Hipkins ChrisCHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I do indeed because I was robbed. The clock was wrong when I was last contributing so I hope that the Chair will view me kindly and give me an additional 5 minutes to talk on the Education Legislation Bill as I fill the role that I occupied prior to Shane Jones' valedictory—helping to fill in the time until the Hon Phil Goff has the opportunity to do his valedictory somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes from now. The Education Legislation Bill is somewhat of a disappointment of a bill as we get into the concluding parts of this debate around the title and commencement. It contains a number of provisions that are uncontroversial and really could be included in a statutes amendment bill without taking up any of the Committee's time and then it includes some that are a little more controversial. We have been through those in detail but to sum up some of the more controversial changes the bill does allow for charter schools to be operated by tertiary education institutions—in particular polytechs and universities. The universities universally said they did not want to do that; the polytechs of course are the ones that have indicated that they want to do that. For some of them there are serious concerns about their ability to manage their existing business without having to take on the responsibility of a charter school. The bill allows schools to change their opening hours in consultation with their community and of course that creates some issues for parents where they may have different kids going to different schools with different opening hours and the logistical nightmare that that could be. The bill allows principals to run more than one school. Throughout the Committee stage we put a number of questions to Hekia Parata about how that would actually work and the Government was unable to answer any questions about the ultimate accountability of a school principal who is managing more than one school. The bill extends out-of-school care provision to home-based early childhood education providers. I want to say at the outset here that we made a number of changes to these provisions at the Education and Science Committee to ensure that there were adequate adult to child ratios and we certainly welcomed the Government's pragmatism on those although we do still have some quality concerns about how out-of-school care for older kids will be managed by those providers whose primary duty is to manage early childhood education kids. There are some other things that the bill does but perhaps the most controversial is the establishment of a new beginning teacher position which was not thoroughly debated by the select committee because it was tabled only a few weeks before the select committee was due to be reporting the bill back to the House. Those amendments were incorporated by a majority. They create a new teacher position called a trainee teacher. They allow the Ministry of Education or the Minister through the Ministry of Education to impose that on a school and that was incredibly controversial. It deals with some of the issues that were canvassed around the Teach First NZ programme but actually goes much wider than that. We had the opportunity to debate that but the Minister of Education was unable to provide reassurance around how that position might be used and whether that position would be over and above the existing staffing entitlement for schools and as a result of that the Labour Party still cannot support that particular amendment. We certainly cannot support the provisions that allow for charter schools to be operated by tertiary education providers. We have concerns about principals running more than one school and about schools being able to change their opening hours. With those factors in mind we will be voting against the bill although I would say some of those other minor amendments and updating amendments—particularly the amendments in Part 2—are supported by the Labour members of the House. We have voted in favour of those but the totality of the changes means that we cannot support the bill as a whole. Thank you.