Willis NicolaNICOLA WILLIS (National): I rise to speak on the Education Amendment Bill in this committee stage. I want to acknowledge the Minister of Education for addressing us in this committee and I suggest that it would have been nice if he also took the time to address the students in the partnership schools who very much have the view Mr Hipkins that their schools are being closed. The Minister can stand up in Parliament and say that those schools aren't being closed but I have sat down with the students of Vanguard Military School and I have sat down with Nick Hyde the leader of that school and his very clear view is that the school that he established to transform the lives of young people at that school has been irrevocably changed by this Government. It will no longer remain in its current form and the magic that allowed it to do great things for dozens of young people may well have been destroyed completely by the flexibility that is being taken away by this legislation and by the legislation that preceded it. So let us be very clear today about what is happening. Now I want in this contribution to first talk about the bit of the mishmash of amendments that we have in this bill. Of course what happened for the Education and Workforce Committee of which I am a member was that we had one amendment bill come that we received submissions on in good faith and that we considered and then we had the Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs) land. The SOPs in fact established this entire section relating to how partnership schools should treat their employees as they move to becoming designated character schools. Did the partnership schools who would be affected by those clauses have the opportunity to present to the committee and show their views on what impact they would have? No they didn't and that is relevant. I want to thank and call out and acknowledge Mark Patterson from New Zealand First who joined National members of the committee—Hon Tracey Martin: No not quite right.NICOLA WILLIS: —in writing to the Business Committee. That's exactly what happened Tracey Martin. He signed a letter to the Business Committee outlining our shared frustration in the report-back date and the timetable for this bill which meant that caucuses weren't able to properly consider it and which led to a shortened process. I want to thank Mark Patterson because it was a simple matter of what's right and wrong in terms of parliamentary process and we weren't given ample time to consider this bill. I would warn the Minister today that if there are unforeseen consequences with some of the amendments here relating to the way staff are treated then be it on his head because there wasn't ample consideration of them. They were last-minute amendments and there are still real questions to be asked about them. The second point I want to raise is about this whole issue of what this transition to designated character schools means for partnership schools because we have this delightful suggestion that actually they will remain just as they were. I want to draw your attention to the amendment in clause 9A to section 156AA which allows that a designated character school may name a body that has a special affiliation with the school or has responsibility for the different character of the school:". So partnership schools have had taken away their ability to have a governing body of the composition they choose running the school leading the school and deciding who teaches in the school what hours it runs and how funding is used and instead what they're allowed is that a body is allowed to be named that actually just has a special relationship. Somehow the Minister thinks that that sop will be enough to maintain partnership schools in their form and I think that it is beneath him to make such a claim for such a small and meaningless amendment. We also of course in this bill have the question of national standards. Of course the point that the Minister neglected to mention was that there is now no requirement for system-wide reporting on how children are achieving in schools. So while an individual child might get some progress about goodness knows what benchmark—it will depend on which school you're at and which principal is in charge and what teacher is teaching as to what sort of information is conveyed—there is now a very real question that Treasury officials have raised with the Minister and that other officials have raised about how we as a country will track system-wide progress of students from one school to another. The Minister still in this bill hasn't come up with amendments to replace that and that is very disappointing. In further contributions I'm going to discuss a number of SOPs that I have brought to the House that I believe would improve this flawed bill but before I do so I do want to draw attention also to this question of fines for students who make a false statutory declaration in order to gain access to fees-free tertiary education. If there was ever an indication that the fees-free policy was rushed in in an ill-thought-through manner it is this clause that seems to latterly realise that people might actually be prepared to take quite significant steps in order to get free tertiary education that in fact free tertiary education could be worth thousands of thousands of dollars and that the Minister might have an obligation to protect taxpayers from abuse of that. It is disappointing that here we are many months into the application of the fees-free policy and only now is there going to be punishment for people with false statutory declarations. As previous members have raised there is a real question about whether or not a $5000 fine is sufficient. I want to draw your attention for example to the fact that someone going to aviation school might expect to spend up to $18000 in fees in order to get their pilot's licence. Well weigh that up against a $5000 fee and you might find that the incentives for people to make false statutory declarations remain despite this amendment. But most importantly I'm interested in where this amendment came from because we never had it addressed at select committee why this hadn't been raised in earlier legislation and why it hadn't come up earlier. So my specific question to the Minister is: does he have any concerns right now that there are students who have made false statutory declarations in order to get fees-free tertiary education? If the answer to that question is yes then New Zealand taxpayers deserve to know because that is a gross abuse of public money. It is not something that should be countenanced and it is something that we should have public knowledge of. Of course the Minister could have taken the opportunity in this bill to make other amendments to the fees-free policy. I make a regular practice of engaging with students in Wellington. Last night in fact I attended a pot-luck dinner with a number of students at Victoria University of Wellington and the subject of fees-free tertiary education—as it does—came up. What these students said to me was "We just can't understand why you would get it in first year when everyone knows that's the year when half of the people drop out. Really if the Government wanted to help people out why wouldn't they be helping out the people who make it to the very end who study hard and pass their courses? Why wouldn't the Government help the people out who are actually from the homes that didn't have the financial or material support? Why wouldn't the Government help out the students who attend schools and have had teaching and circumstances that mean they don't even have the grades to attend university?" Those questions were asked by the students. I looked them in the eyes and I said "Those are good questions. You need to put them to the Minister." But instead of debating those sorts of issues in the House today we are debating the Education Amendment Bill and it is in summary a bill that seeks to remove good progress in terms of the national standards sections and the partnership schools sections. It then puts in the requirements around statutory declarations for fees-free tertiary education and then of course there are the issues relating to council composition. I want to draw the committee's attention to the fact that at the select committee we had wānanga submit to us saying that they felt that the provisions around council composition were inappropriate for them particularly because they didn't want to have to have requirements around staff and student representatives because it was very important that they had iwi representation and tikanga-competent people. Those views were heard and there have been subsequent amendments to the bill. But what wasn't responded to in a similar fashion were the concerns from Māori leaders who came forward and said "We have grave concerns that there are sections of this bill that represent a Treaty of Waitangi breach." A question for the Minister today I have is: what consideration has he given to the potential that this bill re-entrenches a Treaty of Waitangi breach? What consideration has he given or what advice has he received about the potential Treaty of Waitangi implications of this piece of legislation? If he has had that advice we in this House deserve to know and members opposite deserve to know before they put their votes to it. Finally before I sit down—but I will rise again to speak on my SOPs—I want to just say to Chlöe Swarbrick if you're prepared to listen to 900 people submitting from the Tertiary Education Union what about the more than 1000 students at the partnership schools who have spoken very clearly—[Time expired]"