Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): I thank you for the opportunity to speak on this bill the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2) third reading. National's not supporting it because fundamentally it grants too many powers to the Minister to interfere and frankly foul up a lot of the development of the early education sector. And I think all New Zealanders will be conscious of the fact that the early education sector is important on two levels. It's important for the opportunity for the youngest New Zealanders preschoolers to have some access to an element of education to get them prepared for the compulsory sector. But it's also very important for families as well so that parents with young kids are able to have those children looked after while they carry on working. And we're all conscious of the cost of that which is very significant for many families—for all families. So it's a very busy difficult time. Our family have certainly been through that period like many members of the House. So we're very conscious of the need for the sector to be responsive to be as affordable as possible and reflecting the very wide variety of needs within the communities and within families across New Zealand.So the sector has developed over the years there's been quite a lot of competition in the sector a lot of variety. Our main concern with this legislation is that what we have is this impulse towards centralised control that we've seen time and time again in very many different elements in this Government the most classic example being the polytechs which have all been combined into one—disastrously so far. We see it in water. We see it in health. We see it everywhere we look. This kind of agenda that we see from this Government is extended to the early education sector where the Government is giving the Minister quite far-reaching powers to impose new conditions on the approval of applying for new licences.So most New Zealanders will have not known about or have forgotten the way that New Zealand's economy used to operate in the 1950s 1960s 1970s and up until the time of the reforms of the fourth Labour Government. But it was a licensed economy where just about everything that you did you couldn't just do. You couldn't just set up a trucking business and go out and compete find customers and steal customers of other providers if they weren't doing a good enough job by offering a better service lower rates or just an all-round more useful offering. You couldn't just go and open a business. What you had to do was you had to go along hand in glove to the Government and ask them for a licence to operate. And the Government would say Well sorry Mr so-and-so there are too many providers doing this already and no you can't". Or they might say "Well OK yes. We'll let you do it under these conditions." And it was a terrible system because all it did was protect the incumbents and if you had a licence you literally had a licence to print money because the opposition would be kept out.Right throughout the whole economy New Zealand was operated in this way. It was a feudal system that if you had the licence in a particular area whether it was driving trucks or whether it was selling tennis racquets or whatever—whatever different element of the economy was licensed in this way. And it was a kind of dirty deal against consumers because the consumers the people who actually bought the stuff were the ones paying the very high prices. At that point New Zealanders were paying extremely high prices for all sorts of goods and getting relatively low-quality goods whether it was washing machines stoves or TVs—you name it it was all divided up into licences.That is what this Government is doing to the early education sector. They seem to have forgotten all the lessons about the problems that it leads to and are reintroducing this principle into the early education sector where the Government and the Minister advised by officials will say "Oh well actually no we think there are enough providers in this particular neighbourhood; you can't open up a new business." which is just great for the incumbents not so good for the consumers. In their wisdom the Government seems to think they know better. And then it creates an enormous amount of uncertainty because once a licence is provided in this legislation the Minister may at any time impose new conditions on the approval.So just imagine you've decided to set up a new early education provider in a community you've got your licence because thank goodness the Minister has decided that you deserve it and there is enough room. And so you go "OK good. I'm going to start. I'm going to invest a million dollars setting this up in order to provide a good offering to the community." And then halfway through "I've got all these loans I've figured it out it's going to work you know it's quite a complex exercise—I've figured it all out." And then halfway through the Minister may impose new conditions. He might say that you need to do "x" "y" or "z". What an impossible situation. Willie Jackson wouldn't put up with that in any way shape or form in many of his operations—there's no way he'd put up with it. They may amend or revoke any existing conditions. They might say "No you can't do it this way. We're going to do it this way." And what a hopeless position to be in.It creates uncertainty. Anybody that understands the way the world works will know that you don't get investment if there is uncertainty—a huge amount of uncertainty. Well you get less investment where there is uncertainty—a whole lot of things that you can't control. You can't control unfortunately the rampant inflation that we're having to deal with as a country. Governments can have an influence over that by the way that they spend and the quality that they spend and the quality of the monetary policy and all those sorts of things. But one thing you can control is Government regulatory risk. And what's being introduced here is greater regulatory risk because explicitly the Minister may at any time impose new conditions or amend or remove existing conditions. And so that naturally will frighten a lot of people off and make them less likely to invest.I'm looking at some notes here by my very learned colleague Erica Stanford on this topic and she's written "killer"—killer—in the line. And the killer is it's a killer of investment. Because under those conditions who is going to take the risk? No one of course. Who will lend to a business when there are such arbitrary—arbitrary—rules there that the Minister can impose? The Minister can change in an arbitrary manner the conditions on approval. The sector have pointed this all out at length during the select committee process. Has the Government listened? No not at all.The bill also—and we talked about this briefly yesterday in the Education and Workforce Committee phase—talks about the curriculum approvals in the polytech and the tertiary space. The point that we made there of course was you know this is a sector that has been fouled up by this Government with the review and the centralisation of the whole polytechs some of which were not working well some of which were doing very well. Now they've all been combined and the projected deficit is $112 million for this year—it will be worse. And then they've brought a new curriculum such as for the nurses—these same nurses that the Minister of Health says speak with a forked tongue which was insulting and has irritated them to no end. Those same nurses pointed out that the curriculum development—they hadn't been consulted properly and Te Pūkenga–New Zealand Institute of Skills and Technology has withdrawn it so far. So it doesn't fill us with a great deal of confidence in the way that this is operating.So this legislation is a missed opportunity to reverse some of those changes. But what it does introduce is the ability for the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to deal with some micro-credentials which will make a small step. But I do implore this Government to think twice about both the early childhood education reforms at this late stage and the polytech reforms which so far are not making much progress and certainly not filling us with confidence with the ability of this Government to centralise in—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The member's time has expired. Thank you."