Delahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading 
Delahunty Catherine: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading 
[Volume:660;Page:15622] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Deputy Speaker; tena koutou katoa. The Green Party is opposing the Education Amendment Bill (No 2) and I am pleased to have the opportunity at its second reading to explain why. I would like to acknowledge the Education and Science Committee and the committee chair and all the work that the committee does but I cannot say that I found this particular bill edifying or coherent. Although it does have some value the Greens will not be able to support it. This bill is so broad and diverse that the net effect is a strange mixture of the perfectly reasonable and the completely unreasonable. We have waded through this bill with the assistance of the small number of submitters who actually knew what it was about and the result is as disparate and mediocre as when we started. 
So I will begin with talking about what is reasonable in the bill. It is reasonable in Part 1 to provide a legislative framework for the secondary-tertiary programmes. These programmes are not new. There have always been these types of programmes but there is probably no harm in updating and clarifying them in terms of some of the issues raised; whether or not it is necessary it is not essentially harmful. I have no problem with issues such as recognising the providers and the obscure issues that are important—which are not actually obscure—like pastoral care for students of school age. We must remember in debating this bill that the students are school age. We support clarification of the lead provider role. 
The secondary-tertiary programme clauses support an existing provision of more options for young people who have an active interest in learning trades while still of school age and this is a positive and practical development so we do not have a problem with it. However there are four main other issues that we have tried to contest which prevent us from supporting the more reasonable provisions. 
Firstly I would like to speak about limited attendance centres which have been well covered but there is more to say. The clauses on childcare provision at gyms and shopping mall creches remove the early childhood centre requirements but throw the baby out with the bathwater. Of course creches at malls and gyms are not formal educational establishments but as the previous Labour speaker Sue Moroney pointed out young children are learning at all times; it is a matter of what they learn and from whom they learn it. We cannot stop them learning and we need to protect them and create environments where that learning will support their well-being. This bill removes all requirements to ensure police vetting of staff staff-to-child ratios and health and safety provisions particular to the care of children. 
It was said at the committee that there would be health and safety provisions as standard in any gym or shopping mall. Well we are not talking about adults here. We are talking about the particular care of children. The argument that the parents will be nearby so there is no need for extra protection does not ring true. Meanwhile at the other end of the gymnasium or the shopping mall—and some of them are vast with loud music deafening the ear—an untrained person may be trying to care for someone’s toddler two 6-year-olds who did not like each other on sight and a crawling bottle-fed baby without facilities. I am not saying there should not be a creche at these places but the public would assume—parents would definitely assume—that there are standards for care and protection. It is a given in a so-called modern civilised society that people’s children will be protected by the State when they enter into any formal environment that at some level there will be that protection. That is a given that citizens and parents will assume. They will be astonished—any of them who know about this—to realise that the police vetting bottom line is not there. 
The only argument that was raised at the Education and Science Committee on the issue by the Government was that parents could choose to use those facilities and would make their own calls about safety. The Green Party does not believe that parents will even know. There is not likely to be a sign outside the creche saying “No Police Vetting Here”; it will not really happen like that. The parents will not know about this law which removes standards and we cannot agree with that. We believe that removing the formal education requirement could happen in a sensible way without lowering the standards for safety and making them non-existent in terms of children and babies. 
I do wonder how much imagination is needed to figure out what could happen if there are not enough staff or facilities or safety measures in terms of police vetting for small children. But then this is not about children is it? This is about the ideological opposition to standards and regulation and it is an opportunity—an inappropriate opportunity—to cut those at the expense of families because the parents will not know and the staff will not be trained. The children are the people we should be concerned about. So I really fail to understand how we got to this place. It is very bizarre. 
The second issue is private school governance. The Law Commission review into private schools made a large number of recommendations five of which this bill picks up. However this bill is a missed opportunity. There are some gaps around the information to parents about suspension and expulsion in particular. The Law Commission recommended that there be transparency in terms of the suspension and expulsion policy being available to students and parents in the interest of natural justice and the welfare of children. In recommendation 28 and recommendation 29 the Law Commission has made two clear recommendations on appealing suspension and making disciplinary procedures available to families upon request. These were not included in the bill so we cannot trumpet this bill as a celebration of the interpreting of the Law Commission’s recommendations. It is not. It has missed out some of these vital things and this was brought to our attention by a couple of people. It may not be a major issue on its own it might not have been enough for us to vote against the bill on this but I can see what the Law Commission is saying in the interests of natural justice. 
A more serious issue for the Green Party and a more profound issue is the out-of-zone enrolment priorities. At a recent Victoria University seminar on inequality—in fact this week—a comment was made that social origins and inheritance matter more in less egalitarian societies. This change to out-of-zone enrolment priorities to offer priority to students of former pupils and children of board members is simply reinforcing inequity. That might be a tenet of private schools but it does not belong in the public system. We wholeheartedly oppose this principle. Why would we want to increase privilege and inequity and create more power for social origins and inheritance than the ability to attend one’s local school unless we want a less egalitarian society? If we do let us come out and say it. Let us come out and say that we do not want egalitarian societies and we do not want public schools available to everybody and that we want to create inherited privilege. That is fine that is what the private school system does. But we will fight tooth and nail for the rights of children to go to local schools and we are absolutely opposed to this. 
The amendments that came to the select committee late are of great concern to us and not so much for the content. The amendments were regarding the Teachers Council. We do not have a problem with the annotation of the Teachers Council registers in terms of a teacher’s history and neither do the unions but I do have a problem with the process. It was the last days of consideration when these amendments were brought forward. The teachers’ unions and the staff had less than 2 days to consider them and make submissions. It was acknowledged verbally in the committee as a bad process. The issues in these amendments need to be tightened up and if teacher suspension needs new law then teachers themselves need to be consulted and they need to take ownership of those changes. We have enough conflict going on at the moment between the Government and the sector without adding to it. We need good faith and the teachers’ unions showed a clear willingness to look at the issues raised. They did not have a problem with looking at the issues around suspension or even the suppression orders but they did have a problem with being told they had 1 day to consider those issues. 
These groups are representative groups. They wanted to go back to their members and talk through these issues because it vitally affects those members. The issues around suspension and pay affect the daily lives of teachers and maybe they need to be tightened up and maybe there is room to improve the ability for hearings to be made more public and for names to be made more public. But we do not give them 1 day to consider it. I have been talking to those unions and they said to me that they wanted to go back and talk to their members. That is what they do. They do not do Draconian decision-making on behalf of others. They are not the elite who speak on behalf of others. They speak with their members. 
Given all of those issues combined the Green Party is unable to support this bill. The education sector and the Government are in what I consider to be crisis but we are spending a lot of time talking about things like the small centres where children will not get protection. We are spending a lot of time talking about how to privilege those people who already have an inherited relationship with a school. That is not actually what I thought we would be doing when I joined the select committee. I thought we would be at the heart of the debate but we are not. In fact there are a number of very negative things happening in the bill and for those reasons the Green Party will not be supporting it.