Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Oh well thank you very much Madam Chair for a call to speak on what I consider to be an extremely important bill—an extremely important bill for a number of reasons. Can I just say one of them is that it reveals the priorities of a Government. Madam Chair you ruled quite rightly earlier in accordance with Kieran McAnulty who like a good young new member has been reading not only the Standing Orders but the Speakers' rulings to establish that it is wrong to say that an outside force is coercing any person in this Parliament or any Government to do anything. But I'd put it to you Madam Chair that this Government didn't require an outside force to make sure that its first legislative act in education was nothing to do with kids nothing to do with standards nothing to do with achievement nothing to do with engagement and everything to do with teacher politics. They don't need to be influenced by it from the outside because it is them—they are so tightly intertwined that no corrupt influence was required whatsoever.But I also want to draw your attention and perhaps get a response from the Minister in the chair Chris Hipkins on one of the new sections in this bill that's come back from the committee section 380(3) and 380(4). What that section tells us is that the elections must be held in accordance with rules made under section 388." Now presumably the Minister knows what those rules are. Presumably he will have to make new rules after this amendment passes because if you go on to new section 380(4) it then says "However—(a) elections must be held … 4 months before members take office; and (b) the Teaching Council must provide confirmation of the election results to the Minister at least 3 months before [the] members take office." That means that the Minister if I'm reading this correctly—and I hope he can tell me I'm wrong about this—has a three-month window where he knows how the registered teachers have voted and he has six more votes that he can put on to the council. Some might say he would be tempted to use that for political purposes to stack the committee and frustrate the purpose of the electors in electing a certain group of people.So the electors might have a particular beef a particular gripe with the operation of the council and they might seek to elect candidates who promise to work in a particular way who promise to fix whatever that problem is that the electors—the registered teachers that is—had with the operation of the council. They might manage to elect say I don't know five out of seven maybe six out of seven that they're allowed to elect on to the council and believe that they had given a democratic mandate for their particular beef or gripe to be fixed under this legislation. How wrong they would be when they discovered that actually the Minister of the day—and it'd behove these people in the sector to remember that the Minister is not always quite as friendly as the ones that they've got used to—might then decide to frustrate their democratic intent by stacking the committee against them in order to frustrate their intentions to give a democratic mandate to a group of elected representatives to achieve an objective for them.I put it to you that if that's really what the Minister intends—and again I hope he can stand up in a second and tell me I've got this all terribly wrong—then that's actually worse than simply dictating who gets to be on the council. That is worse than telling people that they have no real power because they don't. It is dishonest to tell them that they have power and yet they do not have it at all. It's dishonest and it's a lie to the people who think that they are benefiting from this bill and I put it to the people who are behind it that they may well have been hoodwinked by this Minister and they will be dominated in ways that they won't imagine by future Ministers.You can only imagine the corollary if such an act was to play out in this Parliament if there was some higher power—[Time expired]"