Delahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Delahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
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CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Assistant Speaker Roy. Tena koutou. The issues in the Education Amendment Bill have been thoroughly covered in the debate on its previous stages so I will speak on the context and why the Greens are voting against the bill. 
The changes to vetting procedures for people involved in home care and for tradespeople and others working in schools are an effort to make the process less onerous. Underneath that is a need to be fair to adults while protecting children. We have only to look at the track record of some institutions from the churches to some schools to see that children under so-called care and protection are vulnerable and that people have taken the opportunity to exploit them. Thus the Green Party welcomes the measured approach in this bill but also would like to address this deeper question: why are the vulnerable so often attacked by people with greater power? This phenomenon is greater than a few individuals with sick behaviour. In the 1950s these issues had no names but we all knew they happened. These days the issues are named and that is healthy. However some social attitudes towards children and sexuality and power remain incredibly toxic as Internet child pornography has comprehensively demonstrated. This bill is fair enough on these issues and a review of procedures to provide fairness for all is important. We support it. 
In terms of data matching the bill appears to be playing a role of coherent modernisation and we support that as well. However on the matters of corporatisation around statutory managers for failing schools the term “body corporate” and the issue of combined boards the bill is unsatisfactory. Again the context has to be analysed. The Minister of Education took pains in the Committee stage to explain that the word “corporate” had no sinister intent and I appreciate that. However one person’s progressive is somebody else’s Trojan Horse. The Green Party is opposed to the language in clause 22 of Part 1 which confirms the legitimacy of the body corporate governance role. Everything that has happened in this House since the second reading has made us even stronger on this issue given the direction this Government is taking towards privatisation across the board. This is the major theme I will talk about. It is related to Part 1 and links the Government’s overall educational platform particularly with reference to its agreement with the ACT Party. 
We do not support board combining because it erodes local community power. We do not support the term “body corporate” because it is a red light; it is a warning that a Government has an interest in facilitating public-private partnerships—or as we call them publicly palatable privatisation—in education as well as in prisons and who knows in what else. Public-private partnerships are useful to a Government that made a public promise not to privatise State assets but wants to advance by stealth a privatisation agenda. The terms used in clause 22 of this bill have alerted us to the underlying issue and given what has happened to prisons not to mention the axing of public bodies such as Environment Canterbury and the latest Local Government Act amendment bill it cannot be said that we are being alarmist or extreme in wanting to defend at every point public assets in education. 
The issue for us is a quality public education system and the gradual encroachment of the private sector. The proposal to allow a private contractor to build a school and thus have a lease is not a new idea. In other countries public-private partnerships have been trialled and have resulted in very mixed outcomes for schools and communities. I met with United Kingdom researcher Dexter Whitfield recently when he was touring with his book  
Global Auction of Public Assets 
 in which he talks specifically about the education sector and the effects of public-private partnerships on infrastructure which relates to the wording in this bill in terms of bodies corporate. Meeting him reminded me of the extent to which this bill is not so much softening up the electorate as much as it is confirming a trend towards a corporate model of education starting with the confused nightmare of school bus contracting and the experts surrounding teachers who are contractors instead of teachers themselves in terms of professional development and educational support. The assumption is that the corporate contractors are more efficient but as Dexter Whitfield documented this is not remotely or necessarily true. A corporate organisation has a primary duty to its shareholders. A school in Northern Ireland that sat empty for more than a year because of a dispute with a contractor is a good example of this. Who benefited? It was not the children. 
So although the Greens support the improvements made by Labour MPs Trevor Mallard and Grant Robertson we do not support this bill. We are disappointed that no other party in this House can join the dots and see the links between public-private models which are being shoehorned into schools and this bill as well as what is being force-fed into water management and into prisons. There is a coherent agenda here and we do not support it. We do not want to be buying back our schools their buildings and their governance in the future like the rail-tracks we have had to buy back as a country. It is a failed model that costs citizens across the board over time. It has been done once; let us not do it again. 
We stand by our record of opposing this and we know that somebody will read  
Hansard 
 in the future and see that the Green Party was signalling the direction that education was going in at every stage with every bill. We alone have stood up and challenged the erosion of public schools which is being facilitated by this bill. We reject it. We support the public school system including kohanga and kura for the benefit of all children to be governed and owned by the public of this country so that Tomorrow’s Schools does not become about corporate schools and a corporate tomorrow but about the governance of parents teachers and kids for the benefit of all students. 
Inequity and privatisation are not private matters. They require our critique as does this bill and hence our opposition to it. It pains me to vote against the bill because we thought that many parts of it were sensible. We thought that the select committee process was useful and that the negotiation was useful. We wanted to make amendments that would be practical and we supported the amendments Labour put up but we have come to the point now where having seen what happened in the House with water management this week and having seen what happened to Environment Canterbury under urgency we refuse to close our eyes and pretend there is not an agenda here that affects education. 
Anyone who read the subtext in the  
Education Forum 
 this week will have seen that public-private partnerships are the agenda. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: I never dirtied my mind with that. 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY 
: I read it because it referred to public-private partnerships and I wanted to see what it said. Then I saw what Bill English said. It is clear what Bill English is thinking. He has made it really clear that he wants to try an experiment; he wants to privatise and see what can be done through that model. It is privatisation by stealth. It means that the Government can keep an election promise and can hoodwink the people of this country that with bills such as this nothing is really changing. Actually things are changing really really fast and every little bit of softening up is of concern to us. We stand on the principle that public means public and private means private and that the middle ground is being co-opted for the benefit of the few and the powerful. In education there is nothing more damaging than the few and the powerful having more rights and resources than children across this country who deserve the best at all levels. 
As it was said in the movie  
Boy 
: “Every child”—and that child came from one of the poorest homes—“has potential.” In order to keep that potential we absolutely need our schools not to be governed by corporates not to be fixed by corporate agendas but to be governed and fixed by our own initiative as communities and our own educational ethos in the public school system. So the Green Party is proud to be standing up and putting on the record our opposition to this bill. Kia ora koutou.