Lee DeniseDENISE LEE (National—Maungakiekie): Tēnā koe e Te Mana Whakawā. I'd like to acknowledge New Zealand Sign Language Week and the fantastic effort by my colleague Dr Shane Reti in his signing earlier this afternoon. There are a number of us MPs in Te Reo classes so perhaps we can expand that to signing classes as well. It would be a fantastic idea.Hon Member: Kia ora.DENISE LEE: Kia ora to you too.This particular bill—I've had the disappointment to speak on it a couple of times this week. And here we go on the third reading. The disappointment is because it's quite simply a crude dismantling of previous National Party reforms—that's straight out what it's about. What we see here from the Government is not even a veiled attempt to try to mask the raw ideological grabs at important educational institutions and to go ahead with a messy what I'd call hodgepodge of random ideas that are ideologically driven and based—almost obsessively so. So what we've got here is a straight out reduction—and this is the biggest irony of the bill—of the independence of the Teaching Council. I'll say a little bit more about that later as to why that's so ironic. They are deliberately burdening private schools. Many have asked why; what is the reason behind that? It's a little unclear but none the less a deliberate burdening of private schools.Annoying and confusing parents as to when their kids can start school—that's a deliberate move. To try to explain that away in other ways—it's not happening. It hasn't been convincing. This will confuse parents and quite frankly annoy them.Finally scrapping communities of online learning. Now during the committee process for which I was involved this probably didn't make up so much of the debate as other members in regards to the independence of the Teaching Council did. But the passage of the bill's debate this week has really kicked up some interesting stuff for communities of online learning. What we've seen is that the communities of online learning providers such as the Virtual Learning Network (VLN) didn't have the conversation before this has happened to them. That's of real concern. Furthermore when you look into what they're asking for and look at their submissions what they're asking for is incredibly reasonable. They just want clarity. They had a direction for where they were going under our Government. Now there's no direction at all. The direction that they have been given—which is a non-direction—is because we're told that we need to wait for the context of all the current reforms that are happening in education. Well if you look at those current reforms it's a massive list.We've got Tomorrow's Schools review. We've had the scrapping of national standards. We've got cancelling of charter schools and rushing into the questioning of NCEA. We've even had—maybe not on the massive big top of the list but we had it none the less—a very botched failed attempt at banning music and dance teachers from calling themselves teachers. There's been a raft of educational reforms and attempts at reform.So in that context the Government is asking the communities of online learning providers to chill out wait wait and wait and see what happens. The Minister of Education himself in the chair during the committee stage admitted that work needs to be done on this. Well that's not good enough. That's not good enough for providers and it's definitely not good enough that in the context of debate again this week we had a very flippant attitude from Ministers sitting across the Chamber right now and other MPs in regards to both communities of online learning and the work that they do—phrases such as throwing kids before computers" and "putting them on screen times" and "five-year-olds on screens". We even had VLN say in their submission "It's very disturbing to hear Ministers debating this bill in parliament talking about Mathletics Reading Eggs or Khan Academy. These are web based software platforms and applications …". They are not online learning which providers like VLN provide.So you've got a flippant attitude which denotes that this Government has driven obsessively on to a hodgepodge of ideologically driven reforms. We don't agree with it we stand against it we stand for providers who want certainty and we also stand for parents who want choice as to when their kids start school. We oppose this bill."