Simmonds PennyPENNY SIMMONDS (National—Invercargill): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise to speak in opposition to the Education and Training (Teaching Council Fees Levies and Costs) Amendment Bill. I first heard about this during the election campaign last year and my colleague across the way Dr Liz Craig and I were at a teachers' forum and this was brought up and that was the first I had heard about it but I've certainly heard plenty since then. I'm interested that the member who has just sat down Ibrahim Omer feels that the 1033 submitters to this amendment have had everything they said heard and responded to because that's exactly not what I consider happened in this process.So look I've worked with teachers for the last two decades and more and I want to acknowledge the tremendous passion that teachers have for what they do and they have to have this passion because it's a really challenging job that teachers do. I admire enormously even in a normal situation the work that teachers have to get through and over the last two years my goodness they have had to change and adapt. I'm not going to use that dreadful pivot" word but they really have had to change the way that they engage with their students and they have worked incredibly incredibly hard.That passion that our teachers have the Post Primary Teachers' Association (PPTA) took to the High Court. Now you don't take a High Court matter without being really aggrieved with what has gone on. They took this to the High Court and they won on so many different levels. It must be incredibly disheartening for the PPTA now to find that having gone through that process having done all that work having made all these submissions in that very truncated time that they had which was during school time it was during the period where most teachers were teaching in lockdown conditions that essentially they have been ignored. They came out in strength and they have essentially been ignored.Now the teachers had some very valid grievances. As my colleague from the ACT Party Chris Baillie said it's not an insubstantial amount to change from a three-yearly fee of $220 to an annual fee of $157 and to have to go through that registration process. Now I used to sign off registrations for our early childhood education teachers at the Southern Institute of Technology and it's not just a five-minute job for those teachers having to go through that process. So to have to do that every year and then pay more money for the pleasure of doing that extra admin when they have not been consulted with and then legislation is brought into this House and they are again not consulted with adequately and their concerns have not been heard is giving one almighty message from this Labour Government to our teachers and that is: "We will do what we like to you. We will make the changes that we want to and you will suck it up and like it."So teachers will have taken this on board. They will have seen how this Government has reacted in this situation. They will have seen the rewards that they have been given for the extra work that they've put in over the last two years. They will see how this Government intends to treat them when they bring up reasonable grievances and it is not well the treatment they are receiving. It is very very bad treatment of genuine grievances and they should have been treated more respectfully.Now look the Teaching Council does some really important work. It regulates the profession. It deals with disciplinary matters. It deals with the certification and registration of teachers. So these things are really important. But the Teaching Council started to stray from the mandate that the teachers had given them. And we heard through a number of the submissions that the teachers wanted their professional development to be subject-specific and they wanted it to be through the networks of their discipline areas across New Zealand. They did not see this as a role for the Teaching Council and they asked that the Teaching Council take that from what they intended to do and adjust their budget accordingly and actually live within their budget like every other individual and business has to do. When your income is a certain amount you make sure your expenditure meets that same amount or else you very quickly get yourself in trouble.But the Teaching Council weren't prepared to take that message from the teachers. They weren't prepared to trim their budget. They weren't prepared to trim their activities. They instead went to the Minister who rolled over and said "Don't worry. I'll just take a new amendment to the Act." I've given up counting how many amendments this Education Act has had in the short time of a year that I've been here but he has brought an amendment to the Act to thwart the teachers' submissions and thwart the High Court finding.Now that's an extraordinary thing for any Government to do but it's an extraordinary thing for a Labour Government to do to a group of teachers professionals who would have traditionally been seen as supporters of a Labour Government. These teachers know that they are going through a very difficult time. They know that they have got big issues to solve in the education sector at the moment. They know that truancy was a huge issue before COVID and it is going to be a really difficult thing for them to pull back on over the next while. They know that they've got issues around standards of numeracy and literacy.I'm sure our teaching profession wish that the Minister would engage in some of these really difficult things that teachers are dealing with: discipline of children in the classroom class sizes and resources in the classroom. I'm absolutely certain and I see it in the schools that I visit that they are the sort of substantial issues they want this Minister to be engaging with them over.But as I believe the Green Party member Teanau Tuiono spoke about earlier a lot of the trust between the teachers and the Teaching Council and the teachers and the Minister has been eroded through this process. So getting that trust back and enabling those big issues to be debated and ways forward found is going to be an enormous hurdle for those teachers to get over because they will remember for a very very long time that when they took their case to the High Court and they won hands down the Minister stepped in with this legislation and overruled that. They are going to have to overcome that loss of trust when they really need to be looking at the very big-picture issues that our education sector and our young people are going to be suffering under as we try and recover.We have heard nothing from this Government about what they intend to do next year to try and recover because we cannot just have our young people out of the classroom for 10 12 14 weeks and there not be a consequence of it. So we would have expected that our Minister instead of spending time on an amendment like this would be spending time on looking at what measures will have to be taken next year to support our teachers to support our young people to catch up on the learning that they have lost. We oppose this amendment."