Hipkins ChrisCHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): Yes I am Mr Chair. My apologies—my colleague Tracey Martin sat down a little bit sooner than I was anticipating and I do want to make a few brief contributions on Part 2 of this bill because these are all provisions that the Labour Party members will be supporting.I want to however just canvass a couple of things. One is that Part 2 of this bill amends a number of separate Acts and I am concerned that in the way the bill is drafted these provisions have not received the scrutiny that they adequately deserve. The traditional convention in the House is that when an omnibus bill which amends a number of different Acts is prepared the different Acts are different parts of the bill so that they can actually be scrutinised appropriately by Parliament. What has happened in the case of this bill is that we have had one part that amends the Education Act and then a sort of also-ran part that basically deals with a whole lot of other legislation relating to education administration even if it is in no way connected to Part 1.The Standing Orders Committee of Parliament specifically ruled out this practice in 1995 when it required that the Government cease to introduce what I believe were called—I cannot remember the exact title—something along the lines of legislation amendment bills" which basically allowed the Government to insert amendments to any different legislation it wanted into a single bill and push it through the House. The Standing Orders Committee was quite clear that there had to be a clear unifying policy purpose to connect all of the amendments that were put into the bill. The Government has adopted as its policy purpose for this bill the updating and modernising of education legislation. Well that is not actually really a policy purpose and therefore all of the amendments contained in this part are not in any way connected and so should not be drafted in the bill in the way that they are.I want to put on record my concern that this bill has got all the way through the House to this point without there being adequate scrutiny of the way it has been drafted because it certainly does not comply with the spirit and intent of the Standing Orders Committee's report in 1995 and it is certainly outside of the usual conventions of the House in the way that bills should be prepared.However having said all that I want to turn to some of the specific content of the bill and just make a few very brief comments. It did strike me when I was reading the bill that some of these changes are long overdue and perhaps reflect how far we have come both as a House and as a country in that some of the somewhat antiquated terminology is now being replaced. If we look at the Ngarimu VC and 28th (Maori) Battalion Memorial Scholarship Fund Act and turn to the second clause in regard to this clause 37 we are replacing the phrase "the Maoris" with "Māori". I know that this might seem a small thing but you can just imagine what was being said when they were debating this in the first place. The attitude would have been vastly different from the one that we have today.I actually think it is quite a positive sign that we are updating this because the vast majority of members in the House would not have been Māori members when this was first debated and dare I say it there probably was some semblance of attitude that the Māori were the people over there who needed to be contained and dealt with. I think it is fantastic that Parliament has actually embraced the Māori heritage of New Zealand and is now modernising the legislation that is relevant in this area. I want to fully support this particular provision which I think is a much more appropriate way of talking about Māori New Zealanders than the previous definition in the Act.There are other provisions. There is a provision that relates to the Minister of Education being able to delegate their power around supplementary agreements with integrated schools. I would normally get into that in much greater detail but the very next bill that Parliament will be debating around education actually changes all of the legislative provisions around integrated schools in the sense that they are being brought into to the Education Act as a whole so there will be adequate and ample time to canvass issues around integrated schools when we come to debate that next bill that will be coming up.The Labour Party certainly supports all of the amendments in Part 2. They are updating legislation that has become out of date. We are certainly looking forward—oh actually I have just spotted some that we probably do not agree with which are the amendments to the State Sector Act. But by and large the rest of the amendments with the exception of the amendments to the State Sector Act are ones that the Labour Party will be supporting."