Hipkins Chris: Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Hipkins Chris: Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:657;Page:6823] 
CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 I rise in opposition to the Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill for three key reasons. The first reason is that the bill is unnecessary the second is that it will cost students more and the third is that the real driver behind this bill—which of course we heard already from Roger Douglas and Anne Tolley—is that it is designed to silence critics of the Government. 
This bill is unnecessary. It is unnecessary because students already have choice. They have choice because of the compromise arrangement reached in 1998 by the then National - New Zealand First Government. It was a very sensible arrangement that gave students a choice as to whether to have a system of universal membership or a system of voluntary membership. They are allowed to choose a voluntary system by way of referendum. That deal was brokered by Tau Henare of the National Party. It was a sensible deal and I hope that Tau Henare will take the opportunity of the select committee deliberation—now that we know the bill will be referred to a select committee because National will vote for it—to impress upon his current party the National Party the value of it. It was a sensible arrangement. Students have that choice now and they should be entitled to keep that choice of retaining universal membership if they want it—and we know that they do. In 1999 when the students at my university Victoria University were given that choice 78 percent of them an overwhelming majority voted in favour of retaining universal membership. More than half the students on campus participated in that vote and 78 percent of them voted to retain a system of universal student membership. 
This bill if enacted will cost students more. The universities will want to retain some of the services that students associations currently provide and they will not be able to deliver them at the cost at which the students associations can deliver them. Students associations are run on hundreds and thousands of volunteer hours every year and the universities simply cannot provide that. We know that when voluntary membership was first mooted at Victoria University in 1999 it introduced another levy that would have allowed it to continue some of the services the students association already provided—only some of them not all of them—and that levy was more than the students association levy for those services. So students will pay more if voluntary membership is enacted. In recent weeks we have already seen massive increases in student services levies around the country because universities and polytechnics cannot provide services to the standard and at the price that students associations currently can provide them. So students will pay more. 
The other thing that the National Government did in 1999 was try to stack the deck against students associations. Before National reached the compromise that Tau Henare sponsored it removed the ability of students to add their students association membership fees on to their student loans. So students basically had to front up with the cash to pay their students association fees. The Government did everything it possibly could to stack the deck against having any form of students association membership. It would not surprise me if this bill is passed to see a National Government doing that again. 
Some very important services are provided by students associations some of which may be provided by universities but many of which will not. The most important services which I am concerned about are the student representation services—the welfare and advocacy services—which will be at risk if this bill goes through. Those services are very important to students. I ask the Minister for Ethnic Affairs Pansy Wong to consider the implication of voluntary student membership on so many of the cultural and ethnic clubs and groups on campus. They provide vital support services to those different ethnic groups. I ask the Minister for Social Development and Employment Paula Bennett to consider the welfare and advocacy services that are provided to students who find themselves in hard times. There are so many of them. In fact the Minister for Social Development and Employment used to be one of those students. This is another example of the Minister trying to pull the ladder up behind her and remove many of the vital supports she relied on to get herself up the ladder. She is trying to remove those opportunities from other students.