Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDebate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 June 2013. Volume:691;Page:10936. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State EnterprisesIn CommitteeDebate resumed from 14 May.New Zealand Qualifications Authority(continued )Report noted.New Zealand Teachers CouncilCATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):This speech will not be as melodramatic as those in the previous debate. There will be no offence I think no personal abuse and no—Chris Hipkins: I am going to speak in it.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: True true. Mr Hipkins alias Metiria Turei is speaking today so anything could happen that is true. There seems to be a bit of identity confusion in Parliament today.I would like to speak about the Teachers Council. Despite its lack of Shakespearean drama I do think it is an important issue. The Teachers Council has been reviewed in the past year and this review appears to be welcome across the education sector and across the parties. Everybody felt that this was a useful thing to do although not all the 24 recommendations from the Teachers Council review are acceptable. The debates that have come through about the work of the Teachers Council in the past year are around whether we should create an independent statutory body such as the Medical Council of New Zealand for example where doctors basically look after the issues of doctors—teachers would be more than capable of doing something like that—or whether we should just improve the existing Teachers Council. I think there is a lot of support for the idea of an independent statutory body because it would recognise the importance of the profession.The Teachers Council as it exists right now is about the protection of professionalism mainly through registration and the discipline of registered teachers. The Government has said that this is ineffective. However the Government’s response to this supposed ineffectiveness which may have grounds is curious. There is an opportunity for the Teachers Council to do some interesting professional work around teacher appraisal registered teacher criteria and professional standards but what has been suggested for one of the recommendations is quite strange and it relates to the underlying privatisation agenda of the Government. The Government says that professionalism registration and standards are extremely vital but it is now suggesting a whole new category of unregistered staff in schools which can undermine the whole raison d’être of having a teachers council that looks after registration and professionalism. So it is actually quite a contradictory situation.This new authority to educate which is broader than the current limited authority to teach may not appear to mean anything but actually like many things in the education sector it has a strong drive towards policy that the Government is pushing through around privatisation and the lack of recognition of what a teacher actually does. This broader authority to educate can include scenarios such as this one where a former teacher who has been deregistered possibly for serious misdemeanours can now apply for a broader authority to educate if they have “proven expertise”. The examples that were discussed at our select committee with this Crown entity were alarming because the entity itself did not raise these issues but some of the committee members talked about how anyone who might have a degree in physics for example would be suitable for teaching in a primary school.Presumably under charter schools or using the authority to educate in its broader sense a lecturer can be a teacher. This is a fundamental destruction of the profession if it says that no skills in teaching are actually required; all you need to do is know how to lecture. As for myself having been a tutor like many other people here I would never call myself a teacher. The point about this is that people can have knowledge and have expertise in tutoring adults as some of us do but that is very very different from having the pedagogical process that teacher training offers. I am all for improvement. I think there is more we could do to improve the pedagogy but definitely allowing more deregistered teachers under the Teachers Council and making this Crown entity responsible for a contradiction is not going to be an improvement. It was really concerning when we heard that idea. The idea that teaching is not a skilled and dynamic process that relies on a pedagogical background is very scary.Of course what is behind this in terms of this Crown entity is that it is now being possibly asked to have oversight over the new charter schools—the legislation for which passed through the House last week—where you could have up to 100 percent unregistered teachers. I would suspect that they probably will not have 100 percent unregistered teachers but they will have some staff who are under the Teachers Council who are registered properly meeting professional standards and who will be managed by the Teachers Council in that form and then they will have a category of people who are not registered and who are not required to meet those same standards. This is going to create division confusion irregularity conflict and practice that by no means—even in the Government’s own terminology the idea of “national” or “standard”—means there will be a national standard for teachers. There will not be consistency.CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):There are few areas of Government operation that highlight the contradiction of this National Government in education more than the Teachers Council. On the one hand we have got a Government that says it is focused on the quality of teaching and on improving educational outcomes yet it does so many things that go completely the other way.The review of the Teachers Council came back and argued that teaching should be a postgraduate profession that in order to enter the teaching profession someone should have a postgraduate teaching qualification. I think that is something that is very worthy of discussion. Yet this Government went the other way with charter schools and said: “Actually you don’t need to have any qualification at all. Anyone can go and teach in a charter school and that’s OK.” So we have got a review of the Teachers Council that says all of the international evidence tells us that the quality of teaching is the thing that makes the most difference and the Government turns round and says it will ignore all of that and have charter schools that do not have to have qualified teachers at all. I think that is wrong.In the early childhood area where we were moving towards a system where we would have fully qualified and fully registered teachers again the Government went the other way and it has abandoned the targets that would have seen us moving to a more qualified early childhood workforce. It has simply scrapped that altogether. Actually what we should be saying is that early childhood education is vitally important we should have qualified and registered teachers in early childhood centres and we should fund them in order to cover the cost of that. This Government is not doing that.It is a double standard for Hekia Parata the Minister of Education to come to the House during question time today and talk about the importance of trusting in teachers’ judgments when it is very very clear that the national standards policy was designed because the Government does not trust teachers’ judgments. The Government says to parents that they cannot trust what teachers tell them and it has to set these arbitrary standards in place instead. Even then after it has set the standards in place it is going to manipulate the results to get the outcomes that it wants.In the case of the national standards in writing there is only one standardised assessment tool. That is the e-asTTle assessment tool. This year in term 1 when that produced results that the Government did not like or that the Government did not think were reliable it simply went in and scaled the results. It went in and changed the results to give it the outcome that it expected. So how is that in any way a national standard? How does that reflect a national standard when the Government is going to just change the results of the assessment in order to get the outcome that it thinks it should have got in the first place? It is an absolute hoax.National standards are neither national nor standard. Although we can have an enormous amount of faith in the professionalism of teachers teachers exercising their professional judgment against a pretty vague standard in one school are going to make adifferent judgment from teachers exercising their professional judgment against a vague standard in another school. Unless there is something in place that ensures consistency across those it is not the professionalism of the teachers that is at question. It is the very concept of the standards in the first place that undermines our education system and that means that parents cannot have faith in the information that they are being provided.National standards are not a reliable indicator of a student’s achievement they are not a reliable indicator of a teacher’s professionalism or the quality of the teachers and they are certainly not a reliable indicator of how successful and effective a school is.John Hayes: So you don’t want any standards?CHRIS HIPKINS: No I absolutely think there should be standards but these are not national nor are they standard. In fact good schools already were reporting quality information to parents and in fact some schools are now reporting less information to parents as a result of national standards because they are reporting only the standards and they are not reporting all the other information that they used to give parents.So parents are being duped by national standards because the information they are getting is unreliable. It is not consistent. There is no guarantee that a child being assessed at one school against a standard is going to get the same result if the parents take them and have them assessed at a different school because the standards themselves are vague they are inconsistent and there is no moderation process. For Hekia Parata to try to draw a comparison between national standards and the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) is absolute hogwash because NCEA has a moderation process in place. There is no such moderation process in place for national standards.National standards are not an exercise about lifting student achievement or about education; they are bad for education. Internationally they have not worked. They are not working here in New Zealand. We should be focused on making sure that we have a system that works for Kiwi kids. National standards do not.Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram):I am very happy to take a call on the Teachers Council to talk about the Teachers Council review and pick up where my colleague Chris Hipkins finished off. I want to focus on two aspects of the review. One is the independent statutory body and what was asked for there and also the postgraduate teaching qualification that was mooted. I think the postgraduate teaching qualification shows demonstrably how all over the place this Government is when it comes to education. It does not have a consistent plan. It is not about educational outcomes.At about the same time that we were talking about the need for greater qualification for teachers in our schools the Government talked about undervaluing postgraduate education in this country by withdrawing student support for those students wanting to undertake it. On this side of the Chamber we have talked at great depth about the contradictory nature of the moves around postgraduate student support and how they undermine the Government’s rhetoric around an innovation-led economy and the knowledge economy. Well it shows very much how contradictory that is even within the portfolio of education and how there is just no coherent plan around what is needed.One thing that we on this side of the Chamber are absolutely sure of is that qualified and registered teachers are absolutely key to the success of our education system. That is why to us the Teachers Council is so important as the body that carries the register of teachers in this country. It is why when the council came to the Education and Science Committee and submitted on the issue of charter schools we were so interested in what it had to say. Government members were not in the least bit interested in what the council had to say because it said the idea of having unqualified and non-registered teachers was not at all a good idea.The New Zealand teacher register has not only national but international recognition. It ensures that our education system is relevant within the global context. This is vitally important. Actually Treasury has advised that quality teaching is the most important factor in student achievement and that teacher registration although not perfect gives some assurance of quality. That is what we are very concerned about and it is what is missing in the mode of education in charter schools that this Government set up last week. We do not have that mode of assurance that teacher registration gives us.This is something that we view with great alarm because it is qualified and trained professionals who provide the foundation for a high-quality education system. We need not look very far for the fine examples of Finland Singapore the Netherlands Australia Canada and Scotland where successful teachers require a depth of specialist professional knowledge in areas such as curriculum assessment pedagogy and learning. With teacher registration the need to keep your registration up to date is absolutely vital to ensuring that we have this. This body in the Teachers Council through the register ensures that we have the most important aspect of quality going into our education system and that is quality teachers.We on this side of the Chamber very much value the teachers we have in this country and the expertise they bring so we listened when they and their bodies came to our select committee and told us that they were really alarmed around the notion of teachers not needing to be qualified and not needing to be registered when it came to being entrusted with the education of young New Zealanders in charter schools.So we think that the review of the Teachers Council is a vital document for us to reflect on as this Government makes fundamental changes to our education system. This is not small tinkering around the edges; this is fundamentally different. We are saying that you do not need to be a qualified or registered teacher to now stand in front of our children and teach them. You do not need to follow the curriculum either although we know that one of the things that the Teachers Council is vitally concerned about is making sure that teachers have access to professional development where they can keep up with curriculum development. These are all things that the Teachers Council needs to be the administering body for because one of the things that I think many of the parties that have looked at the review of the Teachers Council have said actually is that in terms of this independent statutory body the new professional body does need to have much oversight over the profession.Report noted.New Zealand Antarctic InstituteThe CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I call John Hayes.Grant Robertson: Here’s a polar bear himself!JOHN HAYES (National—Wairarapa):For the benefit of my colleague across the House there are no polar bears in the Antarctic. I know that. I do not know what school you went to and how good your teachers were but there are no polar bears in the Antarctic.I will just take you back a bit because you do not seem to know much about the Antarctic. A review back in 1994 recognised that the Antarctic was strategically important to New Zealand and this led to the establishment of the New Zealand Antarctic Institute known as Antarctica New Zealand. That was sorted through in 1996. I think it would be fair to say that Antarctica is seen as the last pristine area in the world and all of us in New Zealand see that preserving and protecting Antarctica is a vital role of the Government.Antarctica New Zealand is the Crown entity responsible for developing managing and executing New Zealand’s activities in Antarctica and in the Ross Dependency andit reports to the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee annually on its performance. Antarctica New Zealand manages Scott Base which is New Zealand’s Antarctic research station and it maintains—without sun at this time of the year—New Zealand’s operational presence in the Ross Dependency for the benefit of present and future generations of Kiwis. Key activities include supporting scientific research conserving the intrinsic values of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean and raising public awareness of the international significance of the continent.I think the Antarctic Institute is well rated in both financial and service performance terms and its operational presence environmental stewardship and public engagement has been very good. The Crown provides annual revenue of around just under $14 million and in this last financial year under review it had a net operating surplus of $400000. Most important it achieved a cost saving of 30 percent of its budget and it met that. It also made very significant savings in fuel something like in the financial year under review 666000 litres of fuel that it did not need to use down in the Antarctic and that is 44 percent more than the target fuel savings for last year.The installation of wind-driven generators has contributed to this outcome and particularly to the future energy security both of the American McMurdo Station and New Zealand’s Scott Base. I think that this relationship around the supply of energy to both stations reinforces a long and a very successful relationship with the United States Antarctic Program.I have just a couple of words about the New Zealand Antarctic Research Institute. This was launched by the Prime Minister earlier this year and it will lead to multidisciplinary multinational research down in the Antarctic. This vehicle has been established as a means to attract new international funding working in collaboration with the private sector. The public-private partnership is an innovative new model for science funding and will ensure we continue to build capacity in New Zealand’s polar science community.That institute has already completed the first international study on Antarctic tourism impact and it has partnered with Landcare Research to lead international development of an Antarctic environmental portal to better manage ecosystems. It has also undertaken a joint recovery with the United States of a 763-metre-long core from Roosevelt Island a world-leading climate record of the last 30000 years.Finally I think it is also worth thinking about the importance of the Antarctic industry to Christchurch because it contributes around about $280 million every year to the Canterbury economy. That really imposes I think a particular obligation on the chief executive Lou Sanson and his team and the chair Rob Fenwick and his board to be thinking creatively about how to expand their vision to generate significant benefits for future generations.Report noted.Housing New Zealand CorporationHon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister of Housing):I am pleased to be speaking on the review from the Social Services Committee of Housing New Zealand because we are embarking as a Government on the most exciting and positive changes in social housing in a generation. I want to just briefly talk about both the review and what those changes mean. The long-term assumption about Housing New Zealand is that it is the sole provider of social housing. In 2010 the Government received the vision on social housing which is all about expanding the provision of social housing to beyond just the State. We have seen with the Budget announcements this year this ambition to expand the community provision of social housing up to 20 percent.I know that in Australia—actually I would ask members opposite to talk to their Labor colleagues in Australia about the success of expanding social housing beyond being just a State entity because the programme that the Government is embarking on is mirrored in Australia.Grant Robertson: Who began third-sector housing funding? We did.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Well Mr Robertson interjects and says: “Oh these reforms all started with Labour.” Well let us just look for a moment and say: “Well what percentage of housing—after 9 years of a Labour administration how much community social housing was there?”. It was less than a teeny-weeny 1 percent. The second challenge I have got for the deputy leader of the Labour Party is that if he really believes in the report of the expansion of community social housing why did his party vote against the bill in the Budget that enables community social housing providers to be able to have access to the income-related rent subsidy? Why did you vote against it? If you are so committed to the community social housing sector why would you say that the State subsidy is available only to Housing New Zealand?Equally I would draw the Committee’s attention to the huge boost that this Government is giving to improving the quality of our social housing with Housing New Zealand and others and to making sure that houses are in the right place and are the right size. I reflect Mr Robertson on the decisions of the previous Labour Government which robbed the funding for actually maintaining State houses and saw them deteriorate to an appalling quality simply because Labour played a cynical game of just making a count of the number of State houses.Dr Rajen Prasad: Ha!Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I say to this Committee quite straight and I say to Mr Prasad who is interjecting that this Government is committed to the quality of those houses not just the quantity. Actually having tens of thousands of State houses that are uninsulated and are the wrong size is not the best way in which we can get the right social dividend for New Zealand from its $15 billion investment in Housing New Zealand.Dr Rajen Prasad: When did that start Nick?Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I ask the member whether he supports the Government’s exciting initiative announced in the Budget called Project 324&5 where we are going to take thousands of portable bedrooms and add them on to houses. We are going to change them from being three-bedroom houses into four or five-bedroom houses and reduce the over-crowding for those needy families. We will reduce the incidence of diseases like tuberculosis and rheumatic fever which we know are connected to over-crowding and yet we have not heard a squeak from Labour members in support of that initiative from the Government.The last point I want to make is this. Over the next 3 years this Government is going to invest $2.9 billion into the improvement of Housing New Zealand.Chris Auchinvole: $2.9 billion?Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Yes $2.9 billion. That is almost a billion dollars a year for the benefit of my colleague from the West Coast. What was the average during the affluent years when money came easy prior to the global financial crisis? The previous Labour Government committed less than a third of that—less than a third of that. That speaks louder than words and shows the level of commitment this Government has to a better housing outcome.Report noted.Environmental Protection AuthorityJACQUI DEAN (National—Waitaki):The Environmental Protection Authority is a Crown agent and it is responsible for functions concerning New Zealand’s environmental management. The authority is new. It was established by the National Government in 2011. What it does is bring together the various functions previously part of the Environmental Risk Management Authority the Ministry of Economic Development and the Ministry for the Environment.The Environmental Protection Authority was established to be New Zealand’s national environmental regulator with responsibilities under several different pieces of legislation. It is responsible under the Resource Management Act for proposals of national significance. It is responsible under the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act for the regulation of hazardous substances and new organisms. It is responsible for the administration of the emissions trading scheme and the regulation of ozone-depleting substances and hazardous waste. It is also the agency nominated to manage marine consents monitoring compliance and enforcement within the exclusive economic zone. During the first year of operation we were told the organisation was focusing on—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time for this debate has expired. The debate on the performance in 2011-12 and the current operations of Crown entities public organisations and State enterprises has therefore concluded. I will report the debate to the House presently.Debate to be reported presently.