Mallard Trevor: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMallard Trevor: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading[Sitting date: 13 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16702. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South):I want to make a few points. First of all I will respond to the member Simon O’Connor who just sat down. I actually agree that some of the changes that National is making are useful. I think the $359 million is a step in the right direction but one has got to remember that it is well under 1 percent of the salary budget. It is minuscule and actually will not make the changes that National wants.We in the Labour Party will vote against this bill the Education Amendment Bill (No 2). The main reason that I am voting against this bill is as a result of the changes that were made around tertiary education governance. I think that if there had been two bills and this bill addressed only the question of the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand then it could well be amendable and supportable.I think it is fair to say as a former Minister of Education that probably my biggest area of policy failure was the setting up in the initial stages of the New Zealand Teachers Council. It was something where the initial appointment was wrong. Kathie Irwin was not a suitable person to appoint to chair that organisation. I took advice on the matter and I had doubts. The advice came from Liz Gordon and I regret that I took her advice as to Kathie’s suitability because my view was that the Teachers Council probably suffered for a period of about 5 years as a result of the poor governance at the beginning of the process and the poor setting up then.I do want to acknowledge the recent work that Stan Rodger did in tidying up some of it and more recently Kathy Smith and Alison McAlpine. As chairs of the organisation they have done a very good job. I also want to acknowledge the current chief executive who I think has done an excellent job and has almost certainly been the best. Having criticised Kathie Irwin I have to say that my old mate Harvey McQueen did not have the ability to do the necessary detailed work and to set the necessary systems up. Even his recollections of the time of the Lange Government were a relatively poor history.Grant Robertson: He was a poet.Hon TREVOR MALLARD: He was a poet and he had imagination. He had imagination in his writings and I think it is fair to say that he did not have the necessary focus to be the chief executive of an organisation like the Teachers Council and that is sad. I think that as a result of that it did suffer and the vision that I had for it—which was that it would in fact be the organisation that was the main deliverer of professional learning for teachers in New Zealand; that it would contract with the Ministry of Education; and that it would be the organisation that would be of teachers by teachers for teachers and for developing the profession—is something that we have lost by a period of probably about 15 years. That is something that I very much regret. My colleagues will tell other members of the House that it is not that often you get a mea culpa from me but in this particular area I think we did lose something.My view is also that if we had managed to make the transfer of the funding of professional learning to the Teachers Council it would not have been as easy for Anne Tolley to take that $100 million out in the way that she did on an annual basis in the first of those budgets. My view is that that sort of cut—if it was to an organisation that was owned by teachers and contracted to teachers—would have resulted in much louder screams than actually occurred. The screams in 2009 were mainly political. They were not extensive screams.My view is that most parents did not realise that the National Government was cutting the future quality of the education of young people in New Zealand by taking out the funding for the most important thing. The quality of learning in a classroom is very much based on the quality of teaching and the quality of teaching depends on the professional development and the professional support of those teachers. The National Government cut that to ribbons in its first term. I think our kids will suffer for decades to come as a result of those cuts. I am opposed to this bill but I regret that the Minister did not put up the important part of it separately.