Delahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Reading[Sitting date: 10 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1423. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Deputy Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. In my first speech of the year I would just like to mihi to Ngati Porou whanau hapū and iwi and acknowledge their loss of their rangatira Apirana Mahuika. Moe mai e rangatira.Ostensibly this bill is about tidying up the governance of universities and making the Teachers Council into a more effective body although how this is achieved by changing the names confusing the functions cutting the representation and annoying enormous numbers of teachers and education professionals is anybody’s guess. In 6 years of being on the Education and Science Committee I have never seen so much unity and solidarity from all parts of the tertiary education sector against this bill and so little of even an attempt by the Government to explain why it is needed. A great idea is that a bill should have a reason. If the Government is going to gut the governance structures of universities it should at least have the intestinal fortitude to explain why this is necessary.Virtually no academic or student who came before the select committee said “Thank you Government. What a fantastic idea.” Au contraire—when the main supporters of the bill who appear at the select committee are the Gloriavale fundamentalist Christian school from a closed community who discourage university education on the grounds that it might give people ideas my guess is that it is time for the Government to stop and ask itself why this bill was drafted. My guess is that Steven Joyce thought he had a great idea as he often does and thought it would make university governance more business-like so let us cut the numbers. That was all the evidence he needed in order to do this to university councils. My colleague Gareth Hughes will speak more about that later. However the 1525 submitters told the Government it was wrong.So what does the bill say now? Did the Government hear those submissions? There was one modification to the bill around the teachers’ right to have a maximum not a minimum set on their own council. That is the only change we managed to achieve after all of those submissions. So I would say that the score to the Government is ideology one; listening skills nil.The changes to the Teachers Council itself are fraught with contradiction. On the one hand the Government says it is tightening things up to make sure that teachers are properly registered which is a good idea. We all support that. We all think that the proper registration of teachers is critical. On the other hand the Government is expanding the way in which the limited authority to teach can be applied which will facilitate more unregistered teachers. So we are so worried about the risk to children except when we are not. Having it both ways does not actually work. Maybe I have digressed into the absurd idea that the Government should have some consistency in education policy.I listened very carefully to the Minister of Education’s third reading speech. She talked about things like constantly raising—I am quoting—the quality of leadership setting standards and raising the status of the profession. I am fascinated by what this rhetoric means because it was not clear in the bill and we could not get answers to our questions about it. The Minister said there were 3 years of consultation to create this confusing piece of legislation. I do not know who was talked to in the 3 years but I do know that 90 percent of 1525 submitters were extremely unhappy when they came before the select committee. Perhaps the consultation was an example of my father’s very special definition of the word “consultation”—being a cross between a con and an insult. Either way it did not build a constituency in the education sector that was prepared to come to that select committee and show any support whatsoever whether they were from the tertiary or the compulsory sector.The other aspects of the Teachers Council changes include confusing their function with a new broad undefined role and changing the code of ethics to a code of conduct and that has been a very controversial issue. It is designed either to insult the profession or to attempt more control. Let us hope it is not about controlling teachers in terms of their voice. We have had enough Eleanor Catton intellectual-bashing in this country lately and it is really important that we show some respect for teachers and their right to their intellectualism.This bill gives us a low-trust model and it is very very concerning when the code of ethics is replaced with a code of conduct. The Minister actually referred in her speech to the code of conduct being different from the code of ethics because there would be consequences if you did not meet the conduct standards. She said this part of the bill was inspired by a famous sex-offender case in schools and I think she is referring to a case where the person basically lied their way into the classroom and was not caught even though they faked their name and also hid their history. I am not sure that any code of conduct or code of ethics would stop someone who is prepared to go that far to fake their name and to have so little ethics. I am not sure that a piece of paper called a code of conduct is going to intimidate them into responsible behaviour. It certainly is not even going to catch them. The consequence for this kind of offending against children is not a slap on the wrist with a code of conduct; it is getting arrested and so it should be. So what are we trying to control by getting rid of the ethics concept and turning it into a code of conduct?Returning to the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand (EDUCANZ)function the Government took out the word “teacher”. Although the Minister has been at great pains to say they want to raise the status of the teaching profession the word “teacher” is no longer in the title. I am all for the “Aotearoa” bit. It is overdue that we acknowledge we are in Aotearoa but what is actually wrong with the word “teacher”? Let us see who pays for this body. This body is paid for out of the fees of teachers. So if they want a user-pays system then the Government should at least listen to the users who are going to pay. How quaint is that?The Minister said today that the board’s role was to set consistently high standards and continuous improvement—to what? Why? What is the Education Review Office’s role for? What are they going to do that the Education Review Office and the other agencies that were described by other speakers going to do? The Minister said something about undertaking contracts. What kinds of contracts? For whom? Is EDUCANZ paid for out of the teachers’ fees going to be contracting out and for what purpose? We never got answers on any of this.We had a weird fight in the select committee about how many members of the Teachers Council in the new EDUCANZ would be from the education profession because originally the draft said there would be a maximum number of teachers with practising certificates. The Government said this was a mistake in the original drafting but cynically some of us thought it did it on purpose to draw the heat and then look as if it was listening by amending the draft. Fancy me being that cynical—it is hard to believe is it not? Would any Government do that with a piece of legislation? But actually either that or it is incredibly bad at drafting laws. Which is it? No one really believes the Government.The issue of appointment and not election—again if the piper is paying for the organisation and if the teachers are the pipers should they not be the electors rather than the Minister? If the Minister believes that the status of the profession should be raised she should trust the profession and build teachers’ status by allowing them to have responsibility for their own professional body. It is actually that simple.The moderation clause is also frustrating. Ten percent of the registrations will be audited annually through a paper-based appraisal. I think this was well covered by the previous speaker from the Labour Party because he was a teacher and he knew exactly why it was not going to work. Excellent work. Kelvin Davis made a really clear case—“actually listen to teachers”. He was like the many who came. So that one is not going to work either.So my message—not to the Government because I have given up trying to give them messages but my message to the education professionals here trying to do their best for the students of this country on every level whether it is tertiary or compulsory—is simple and it is in Latin. I did not do Latin at school but I think this fits: nil carborundum. Now I did not really know what nil carborundum is so I had to look it up and I always thought that “NilsCarborundum” was a 1970s Norwegian punk folk singer with stringy long blond hair. But it turns out that “Nils” is not that character. It turns out that what it means—and I am quoting—is: “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”So I urge the teachers and the university staff and the governors: do not be ground down keep standing the ground for education and its vital role as critic and conscience of society and be the professionals who put children first. We need to raise the status of teaching we need to protect our kids from people who are abusing the system or at the very least being boring because that is one of the worst faults of teachers. However this is about leadership in the schools. This is not about changing the law in a way that insults the profession at every level.Sonil carborundum people. We actually have to keep standing up for what is important. The Government can grind away with its ideology but most people who enter education are motivated by a higher mission and a higher purpose and that higher mission is actually about children getting the best they can from the system. It is not a business folks. Steven Joyce is living on “Planet Steven” but it is not a business. It is about education and it is about a bill that fails to make it better. Kia ora tātou. We oppose the bill.