Hughes Gareth: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHughes Gareth: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading[Sitting date: 25 November 2014. Volume:702;Page:828. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GARETH HUGHES (Green):Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I rise to take a call on this bill the Education Amendment Bill (No 2). The Green Party is absolutely opposed to this flawed piece of legislation in front of this House. The Green Party stands for good educational outcomes good representation when it comes to those councils and good outcomes for our kids. What we want to see is students going forward with the best education system in the world and I do not believe any Government member can say that this is going to be the outcome of this flawed ideological bill which simply tries to express the Minister’s ideological ideas when it comes to education and tertiary education.This bill which is quite large should actually be four bills given the scale of reform that has been crammed into it. You have got the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand reforms the biggest attacks on the governance of tertiary institutions since the Education (Polytechnics) Amendment Act in 2009 and a raft of new provisions around international education and quality assurance. This bill is not only enormous in size; it is also enormously unpopular. We heard from Catherine Delahunty who spoke about the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand part of the bill and said that the Education and Science Committee saw 1037 written submissions. Of these 1032 were opposed. Only five—only five—actually supported the bill and you saw exactly the same with the university council changes.For anyone who has just tuned into the broadcast the status quo is that our universities have a number of guaranteed seats on their university councils—the supreme governance body. They comprise around 12 to 20 members. They undertake a number of roles. There are a number of guaranteed representatives such as one to three members of the academic staff one to three members of the general staff one to three students etc. What this bill does by providing ministerial appointments is massively reduce the university council size and that is why the Green Party is opposed to this part of the bill which I am going to speak on.What we see is further tangible evidence of the Minister for Tertiary Education Skills and Employment’s invasive meddling in our university sector. This is a Minister who used to talk about nanny State but he is quite happy to take a nanny State approach to our universities from determining who is on the council to how many people will be there and what will happen with the student levies. He is a Minister who has a got a hands-on approach invading our independent universities. We see the removal of representation for the most significant university stakeholder. That is students. The Minister wants to see more corporate board members on our councils. I want to see students on the councils—the stakeholders or the “customers” in the National parlance. They are the people who really count and whom the whole education system is for. The bill confuses management and governance and conflates the shrinking size of that with efficiency outcomes. What we are going to see is lessened autonomy brought about by this bill and that is exactly what all those more than 1000 submitters raised concerns about—protecting the institutional autonomy. This relates to our international rankings. This is one of the measures with our international university comparative rankings—the relative autonomy of the institutions. They are concerned about protection of universities as critics and the conscience of society and the retention of staff and student voices.The fact is that this is a bill with absolutely no solid evidence. You only have to look at page 1—literally page 1—of the regulatory impact assessment which talks about the significant risks with proceeding: that students and staff may feel particularly disenfranchised and that the costs may erode the benefits. This is just on page 1 of the regulatory impact assessment. We only have to look at what happened with the institutes of technology and polytechnics sector. There you could argue that there was some poor financial management and some challenges in that sector. There was a case for action potentially. There has been no evidence and no case brought for this bill. In fact when you look at all the challenges facing the sector in the regulatory impact assessment—from strategic investments the impact of massive open online courses competition for students—I think this is exactly the type of challenge that we should have students on the councils for to provide their voice and their say.What this bill is simply doing is providing a ministerial overview and more invasive meddling in our university sector just like the levy. When we look at the track record of the Minister for Tertiary Education Skills and Employment we see in the appointments that Minister Joyce has made that only five out of 30 have been women only one out of 30 have been Māori none out of 30 appointments have been Pasifika and two-thirds have been chief executive officers or company directors. What we see is more corporate takeovers of our university sector. I want to stand up for a student voice a staff voice and good educational outcomes.