Parmar ParmjeetDr PARMJEET PARMAR (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'm taking this call to support the third reading of the Education (Pastoral Care) Amendment Bill. This bill was introduced after that sad incident that happened at Canterbury University. Nineteen-year-old Mason's body was in his room and nobody noticed. He was there—his body was lying in his room for a number of weeks and nobody noticed that he was not around. So my hope is that through this legislation we are making sure that this kind of incident will never happen again here in New Zealand. This bill allows the Minister to issue a code which will cover both the international pastoral care code and the domestic pastoral care code. Talking about the international and domestic pastoral care code I want to highlight that when we talk about international students our attention towards their pastoral care is a lot more than domestic tertiary students. I can understand to some extent why that exists because international students come from different countries different backgrounds different cultures and societies and they need time to adjust in our new environment here in New Zealand and we want to make sure that we are providing them the best possible experience here in New Zealand while they are gaining their tertiary education. But for domestic tertiary students we cannot take their wellbeing for granted. I understand that they are in the same country—their home country here in New Zealand—but there could be some young ones that are leaving their home for the first time to move into a hall of residence and there could be some students that are leaving their hometown going into a different town. So for them also it's a new environment. For them they have to make new connections new friends and on top of that there are other pressures of course—to study to do well in sports and there are so many other activities that they might be involved in. So there could be so many reasons that these kinds of things can happen. So we want to see that we have a proactive pastoral care system for our domestic tertiary students as well. I fully understand the difference for the providers for international students—that is for international students the providers are to take all reasonable steps to protect them and for domestic tertiary students they are to take all reasonable steps to ensure their wellbeing. In this legislation the other thing that is very good is that the Minister is required to consult with students their families providers and also the Privacy Commissioner before issuing a code of practice. I want to especially acknowledge the Privacy Commissioner because he addressed a lot of concerns that we had during the select committee process. Of course I want to acknowledge all 22 submitters as well for their contribution and it's because of their contributions that we have been able to amend this legislation and bring this legislation back in this form. We really want this legislation to go through. We want to see that the interim code is in place ASAP and then the permanent code is in place because we are really concerned about the wellbeing of our domestic tertiary students. In this legislation I also want to highlight that while we were trying to balance safety of domestic tertiary students we wanted to see that their privacy is also maintained because we know that for parents their children will always be children and we would like to monitor them 24 hours 7 days. But that's not practical because in reality children grow up and once they are over 18 they need their space. We wanted to respect that in this legislation. So that has been done in this legislation. The third factor was accountability of providers. I just want to highlight one point—other points have been already mentioned. This is establishing a student contract dispute resolution scheme. In this legislation students will have access to this scheme for seven years. We think that seven years is a reasonable length of time because that is the length of time for which most of the records are maintained.Finally I want to talk about the definition of serious harm in this legislation because serious harm is central to the issue that we are trying to resolve through this legislation. As the legislation was introduced various kinds of medical and other interventions were listed under serious harm". During the select committee process we changed that. We didn't want those interventions listed.I was asked by the media about the select committee process. The question was: have you diluted the definition of serious harm in the select committee process? I don't agree with that because we haven't actually diluted it; we have actually strengthened the definition of serious harm in the select committee process. We didn't want to exclude any kind of interventions by listing some interventions in a serious harms definition.This bill is a much much better bill after our work in the select committee process and once again I want to thank everyone for their contributions. I support this bill. Thank you."