Moroney Sue: Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Moroney Sue: Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:670;Page:16863] 
SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 I am pleased to be on my feet to take a call on the Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill and on clause 3 of this bill. I am a member of the Education and Science Committee which heard the many many submissions on this bill. It is a very good select committee. 
Clause 3 is about amending the Education Act—amending the Act that is supposed to enhance public education for the people of this country. It is the Act that is supposed to promote educational opportunities for people in this country but here we are with legislation that will actually make educational opportunities more difficult for students. The reason it will make educational opportunities more difficult for students is that despite what the member sponsoring the bill says it will put paid to student representation and it will put paid to the student voice. On this side of the House we believe that a strong student voice and strong student representation are absolutely important for making sure we have good quality education services in New Zealand so I find it very ironic that the Education Act is being amended by this particular bill because I am sure we would find that the objective of that Act is to promote quality education. In the bill we have in front of us we find that the legislation will do the opposite. 
If anyone is in any doubt I will just take some time to read a little bit from one of the very good submissions we heard the submission from the Waikato Student Union. I think its submission was particularly powerful because the union had been through voluntary unionism. It had been through voluntary unionism when it was voluntary to have voluntary unionism. This bill proposes to make it compulsory to have voluntary student union membership but Waikato went through the process voluntarily. The union went through it: it took its own ballot and it decided membership would become voluntary. 
That happened in 1996 and in 1997 it spent the whole year planning what it would need to do to actually retain a student voice under voluntary membership. So it did things at that point. The membership levy revenue was $593000; it was reasonably healthy. That was before the union went to voluntary union membership. The union created a working party to plan and manage the transition for what it was about to undertake. It started selling assets in 1997 in order to become voluntary. It sold off campus movies. It started asset stripping its own union in order to make that change. I could read out all the bullet points because there is a lot of detail about what it went through in the year before it got there but the bullet point that really makes my heart break is the final one: all staff were made redundant effective 31December and that was before the union even went to voluntary student union membership. That was in preparation for going to voluntary student union membership. So in the year of 1998 when the union’s membership became voluntary it literally had no infrastructure in place to make sure there was a voice for students to ensure that the education of those students was improved—as I believe the Education Act actually envisages. I am sure that the Education Act was put in place to make sure that we had the best possible education system in New Zealand not a second-rate one not one where students did not have their voices heard and not one that has been proposed by this bill. 
I think that being on the Education and Science Committee while an enlightening process was actually quite disturbing because about 98 percent of the submissions that we heard were against the Education Act being amended in this way. Submitters came forward and said to us that they did not want the Education Act amended in this way at all; 98 percent of submitters said that so the majority of the select committee has gone against the wishes of those submitters in amending the Act.