Hipkins Chris; Dean JacquiEDUCATION AND TRAINING AMENDMENT BILLFirst ReadingHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): I move That the Education and Training Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Education and Workforce Committee to consider the bill.The Education and Training Act came into force on 1 August last year. It was quite possibly the largest rewrite of our education legislation that we've ever undertaken. Even the very very large rewrite of education rules in 1989 still left some legislation in the old 1964 Act untouched. It was about time I think that we brought our education and training framework all together as one. So this Act replaced what was the Industry Training Act what was the Education Act 1989 what was the Education Act 1964. It was an incredibly big undertaking. In addition to streamlining the legislation in a policy-neutral sense it almost made quite a number of policy changes as well.This particular bill primarily deals with issues that weren't policy changes but there were the inevitable tidying-up things that emerge when you do such a big piece of legislative change. I do intend to bring forward another amendment bill later on in the year that deals with other policy issues where either we want to make further policy change or where we want to do other things. However I've tried to keep this bill relatively technical so it tidies up things that were unintentionally changed in the way the various pieces of legislation were drawn together and it also tidies up some areas of ambiguity. I will just talk through one of the biggest things that this bill does. With the amalgamation of the education legislation one of the things that became apparent to me was that there was a lot of very prescriptive legislation around the way schools and early childhood services and tertiary providers have to operate that was more appropriately transferred to regulation. To give an example the Act itself specified how school board meetings needed to take place. If you wanted to do a teleconference or a Zoom meeting for example you couldn't do it because the primary legislation was that specific around how school board meetings had to be conducted; with similarly prescriptive requirements around a school board election as to when things had to be posted. Of course we don't tend to use postal quite so much these days and it didn't allow for the potential of online voting which is regularly used in a whole lot of other forums. It didn't allow for a variety of other things.So we tried to move parts of the legislation that needed to be amended more frequently and to be a bit more flexible into schedules that could then ultimately be incorporated in regulation. As we've gone through that process of starting to develop and prepare those new regulations—and the Education and Training Act has those schedules eventually being repealed automatically once the new regulations were put in place—it's become apparent that there are still some things in there that are actually better positioned in primary legislation that Government shouldn't have the ability to amend through regulation without coming back to the House to talk about. For example Schedule 20 includes some provisions that impact on the general right of students to enrol in any State school. Those provisions should more appropriately be in primary legislation rather than in secondary regulation. So this bill makes those changes.Schedule 23 includes provisions about the ineligibility and disqualification of people from being school board of trustee members. Also I think there is a need to have some more flexibility around how we do school board elections and so on and that more appropriately sits in a regulatory setting. Something as fundamental as who's allowed to be on the board should still sit in the primary legislation. So this bill deals with that.Schedule 24 sets out key provisions regarding national student numbers like their purpose and use. National student numbers provisions were due to be repealed on 1 January 2022 and we want to make sure that they are still incorporated there. So that's why we're trying to push this bill through the House this year to make sure that we don't end up repealing things that we've subsequently looked at and decided need to still be in the primary legislation. There are some further changes around aligning the Children's Act 2014 passed by the last National Government with the Education and Training Act when it comes to issues around police vetting of those working in an early childhood setting. What's become clear is that there is some inconsistency and ambiguity there around what vetting requirements are needed for those wider early childhood workforces. So there are some further changes here just to make sure that that is all very very clear. It's in keeping with the principle I think of the reforms of the Children's Act 2014 passed by the last Government. We should have a very low-risk tolerance when it comes to people who are working in those settings with children. So the changes in this bill more closely align with that. The bill makes a number of minor and technical changes. It amends section 171 of the Act which relates to the thresholds for interventions in State schools so that it replicates the provisions of the 1989 Act. There were some changes there that inadvertently changed those thresholds. That was not intended. This fixes that up. It extends the transitional provisions around tertiary education providers that prevent them from charging a compulsory student services fee to those who are doing on-job training for a further year as we continue to work through a more integrated funding system as we're bringing together on-the-job and off-the-job training. The bill clarifies the early childhood education regulation-making power in the Act and it ensures that the regulations can be made to cover applications for approval to apply for an early childhood education service licence. It's a new process provided by the Act but it's not yet come into force. Regulations will be required to operationalise the process and the bill clarifies some of those. So I don't think this bill is going to set the world on fire. It is a relatively technical and I would hope a reasonably non-controversial bill compared to some of the other education legislation we deal with. I can assure members of the House that there'll be plenty of opportunity to debate some more exciting education issues later in the year when we do bring forward some further policy changes. Now this particular bill really isn't designed to make any further policy changes. It's largely a tidying-up bill.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The question is that the motion be agreed to.