Mackey Moana: Education (Trustee Ineligibility) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Mackey Moana: Education (Trustee Ineligibility) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:633;Page:5243] 
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 I am happy to take a call on the Education (Trustee Ineligibility) Amendment Bill as the deputy chair of the Education and Science Committee which in this term of Parliament looked at this bill again. I tell Mr Brownlee straight up that all National members of the committee were present on the day we decided unanimously that this bill should not proceed. 
I have to say that I was a bit disappointed at Mr Brownlee’s speech because the Education and Science Committee tried extremely hard to make this bill work. When the bill was first referred to us we looked at the submission we had received from the School Trustees Association and we thought that the bill had obviously been introduced because of a specific situation in Christchurch; we thought that people had been very very upset so Mr Brownlee had introduced a bill to recognise a problem. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: It was Palmerston North. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: Oh—Palmerston North. We recognised that but the bill was difficult and unworkable. Submitters said that boards of trustees had far less contact with children than many other people did and that unless we addressed that we would create inconsistencies. 
Then Brian Donnelly the chair of the committee about whom Mr Brownlee has been very uncharitable tonight said that he thought we should go ahead with the bill. He said we should see whether we could make it work because he made the very good point that in rural schools boards of trustees have a lot of contact with children. They do a lot of the hiring. They take on a lot of the roles that in other schools teacher aides and other teachers take on. We said that that was a very good point and that we should go ahead and see whether we could make the bill work. We tried very very hard to make this bill work. 
Judith Collins 
: Not hard enough. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: Judith Collins was not on the committee and does not know. I am sure she thinks that no committee works nearly as hard as any committee she is on. I would hope she knows from the various committees we have been on together that I work very hard to try to make things work that I think are practical and this bill was one of them. 
The committee tried very very hard to make this bill work but in the end every road we went down tended to be quite circular. We came back to the fact that the list of offences in the original bill is not very comprehensive and that if we were going to outlaw the things listed in the bill—which indeed we should—then we should outlaw sexual grooming and many other sexual offences. Once we started to add more and more offences it became difficult to say where we should draw that line. A lot of us went out and talked to schools about the matter and they said: “Well we would quite like people with fraud convictions not to be allowed to stand for boards of trustees.” So we ended up with a ballooning group of offences that related only to people standing for boards of trustees. 
We looked at police vetting and we thought maybe that if we said people had to be police-vetted and then parents had to make up their own minds about it when they voted that could make a difference. But of course if only a certain number of people stand for a board—the same number as there are places—those people will be appointed automatically and there is not an election which makes it difficult. The problem with police vetting was also that we did not think the police would have the capacity to cope with the thousands and thousands of applications there would be every time board of trustee elections came around. 
We also looked at tying this bill to the Parole Act in relation to extended supervision orders. I think it is important to note here that the sex offenders that parents are truly worried about are now able to be sentenced to preventive detention on their first offence. But it was certainly a concern that under the law prior to the 2002 changes under the Sentencing Act the very worst sex offenders could often not be given preventive detention because it was their first offence. As members of this House well know it probably was not their first offence; it was just the first one they were caught doing. But in any case they were given a limited sentence at which point they would be paroled and then released into the community. Now we know that the most serious sex offenders will get preventive detention on their first offence. Preventive detention is a lifelong sentence so those offenders are automatically ineligible ever to be elected to a board of trustees. 
That does not change the fact that currently we are still dealing with those people who are being released from prison now and who did not get preventive detention even though when we read sentencing notes we can see that judges have said that if preventive detention had been available for those offenders’ sentences they would have got it. That is why the Hon Phil Goff introduced the amendment to the Parole Act to provide an extended supervision order. Of course any sex offender under an extended supervision order will not be eligible to stand for a board of trustees. 
It was suggested to us that we might want to link this bill to that list so that if that list were ever enlarged to include more offences this bill would also include those offences. But we felt that the list under the amendment to the Parole Act—the extended supervision orders—was not comprehensive enough for what Mr Brownlee was looking to achieve there. Again even though the list involved the worst offences it did not involve for example some of the offences already in the bill and many of the others we have mentioned including sexual grooming accessing child pornography and things like that. 
So a lot of work went into trying to make this bill work. Some members of the select committee went out and consulted schools in their communities that were concerned about this matter that had heard about this bill and that thought it was a great idea. But those members said that when they had gone through the issue and talked about it they had realised that probably the best route was not to introduce more and more legislation and more and more restrictions and bureaucracy if the bill could be made to work without doing that. 
One of the things the committee asked for advice on was the kinds of powers boards of trustees themselves had to make decisions in regard to how they conducted their elections but we have not received that advice yet. Another thing we looked at was the role the Minister plays in removing people who have been elected. Even under Mr Brownlee’s bill offenders who have never been caught could be put on to boards of trustees. Currently if people know there are problems they can go to the Minister and say they have serious concerns about someone and that person can be removed. 
At the end of the day I understand that Mr Brownlee is very disappointed that this bill will not proceed but he can rest assured that we tried very very hard to make it work. I think it stands to reason that people who are in contact day to day with children and with young children in particular should not carry those offences. I know that Mr Brownlee probably does not believe me but we tried very very hard to make the bill work. However it was a unanimous decision of the committee that it should not proceed but that is not to say that that would be the case if some other member were to introduce a bill that was workable and that would not just create a massive bureaucracy that would be very difficult to administer—a bill that would not mean that the registrar of electors for boards of trustees would have to go through every single person of the thousands of people who stand for boards of trustees all at the same time cross-referencing to find out what offences they had; and that the police within a very short period of time would not have to come up with a huge number of police vets which they simply would not be able to do. If we were able to have a bill in the House that addressed the issue then I for one would be very interested in seeing it but I am afraid that Mr Brownlee’s bill is not it. 
I am sorry that Mr Brownlee felt that Brian Donnelly did such a terrible job. He was the member who beyond the meeting that Mr Brownlee was able to attend said initially that we should go ahead with the bill because of the issue that rural schools had with it. The committee thought that that was a very good point. And Mr Donnelly’s committee members did carry on and bring Mr Brownlee’s wishes to the committee as to how he wished the bill to proceed. The committee looked at all the options it felt were available to it under current law. 
But we felt that if we had gone ahead with this bill despite the fact we thought its intentions were honourable we would have created bad law and made a lot of problems in the future. We would hate Mr Brownlee to look bad at any point in the future when boards of trustee elections come around because of the very difficult administrative efforts that would have to be made if his bill were passed.