to be looking to when we are spending public money. It is a simple transfer of public education money into the pockets of corporations. It is a continuation of the privatisation agenda.So I would like to suggest some alternative titles for this piece of legislation. I think that the “Privatisation of Education Act (Part 3 Hot on the Heels of Private-Public Partnerships and Charter Schools) Bill” could be a more apt name for the piece of legislation that we are debating in this Committee today. I think that if we were not going to go there Government members might like to consider an amendment that goes along the lines of the “Ideological Blinkers of This Government Bill”. That would perhaps be a more apt name because this bill is all about this Government’s commitment to privatisation in our education system and not about visionary thinking about what is going to make a better country a better economy and what will equip our workforce with the necessary trades skills and education that are required for us to go forward into the 21st century.We on this side of the Chamber know that if we really are going to address inequality in this country then having robust industry training robust apprenticeships and good skills training is absolutely critical and this legislation is doing everything it can to undermine it. I find the name of this bill the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill a little absurd given that all the players involved in industry training came along and told the Government that the bill was not going to work. It seems a little like it is a piece of irony that we are in this Chamber debating today. I would like to have a Government member take a call and tell us how it is that this bill is supporting industry training because in our mind all this is doing is undermining industry training. To give it that title in this legislation is nothing short of shameful.Why does a Government member not take a call get on their legs and justify their position? Why is it that the Government thinks that it can run industry training and that industry’s voice should be silenced? So perhaps that is another name that we could give this bill—the “Government Knows Better Than Industry Training Bill”. That would be another contender for my alternative title of this legislation. It is a sad day that we are not here today debating a piece of legislation that is going to enrich the tapestry of a history of industry and apprenticeships training in this country and that we are about to pass a piece of legislation that is going to undermine it.CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour):I rise to speak on clauses 1 2 and 3 of the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill as well. I think that the title is important. I do want to acknowledge the point that Grant Robertson said which was that including the words “and Apprenticeships” in the title is a good thing. But the fact of the matter is that another irony about this bill is that on the back of reviewing industry training on the back of some really hard yards that have been undertaken by industry training organisations to look at how they need to function to go forward and provide industry training and apprenticeships that we need as a country—that we desperately need as a country—what is happening with this particular bill will undermine their ability to do that. It will undermine the “industry” bit of industry training. That is the irony here because instead of industry training organisations providing industry training we will now have corporate training. We will fund as Dr Woods has said and we will put public moneys into organisations other than industry training organisations to provide industry training.The fact of that is what that will lead to is not industry training but training that will be relevant to the particular business that is undertaking it. We know what that looks like. That will be training that is specific to the particular ways that that business operates and the particular needs machinery and technology that it uses and not to what is needed across the whole industry. The real risk for the people undertaking the training is that they will not end up with qualifications that they will be able to take with them in the industry. They will end up with qualifications that are narrowly focused on particular businesses.I do think it is absolutely vital that people understand what is being suggested here because we know and we would all agree that there are real skills shortages in this country. Labour has long been a party that stands for skills training and that stands for apprenticeships because we understand and know as do most New Zealanders just how vital those trades and technical skills are. How important are they for our manufacturing industry? How important are they for us in terms of building and construction or infrastructure development for example? Those are some of the areas where we have got massive skills shortages. We need industry training and apprenticeships to fill those skills shortages. That is supposedly what this bill is about. There was a real opportunity and it has been missed. I think that is a crying shame.In 2008 when this Government came in there was a skills strategy in place. There had been work undertaken. It had involved industry. It had involved Business New Zealand. It had involved the Council of Trade Unions. It had involved various Government agencies—the Tertiary Education Commission the Ministry of Social Development—and a whole number of people looking at what was needed for skills across all of our industries. What was the first thing that the Government did with that? Well it chucked it out. Then it said: “Let’s not bother meeting any more to talk about these things. Let’s not talk about a skills strategy for this country.”This bill could have provided an opportunity to strengthen industry training and apprenticeships. We could have had some consensus on that. I would urge the Minister or any of the members opposite who know about this bill to explain why that opportunity has been deliberately missed. Why is it that instead of strengthening industry training organisations and instead of asking what we need as a skills strategy at an industry level across the whole country we have a bill that undermines industry training organisations that starts a path of privatising industry training and removes the ability of industry training organisations to provide a leadership role in their industry? Why? Nobody across the other side of the Chamber is willing to answer any questions in this. It is just appalling. This is vitally important for our country.JAMI-LEE ROSS (Junior Whip—National):I move That the question be now put.SUE MORONEY (Labour):Thank you for the opportunity to take a call in the Committee stage to talk about clauses 1 and 2 of the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill. I particularly want to start my contribution by talking about the commencement date of when this Government is planning to do something about industry training and apprenticeships. The sad indictment on this particular Government is that we have got in front of this country right now the example of this Government’s appalling track record on taking industry training and apprenticeships seriously because right now Christchurch is largely being rebuilt by immigrant labour.David Bennett: Oh what a lie!The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! The member cannot say that.SUE MORONEY: Well David Bennett does not seem to have visited Christchurch to see for himself but it is largely being rebuilt by immigrant labour. Many of them are Irish. You know I have got nothing against the Irish—I am of Irish ancestry myself—but actually those should have been jobs being held by all of those New Zealanders who are sitting on the scrap heap of the dole queue instead. [Interruption]Well here we go. The Government has finally woken up. It has finally woken up 3 years too late. It had 3 years to actually be training New Zealanders to rebuild Christchurch. That is the opportunity that was missed. It is an absolute indictment on the lack of strategy from this Government for having a thorough industry training and apprenticeship approach and strategy. If it had had that then it would have listened to the Labour Party which within 2 months of that earthquake started begging the Government in this very debating chamber to actually bring in industry training and to add to the apprenticeships in order to prepare for the rebuild of Christchurch. The Government ignored those calls.Now we have got the building industry screaming out to the Government—still 3 years later—saying that it is 5000 apprentices short of what the building industry needs. That is the track record of this Government. In its sixth year of Government it has got rising unemployment—certainly in the Waikato region it has been rising.David Bennett: No it hasn’t. That’s not true.SUE MORONEY: Well there we go again. David Bennett does not even know the unemployment figures from his own region.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! It is not about unemployment.David Bennett: Prove it.SUE MORONEY: Well the member wants me to prove it Mr Chair. Am I allowed to respond? If he goes and looks at the last quarterly figures released by the Waikato region they increase from 6.1 percent to 6.8 percent.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! This is not about unemployment; this is about industry training.SUE MORONEY: Well thank you Mr Chair. I was just responding to the member opposite but I will now focus back on the bill itself.What this bill does is yes some useful things. As some of my colleagues have said it is a shame that we cannot support the bill in its entirety because there are one or two things that it does that are useful. Sadly as this Government is wont to do it has got privatisation at its core. It has also got the narrowing down of what we are trying to achieve in terms of people’s education and is that not a theme from this Government as well? It has done that with compulsory education as well as industry training now. It has taken a very broad concept that gives people a very broad set of skills that they can apply across industry or across different careers and different things that they might want to pursue in their lives—that is what the compulsory education system is supposed to help with. Both with the compulsory education system and now with industry training the Government has taken the approach of narrowing things down.In this bill it is doing it by not requiring the bodies that take care of this area to be industry wide. It can be just an employer. What we start to get is the narrowing of skills that are actually going to be imparted to people as a result because although an employer might have specific skill needs for their particular business they will not be necessarily engaging in preparing those people for a skill base that is to be used right across their industry. I can see that a couple of the members opposite are quite interested to learn that this is a bill that is going through in their name that does this.MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney):I move That the question be now put.A party votewas called for on the questionThat the question be now put.Ayes64New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 3; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes56New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.Motion agreed to.A party votewas called for on the questionThat clause 1 be agreed to.Ayes64New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 3; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes56New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.Clause 1 agreed to.A party votewas called for on the questionThat clause 2 be agreed to.Ayes64New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 3; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes56New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.Clause 2 agreed to.A party votewas called for on the questionThat clause 3 be agreed to.Ayes64New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 3; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes56New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.Clause 3 agreed to.Bill to be reported without amendment presently.