Woods Megan: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Reading[Sitting date: 10 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1431. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): I would like to acknowledge this House in my first contribution back here this year. It is not with any joy that I am giving the last of my many contributions on this piece of legislation the Education Amendment Bill (No 2) having sat through along with many colleagues literally hundreds of submissions from members of the professions across the teaching profession and across the tertiary sector and hearing from people who are as the Government would no doubt put it the consumers of this product telling us that these were not changes that were wanted. These are fundamental changes to our education system. We have two very different changes weaved together in one piece of legislation. On one hand we have some legislative changes that are going to fundamentally change how it is that our teaching profession is organised in our primary and secondary schools. Then hidden under the cloak of this legislation we are slipping in something that undermines centuries of evolution of how it is that we govern our tertiary institutions and what has evolved across the Western World in terms of how we protect freedom of thought freedom of expression and the rights of academics to be able to pursue those lofty goals.It goes without saying that Labour does not support this legislation. We have opposed this legislation consistently throughout because it is bad legislation. This is not legislation that has identified a problem and sought to create a solution. It is in fact the latest in a line of terrible education decisions by this Government. Labour believes in delivering a world-class education system for our children; National believes in fiddling with the bureaucracy. We have seen that across a range of education measures over the last couple of terms. Under National we have seen literally a litany of failed initiatives in this area and a decline in our international rankings. This is from a Government that is unable to even pay its teachers. This is a Government that has mucked up education to this extent. This is not something we take any joy from because when we heard the state of the nation speeches from our respective leaders a few weeks ago the lines were very clearly drawn. For Labour it is about jobs and it is about making sure that we have people equipped with the requisite skills and education to take those jobs. In order to be able to achieve that we cannot bungle our education system in the way that this Government has. This is a Government that is hell-bent on destroying the education sector for whatever reason that it has. National members need to wake up and realise that their vision for education is not that of New Zealanders.Let us take some of the changes in the secondary area that the Government is proposing in this legislation. At present schools have a great amount of flexibility in order to get people who are not qualified and are not registered where they need to fill gaps. This is called the limited authority to teach. What we heard from schools and teachers coming in is that actually this is really useful in some areas—itinerant music teachers being the primary place where this limited authority to teach is used. What happens at the moment before we pass this bad piece of legislation is that if a school has a gap and it cannot hire a teacher in that area it applies for this limited authority to teach. The limited authority to teach applies to that school and it has the right to bring in someone with expert skills but who lacks a formal teacher qualification and registration. What this bill—this piece of legislation—does is that instead of licensing a school to fill a gap it is going to license individuals to roam the country for 3 years with a limited authority to teach. This is not about schools filling gaps; this is about the Government downgrading the respect for the profession and having people who are neither qualified nor registered teaching our children. I do not want a non-registered or non-qualified doctor treating me if I am ill and I certainly do not want non-qualified and non-registered teachers teaching in our schools. This is too important to get wrong.Then we move on to the tertiary education changes that Steven Joyce has slipped in there. He told us that it is all about international rankings. It is all about innovation. It is all about the need for flexibility. This is a solution looking for a problem. Other members have talked about the size of councils. Let us go through some of those. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has 72 members. Is that something slipping down the international rankings? Is that an institution—the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—that cannot get innovation right? This is simply not going to deliver what the Minister for Tertiary Education Skills and Employment has claimed he wants it to do. All the while New Zealand universities are slipping down the international rankings.We had academics—the vice-chancellors of all of our universities—come and tell us at the Education and Science Committee that they fear what this will do further for our international reputation. A university’s prime asset is academic freedom and the ability of its academics to be academics and this bill undercuts this. For the Minister to come and say: “It’s OK. I’m not touching section 161.” is simply disingenuous because other measures in this bill subsequent clauses in this bill fundamentally undermine academic freedom. When you have a Minister not only with the power to appoint but also with the power to dismiss which is bad enough and too great a proportion of that university council made up of ministerial appointments you have a Minister who then goes and changes to whom those appointees are accountable. Are they accountable to the institution on whose board they are serving? No. They are accountable to the Minister. This legislation goes far too many steps too far. It is undercutting the very things that we hold dear about our education system: to have our teachers to have our university academics to have our university students represented and having a say in the governance of their institutions.We heard from a number of universities that there were some compromises they were willing to make around the size of their councils. The Government’s suggestion of eight to 12 members was not something that they could work with. They did point out that they were not corporations they were not a business. They needed to run an academic institution and that is a little bit different. That is something that this Government does fail to recognise and understand. Not one vice-chancellor told us that this was going to make their institution better. Not one vice-chancellor told us that this would make them more internationally competitive. Not one vice-chancellor told us that this would increase their ability to innovate and not one vice-chancellor told us that this was going to make the New Zealand education sector better. For me that is good enough. I have come into politics because I want to institute change that will bring about betterment not something that is going to undermine.If we look at some of the other tinkering of Steven Joyce when he tinkered around with the governance of our polytechs if we take Minister Joyce’s own measure of what would be a good measure of whether a polytechnic or an institute of technology is doing well it is profitability. This has all declined since he tinkered with the governance of our polytechnics and reduced the number and moved to this type of governance model for our institutes of technology and polytechnics. So we have no reason to believe that this is going to work in our universities. We have been told consistently by the very people who know and understand who have a huge stake in the game in tertiary education in New Zealand that it is not going to work. We are going to limit academic freedom. We are stifling the student voice. We are stifling the staff voice. And to say that universities can choose to appoint these members to their boards is not good enough. It is our job as legislators in this country to enshrine in the Act that governs how our tertiary education is administered in this country that legislative protection and not just leave it to the whim of an institution that can be downgraded. This legislation is not good legislation. It is not going to improve our education system—whether it be at primary secondary or tertiary level—and we oppose it strongly.