Hipkins Chris: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 December 2014. Volume:702;Page:1049. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):I am happy to take a call in this the closing section of the Committee stage debate on the Education Amendment Bill (No 2) which amends the Act from 2004. It is a very sad day I think for the teaching profession in New Zealand and for democracy within the education community in New Zealand. I do not think that the name of this bill actually reflects adequately just how bad this legislation is going to be.This legislation of course instils a low-trust model within the teaching profession a low-trust model when it comes to university governance and an anti-democratic model in all of those areas as well. It has been strongly opposed by the teaching profession by the universities and by all of the others who submitted to the Education and Science Committee. I think that only about 14 of the hundreds of submissions the select committee received were in favour of this legislation.I also want to talk in my comments on these clauses about the commencement of this legislation and to express my deep concern and the concern I think of the Opposition that this bill in effect uses what is commonly referred to as a “Henry VIII” clause in the sense that it gives the Government the ultimate discretion to change the law at will. That is something that this Parliament looks very very unfavourably upon and yet it is used in this legislation quite liberally. It gives the Government the power by Order in Council to change the law. That is something that we have for a long time been discouraging Parliament from doing. In fact the National Party when it was in Opposition railed against the Government having these types of provisions in legislation. In fact increasingly in recent times we have seen the National Government using exactly those sorts of provisions in legislation and they are not good.Constitutionally this is a bad bill because it removes the power from Parliament to create the laws of New Zealand and hands it to the executive. It means that the executive—the Ministers of the Crown; well the Governor-General by Order in Council which means on the advice of the Ministers of the Crown—can change the law at will without reference back to Parliament. That is something that is discouraged and that should be discouraged. It is named after Henry VIII because of course he would get Parliament to pass legislation that would give him ultimate power. It would allow him to change the law at will and therefore he had no further need for Parliament. That is something that we do not want to have and therefore we jealously guard against these types of provisions. There is no good reason for this.It is not as if the Government did not see this coming and it is not as if it did not have plenty of time to prepare because of course it introduced this legislation a very long time ago and then despite its rush through the select committee and the Government not giving the select committee any additional time to consider the legislation even though there were so many submitters who wanted to be heard it brought it back to the House well in advance of the last election with the intention of progressing it before the last election and its own utter incompetence meant that the bill did not get progressed before then. The Government could easily have deferred the report back on this bill in order to give all of those submitters who did not get the opportunity to be heard the opportunity to be heard on this legislation. I think that is the real irony of this legislation coming in to effect by Order in Council or as late as September 2016. So it is nearly 2 years before this legislation would be fully implemented.Given the Government has now given itself this power to defer the implementation the real question is why it did not therefore take an extra month or so to allow the literally hundreds of submitters who were turned away by the select committee the opportunity to have their say on this legislation because there were heaps and heaps and heaps of people who wanted to have a say on this who were not given the opportunity to do so. I can say that I sat through days on end of select committee hearings on this legislation and as much as it was tiring and exhausting I would happily do so again because that is the essence of democracy.I think Parliament and the Government do a great disservice to the people of New Zealand when they simply stop listening and say: “No we have heard enough. We are just going to go ahead and ram through legislation without further reference.” particularly when it is controversial particularly as is the case with this legislation when those who are ultimately subject to it are paying for the body themselves but have no say over its governance—and I am referring specifically to the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand—and particularly in the case of the provisions relating to tertiary institutions when once again they have been overwhelmingly opposed to it. Why rush the legislation through when in fact clearly there is no rush because if there were any great rush this would be coming in straight away after it had been passed by Parliament and received the Royal assent? Unfortunately that is not going to be the case so this is bad law.Finally I guess if I could just wrap up and summarise the concerns that have been raised—and they have been many and varied—thus: the lack of democratic representation on university councils and on the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand is very concerning it is heavy-handed and it is anti-democratic. The requirements that it now places on the teaching profession are also heavy-handed. It is a very low-trust model that disempowers teachers and says to the teaching community that it cannot be trusted and that therefore the Government needs to seize control of that profession in a way that it does not do with just about any other profession in the country. It would not do it to the medical profession—doctors or nurses or any of those others—and would not even do it to real estate agents. Therefore why is it doing it to the teaching profession? There is no justification for it.This is a bill that transfers costs away from Government and on to the teaching profession by massively extending the powers of this professional regulatory body to include things that are currently covered by the employer by the Crown and transfers the cost of those on to the teaching profession itself. I want to know from the Government whether it is going to give teachers a corresponding pay rise in order to meet those additional costs because you can bet your bottom dollar that within a few years teacher registration fees will be increasing significantly to pay for the costs of the additional compliance burdens introduced by this legislation.This is a bad bill. It has been strongly opposed by just about everybody who is subject to it. Those concerns have fallen on deaf ears when it comes to this Government and I would certainly encourage the current Government to think again and to go back and look at the overwhelming number of submitters who were opposed to this to listen to their concerns and to make the amendments necessary so that this regulatory body can actually have the support of the profession that it governs.