Donnelly Brian: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Donnelly Brian: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:622;Page:18074] 
Hon BRIAN DONNELLY (NZ First) 
: 
 This bill traverses such a wide range of areas that one could speak on it for hours but given the particular circumstances I am not too certain my colleagues would be very impressed if I planned to do that. The bill does range over a wide area although most of it is nuts and bolts stuff. New Zealand First will be supporting the bill going to the Education and Science Committee but we will also be guaranteeing that when it reaches that committee there will be very close scrutiny of the issues it traverses. 
I want to take the House back to the days prior to the education reforms when there was a Department of Education education boards and things called brown cards. The brown cards contained the record of attendance of a child for every year and there was a 1 to 5 assessment system based around the normal distribution curves of the school population. The brown cards provided a system that enabled the tracking of students. If a student left a school the brown card was not passed on until a slip was received from the new school saying the child had been enrolled. Then the brown card was sent on. If after a certain amount of time the school did not receive that slip one went to the truancy officers at the education board who would then track the child down. 
When Tomorrow’s Schools came along and the Government got rid of education boards obviously there were no truancy officers any more and no one to employ them so the answer to the problem of “What are we going to do?” was to leave it over to boards of trustees. Well that has to be the stupidest solution to that problem that there could have been because the last thing boards of trustees wanted was to use scarce resources in hunting down those kids who were not in the practice of attending school on a regular basis. They were not the kids that schools necessarily wanted so we ended up with large numbers of students slipping through the cracks. It was a real problem during the 1990s. 
I can tell members that as a principal of an intermediate school I used to hold on to all the cards of the students going on to various secondary schools and wait for those schools to ask for them. The cards were kept in my office. One year I had cards in my office for over 6 months and they still had not been collected. We did not have a clue where the students were whose cards remained there. After a while we thought: “We’ve got all these cards packed up. We don’t know where the students have got to. We will send them to the Ministry of Education.” Do members know what the ministry did? It send them all back to us. That was how good the system was. 
Now the Greens will argue that it is an infringement of human rights to give people a unique identifier. I would suggest to the Greens that it is an infringement of human rights not to provide an education for the young people of this country and that too many of them in fact have been slipping through the cracks. So we believe that this legislation is a move in the right direction. 
The Greens will ask: “Why don’t you just give them a name?” Well I will use another anecdote. I was in Titikaveka in the Cook Islands and over the Christmas break its school changed from what was basically an area school into a college. I did not find out until the day before that that change was going to be made. We even had the infants’ desks still there and we had to start arranging things. But after trying to track down all the cards and who was at the school we ended up with 20 cards that had no kids for those names. But there were 20 kids who did not have cards. They had gone to Takitimu school the year before. Then it dawned on us that the kids had changed their names over the Christmas period which was quite a regular occurrence over there. 
Given the number of Pacific Islanders in our Auckland schools and in New Zealand schools one would assume that that is occurring on a fairly frequent basis here. This legislation will overcome the problems associated with the changing of names which is quite literally what some people do. 
I want to go into another area of genuine concern but I really see the clause in question quite differently from the Hon Bill English. Up in Northland many schools are small isolated schools with only one two or maybe three staff and most of them are staffed by women. The principals of those schools are expressing real concern about one of the things happening—that is people who are tanked up on P are coming to their schools during the daytime over issues relating to kids and the schools are too far away to get any help. I myself have been in a school where a distraught father threatened to shoot me but that was under a very different circumstance. 
I think that we do need to send out fairly strong messages from this House that we will defend our teachers protect them and give them fundamental protections from that sort of behaviour. I can assure members that there is genuine fear amongst many of the staff up in the far north about the sort of bullying behaviour that some parents take in association with the unfortunate increase in the use of P. So we are very happy with section 139C inserted by clause 29. If anything we would like to see section 139C amended upwards so that the penalties are greater than what they are in that provision. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: Oh no. 
Hon BRIAN DONNELLY 
: So we have people over there who do not want any protection for teachers. That is the National Party. It does not want to protect its teachers in rural areas yet it claims that it is a rural party. 
There are some minor changes to the way in which the New Zealand Teachers Council will be able to operate. We have to say at this point in time that the New Zealand Teachers Council has been a real disappointment. It was supposed to do wonderful things and be the professional body for teachers but it has had a very unfortunate history starting off with a very unfortunate appointment to its head position by the Minister of Education. 
We do not believe that the council is doing a wonderful job. We believe that if it could get its work going properly that would be very important. In fact Dr Nick Smith will tell members that the National – New Zealand First Government was working along a policy in the same direction. However the actual practicality of that has not been good. 
Certainly the changes that are reflected in the bill will enable the council to do its job better. There is some tidying up of matters around boards of trustees and annual general meetings. Once again it is sensible stuff in the light of practical experience. When people designed the framework around which boards of trustees operated they were not fully aware of everything that would take place but in the light of experience we can see that it is now necessary to make some changes. 
Another feature of this bill that we see as positive is that it gives the potential at least for the Minister of Education to create some form of bonding around a scholarship system or an upfront reduction of fees for students at tertiary level. We have seen what I believe is a scandal—the increase in fees by the University of Otago for medical students of I think 10 percent on top of its current fees. Neither National nor Labour have treated our would-be medical practitioners very well at all. Medical students are the cream of the bunch; they are taken off the top. They have the longest training programme of virtually anyone and they have such an important public-good function when they come out yet we are lumbering them with huge amounts of debt—debt much higher than that of any other level of students. That really is unforgivable in terms of a society. 
This bill would enable a Minister to inject some common sense into the funding of our medical students by upfronting the reduction of fees on the basis that students are bonded for a certain number of years. Those people who trained in teaching back in the time I trained as a teacher will know the benefits of the bonding system particularly for people from working-class areas as I was. 
I will round off by saying that Bill English raised some very serious concerns about the early childhood sector—concerns that are reflected in this bill. We have to concur with Bill English on those concerns and on what he said. There is a very unfortunate situation occurring where the Minister seems to have been sucked in by one particular teachers’ group and he has built policy all around one particular set of providers who are not necessarily the best providers—or the worst. They are just historically linked with Governments going back to 1948 I think when Peter Fraser first started paying kindergarten teachers. 
Kindergartens have morning and afternoon sessions because the women the philanthropists etc. who first put them in place to look after the children of the poor did not believe that mothers should work. So the early childhood education provider—the service—has those sorts of anachronisms within its structure as the preferred provider. Kindergartens largely teach 4-year-olds and so many of the provisions in the early childhood sector are built around the delivery of education for 4-year-olds. 
I heard about a case last night of a staff person with a degree in relation to a baby in an early childhood centre. The person realised that the baby was hot but when someone said to take its temperature she did not know how to do that even though she had a degree and was being paid at huge rates. I will bet if my teaching of students is anything to go by that that person will know the theories of Karl Marx. Students know the theories of Karl Marx and they get their degrees but they do not know how to use a thermometer or take a baby’s temperature. Unfortunately that is the direction in which the Minister’s policy priorities are taking us so we will certainly be scrutinising that part. 
That is the negative side of this legislation. Other than that we will be supporting it going to a select committee and going through the select committee process.