Donnelly Brian: State Sector Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
Donnelly Brian: State Sector Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:616;Page:12155] 
Hon BRIAN DONNELLY (NZ First) 
: 
 Firstly I will comment that in terms of the report back the process of this particular bill through the Education and Science Committee was probably the best that I have ever seen. The select committee as a whole took the bill and looked at how to make it work. It looked at the areas that were problematic within the bill and at what it could do to improve upon the bill. As a result of that process the bill was quite monstered at the select committee stage. Quite large sections were modified and in fact removed during that period of time. 
What the bill set out to do—and it went beyond its initial intention—was to overcome a really anomalous situation with regard to the teaching profession over the negotiation of the conditions of and payment for employment. Teachers are employed by boards of trustees but the boards of trustees do not negotiate teachers’ salaries and conditions of employment. There is a national collective and by law it comes under the State Services Commission which is the agent of the Government that negotiates those matters. The States Services Commission has delegated its responsibility to the Ministry of Education as it has the right to do. So we have the Ministry of Education negotiating the salaries and conditions of employment of teachers and going through all the industrial actions when it is the boards of trustees that employ teachers and have the rights of employers. That has led to a number of circumstances that I think most people would regard as pretty unsavoury. 
For example in order for teachers who go on strike—as is their right to go on strike through industrial negotiations—to have their pay deducted which one would conclude was logical in any industrial setting the boards of trustees have to write to the Ministry of Education and tell it who went on strike. At certain schools teachers have put pressure on their boards and said the boards should show them goodwill under those circumstances and should not write to the Ministry of Education. We had one situation during a wildcat strike where the teachers threatened to go on strike again if the school deducted their salaries from them. Pretty obviously that is a totally impossible situation to operate in. It certainly does not make it fair for either the Government or the teachers to bargain in good faith. If people can withdraw their labour at will but also get paid for it then we do not have a level playing field. 
Mark Peck 
: The old freezing works would have done well wouldn’t they! 
Hon BRIAN DONNELLY 
: Would they ever! The purpose of this bill is to try to overcome that particular issue but it has a corollary benefit. One of the tactics used by secondary teachers both in 1996 and in the most recent round of strike action was to roster off certain classes. They would say that on a certain day they would not teach third-form classes across the whole country. So in many cases the boards of trustees were forced into a situation of telling parents to keep their children at home. Of course the problem was how to deduct the teachers’ pay. If that occurred on a Thursday on a certain timetable we would not know the classes that Mr Black or Mrs Brown was teaching. One teacher may have two or three third-form classes and another may have one. Schools may have 45-minute periods or hour-long periods. In the end it just became too administratively difficult for the boards of trustees even to send the information in to the ministry. Consequently there was a mechanism that teachers could keep going indefinitely. 
But there was a downside to that particular mechanism which was not recognised by very many: when parents kept their children at home they were breaking the law. The law states that when a school is open for instruction parents have to ensure their children are in attendance. How can we put parents into that situation? Pretty obviously the Government was not going to chase parents up and fine them $15 for every day their children were not in attendance. But many many parents do not like the idea that they are in breach of the law when they are forced into that situation. So the bill attempts to overcome those particular anomalies. 
There is another anomaly and it is that schools by law have to be open for a certain number of half days—380 half days for secondary schools and I think it is now 394 half days for primary schools. If the teachers go on strike pretty obviously schools cannot be open for instruction. Therefore boards of trustees would not be able to meet their legal requirement to keep schools open for instruction for a certain number of days without asking the teachers to come back for an extra day at the end of the year. Once again that really attacks some of the fundamental industrial rights of teachers as employees. What the bill does—and I think this is a very positive move—is to state that if the teachers are on strike then it is deemed that the school is open for instruction. 
But then the Minister tried to say that if we had too many strikes that would cut into education too badly so he wanted to have the reserve power to be able to extend the school year as long as he liked. That raised some questions as to the power the Government was trying to accrue to itself which no other employer would have been able to have. So if teachers went on strike for 3 or 4 days the Minister could have just said to count one of those days as a school day but the extra 2 days would have to be worked at the end of the school year. If teachers went on strike for even longer than that we could have the school year lasting until past Christmas time. The Minister was asking for a draconian power and the select committee did a very good job of arguing that there was no purpose in keeping that particular clause in the bill. It flew in the face of fairness around industrial relationships for teachers. 
A number of other issues came up as a result of this particular bill. Once again it is believed that these are improvements. When the Employment Relations Act went through one of the issues that came up was how much notice a union should have to give before its members went on strike. When it came to schoolchildren there was the real problem of getting the information back to the parents that the teachers were going on strike at a certain time. During the last round of strikes students in Auckland were stranded. Parents did not know that bus drivers were going on strike and there was no way of getting the students home. This legislation ensures that there has to be 3 days’ notice of any strike action. We believe that is fair. We believe it is fair that schools get that information in a timely fashion in order to be able to get the information to parents and ensure that appropriate arrangements can be made. 
The final issue that we need to talk about is the power that the bill planned to give to the Minister to punish boards of trustees if they did not do what they were supposed to do. Boards of trustees are now to be required to send information to the Ministry of Education about all the teachers who did not go on strike rather than the other way round. The ones who did not go on strike can be paid in a rightful fashion. But the Minister tried to give himself unlimited powers to be able to punish boards of trustees that did not comply with that requirement. The punishment would have been to make deductions from their grants. The people who were going to be hurt by that would have been the students themselves because there would have been less money available to them for their particular studies. It is fortunate that the select committee was able to argue cogently and as a group that that was an unnecessary power. The Minister already has powers to punish or penalise boards of trustees that are recalcitrant and he certainly did not need the sorts of draconian powers that would have flown in the face of a board’s responsibility to ensure that students are getting the best possible education. 
There was another little issue around technical redundancies that required the select committee to do some tidying-up. Although the committee did not change the basic principle or premise of the bill it certainly needed to do a lot of tidying-up of the wording. I think the wording that has come back to the House is far far clearer in stating what the Government is attempting to do to ensure that people do not double dip when there is loss of jobs as a result of the merger or closure of schools. 
Finally I say once again a very big thankyou and give my congratulations to the select committee for what I consider to be a very fine job on this bill.