Simmonds PennyPENNY SIMMONDS (National—Invercargill): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise to speak in opposition to the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2). The purpose of the bill obviously at the start was to make a number of amendments across a range of relatively minor and technical changes but then of course that changed with Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 118 when it brought in the networking planning for the early childhood sector—a particularly significant addition to the bill.Some of the technical changes are relatively minor but I think they're worth mentioning because some will have real nuisance value. The police-vetting provisions will certainly be a nuisance to the police in that a number of applicants—non-teaching and unregistered-position applicants—will be preparing their application and getting vetted in preparation for it so that means that the police are going to be doing a lot more work than is necessary in that area. The other area is that of the compulsory student services fees being charged. The notes say and I listened carefully to the Minister of Education saying greater flexibility for the Government"—please read that as "much less flexibility for the tertiary education providers". Once more the Government is exercising more control and therefore making it more difficult with less control for those on the ground.The simplification of qualifications and other credentials: this is an enabling part of the bill for the WDCs or the workforce development councils which were part of the review of vocational education. That was a completely unnecessary review and equally unnecessary workforce development councils were put in place. Previously this work was done by industry training organisations which were made up of people from the industry. The workforce development councils unlike the industry training organisation boards are mainly made up of union representatives and special interest groups and so I think we are quite likely to see a change in focus around the qualifications. Let's look carefully and see how many encompass things like employee rights health and safety and employee welfare rather than the actual skills needed in a trade and industry qualification. The most significant part of the bill though obviously was SOP 118. The Minister talked about the granting of new early childhood education (ECE) licences. Now all through I kept thinking that this is a solution looking for a problem and the solution that was already sitting there for the Minister was the targeted assistance for participation (TAP) funding that could have been used where he wanted to put in place centres—particularly special nature centres—where there aren't centres or where it's difficult to put a centre in for it to be viable. So he had the tool there to be able to bring about the change without taking this heavy-handed sledgehammer to the walnut.This though is part of an overall trend. This is a Government trying to dictate to the private sector. So we're seeing it in the ECE sector we've seen it in the tertiary education sector and we've seen it in the healthcare of elderly sector—most recently in the tertiary sector where the Minister has reduced funding for private providers and it will be to such an extent that a number of private providers will close. In the healthcare sector I received a letter this week as did a number of southern MPs about the incredible difficulties that their private providers in the care of elderly were finding and the lack of sympathy from the Government in terms of those private providers. It is ideological. It is driven from a point of saying that the private sector should not be doing these things the centre knows best the Government knows best and the Government wants control.The two-year time frame that my colleague Erica Stanford has referred to—there was a lot of argument over this. Look I'm not surprised that the Minister didn't understand that you couldn't build something in two years. We have to keep remembering that the Minister has never run any sort of tertiary early childhood or any education centre so he simply wouldn't know how long it takes to get resource consent to get building consent and to do the building of it. As someone who has built over $110 million worth of education facilities I knew that two years was ridiculous and so we had to try and point this out gently to the Minister so that he could understand it.Going to a number of early childhood centres with this legislation and trying to get from them what the issues are—and look there are a number of issues. Having visited a number of centres let's traverse some of the issues that they are looking at. Child-to-teacher ratios: major issues there. Pay parity—where the Government has caused more harm than good. Quality assurance: spot checks are not regularly occurring that we were led to believe would occur. High costs to parents—and here we see the impact again on those squeezed middle-income families who have got high childcare costs. The free hours for those over three years old just simply are not free hours for many families. The administrative burden on teachers and centre managers; the restrictions on the six hours per day that can be claimed; the skill shortages and the desperate issues that they have around being able to access qualified teachers who are simply burning out—these are all real problems. They're real problems looking for solutions not solutions looking for a problem as the Minister has gone here.The consultation around this legislation this bill could not have happened at a worse time. When I visited the centres and talked to the centre managers these were people who were absolutely exhausted. They were people who had been through the most difficult time in their careers: keeping centres open for essential workers; keeping centres open when they were struggling to get enough teachers there themselves; people having to work much longer hours than they should have; trying to cope with these staff shortages; trying to cope with children with COVID; and all the time they were expected to be in a place in their mindset to be able to think of network management—of the Government wanting to have more control over where centres should be open how they should open and what they should look like.This whole notion of strategic priorities again talking to the centres—how do you put these applications in when you have no idea what the weighting is going to be of the criteria? This most transparent Government ever without any indication on just how these priorities are going to influence the Minister's decision-making! This just looks like the whole tertiary education situation again where if you centralise it you have control over it. When I look at things like the simplification of qualifications where normally 16 invitations to participate would have been putting in submissions all of a sudden it's centralised controlled by a head office. They cannot put submissions in. They cannot put their heads up and disagree with the Government because they are entirely controlled by the centre.So that's what this Government is wanting to do with this legislation: more control. They've got control of the vocational sector. They're going now for this greater control of the early childhood education centre. This will not improve quality; it will lower quality. It will reduce competition and it will increase prices and the squeezed middle families will be hit again."