Hipkins ChrisHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): Thank you Madam Chair. It is a good time to respond to a few of the issues that have been raised by members of the Opposition thus far. I'll work backwards through those perhaps and start with the contribution from Tim Macindoe.The first part of his contribution or the first half of his speech largely was an ideological argument against fees-free which doesn't actually relate to the bill which of course is a very narrow and technical aspect of the implementation of the administration of fees-free. Now I accept that the Opposition are ideologically opposed to fees-free and we can have that argument on another day but with regard to the specific provisions in the bill which are around the making of a declaration the intention of these provisions is to make it easier for someone to make a declaration.I utterly reject the claim that the member made which is that there is no consequence for fraud. In fact the bill creates a consequence for fraud. That is one of the purposes of the bill and that's exactly what it does when it creates an offence and a fine that goes with committing that offence. He did ask me how much fraud I'm aware of. None is the answer to that. I've not been informed of any fraud associated with the fees-free policy. This is about making compliance with the requirements of that easier. We do have systems in place to detect when people are making false declarations or false applications.Just to pick up a couple of the other points that have been made—Simeon Brown I think continues to make the claim that charter schools are being closed. They are not being closed; they are transitioning into the public education system. The Supplementary Order Paper Supplementary Order Paper 50 that deals with transition measures responds to issues that were raised by those existing charter schools in the transition process. Now not all of them agree with one another on these and there was certainly some disagreement about that but actually the intention of the bill is to remove the ideology of privatisation and deregulation from the school system that was introduced.Now I think Simeon Brown and Tim Macindoe both didn't get the memo from Nikki Kaye about the teachers when they talked about our union mates because it seems to me that the union mates—of course these are teachers that they are talking about. On the one hand the National Party is trying to cuddle up to them at the moment so I am surprised that their ongoing attacks on teachers are continuing in light of that. It does seem to be somewhat contradictory. The allegation is that we are giving teachers too much power over what happens in classrooms. Now I think that we could give teachers a bit more power over what happens in classrooms and that would probably have quite a positive effect on kids' education because actually these are people who have devoted their lives to educating kids and they do actually know what they are talking about as opposed to some of the contributions that we've had in the debate so far.The final point that I wanted to respond to was Parmjeet Parmar's question: without national standards how will parents know how their kids are doing? Well the requirement for national standards has been replaced with a requirement for schools to report to parents regularly and in plain English about the progress their children are making in all aspects of the curriculum. So it's not just about literacy and numeracy. Actually parents want to know how kids are doing across the board and not just in literacy and numeracy and there is a multiple range of tools that schools can use in order to give parents very accurate information—much more accurate information than they got through national standards which research reports clearly demonstrated were neither national nor standard. So they were getting bogus information previously and now they will actually get reliable information.Now just with regard to the various Supplementary Order Papers I did do the Opposition the courtesy of reading them all and considering them all which is something that the committee is not particularly accustomed to because certainly for the nine years that I sat in Opposition having tabled many Supplementary Order Papers myself I don't think Ministers in the previous Government ever troubled themselves to read them. But I read them and I considered them. Now none of the Supplementary Order Papers put forward by the Opposition enhance the bill. Most of them express opposition to the bill which is an understandable thing and therefore seek to delete various parts of the bill but actually they don't improve the bill in any way. Many of them are inconsistent with the policy intention of the bill—i.e. trying to delete clauses in order to thwart the policy intention of the bill. But none of them—and I have considered them—in my view enhance the bill and therefore certainly the Government intends to vote against them.