Mallard Trevor: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading 
Mallard Trevor: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading 
[Volume:660;Page:15617] 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South) 
: 
 Labour members supported the Education Amendment Bill (No 2) to go to the Education and Science Committee but we will not be supporting it from this point on. There are two major reasons for this. Firstly we became aware that one of the major undertakings given to us by Anne Tolley was incorrect with regard to police checks on people in limited-attendance centres. Secondly she failed to accept an approach to open up the Teachers Council disciplinary hearings and desired to continue to hide those teachers who are abusing children. So we will not be supporting this bill to go forward. 
However I think it would be churlish of me not to congratulate the chair of the select committee Allan Peachey and all the members of the select committee on the contributions that were made there. I think the chair has an ability to haul together a variety of points of view—those of two ACT members and those of National Green and Labour members—and to work as far as is possible with some of our different philosophies for the benefit of young people. I think it is fair to say that we have those differences within parties as well as between parties and there might even be some overlap in some matters. 
Much of this bill is pretty much harmless. As I have indicated to the Minister of Education and to the chair of the select committee I think the whole secondary-tertiary part of this bill is unnecessary. I think it will give us a pile of bureaucracy that we will come to regret later on. It will tie us down in a way that will mean that policy changes and improvements will be hard to make and I regret that the Minister has chosen to take the advice of people who want to have everything possible written into legislation. I think that is a short-sighted approach on her part. It shows a poor understanding of the way both the education system and Parliament work. 
The first and relatively minor point that I will focus on is the change to allow inherited rights to take precedence over local entry to State schools. It is my view that in New Zealand we are an egalitarian society. Some schools have limited places generally because of geography and the way that populations have grown. Schools have good reputations and they have to have enrolment schemes. Labour has always been firmly of the view that the people who live close to the school should have preference and that a zone should be developed. If there are spare places from outside they should be available by way of ballot. There is a method relating to current and former siblings and people work through the matter on that basis. 
The changes made by this bill state that if a child’s parent attended the school the child will get access. That provision is intergenerational so someone could end up having access to a school not because they or their mother or father live or lived in the zone but because their grandparents lived in the zone. That is the idea of inherited rights to entry to State schools while other people are excluded. Let me make this point clear; Allan Peachey understands it well. Zoning in zoned schools applies only when there are a limited number of places and when one person gets in another person does not. That is the way the system works and what we are doing here— 
Hon Sir Roger Douglas 
: It doesn’t have to work that way. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: He is absolutely right. We can build massive schools when they are popular then abandon them later. We can have massive capital investment in areas where schools are popular at a particular point in time and then when they are less popular and the school down the road is more popular we can make massive capital investment there. The member might want the private sector to do that building work and he might want public-private partnerships in order to help his mates but I am for the rationing of capital in schools and for the capital going where it is needed. That is a relatively minor issue and we probably would not vote against the legislation on that issue alone. 
The next point I refer to is the issue of the limited-attendance centres. Those are things like gym or shopping centre early childhood education facilities. We received an assurance from Anne Tolley the Minister of Education that the people who will be leading the centres—not the teachers but the people supervising the children—would be subject to police checks. On that basis we supported the first reading of the legislation. I am not saying that she deliberately misled us. I think that in this case— 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: You can’t say that. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: That has never worried me in the past. In this case I think it was genuine ignorance. I think she did not know. Maybe she was badly advised but now she has been properly advised. She and Government members were asked to change this bill to ensure that someone who might be in an enclosed room with children and could have a long-term criminal record of sexual abuse of children should have a police check. This bill is an early childhood education sex-abuser’s charter because it takes away for the first time the requirement for those people to have a police check. My view is that that is wrong and I look National members in the eye now and ask whether they will be prepared to front up to the families of the first the second and the third child who is abused by someone who was already of interest to the police someone who would have failed a police check if one had been necessary. Members opposite are saying that they want to take that police check away. I just think it is shocking. 
Some other things are important for those centres. One of them is that there should be always be a line of sight. They should be open in their design; they should not be totally enclosed. One of the principles of good education now is that there should be some glass in certain areas to ensure that nothing untoward is happening in the rooms. It is a very good protection for the teachers or the people who are doing the supervision because it can prevent false accusations. Having unregistered people in unlicensed premises without police checks and without a line of sight to where they are working is a recipe for abuse and I think all members of Parliament should be concerned about that. 
The other matter I will focus on is the question of the Teachers Council. I had a meeting with the Minister and she put to me a series of propositions which I agreed with. Most of those propositions came to the select committee. One of them did not and that was her proposal to open up the hearings of the Teachers Council by way of a method similar to a court and to grant suppression orders. At the moment the hearings have to be either open or closed and the current rules do not allow for suppression orders. They could but the only protection is a $1000 fine and that is not good enough. Media could ignore it. They could take that fine and certainly bloggers do all the time. 
I have drafted two amendments. One of them is very simple: it increases the fine from $1000 to $100000 and thereby invites the Teachers Council to rewrite its rules in order to allow for suppression orders. The other takes the approach of Simon Power by using a presumption of openness stating that the hearing should be open but there is room to close it and to suppress the name of the teacher and most important the names of any of the witnesses. I think in particular of child witnesses because I think it would be wrong for child victims of teachers to have their names printed. I want a system where we can identify the offenders but protect the children. There are two amendments which we will get to at the Committee stage and I ask Allan Peachey in particular who understands these matters to read them carefully and talk to his colleagues because this is more important than politics.