SpeechCHRIS BAILLIE (ACT): I rise on behalf of ACT to speak to the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2) the third reading. It's amusing to hear from the Government how terrible education was prior to 2017. I was teaching then; it wasn't. Actually quite the opposite. The purpose of this bill is to make amendments across a range of matters in the Act to give effect to new policy decisions and to make other minor and technical changes. There are some good things in the bill but unfortunately the bad outweigh the good and ACT will not be supporting it. I'll go through quickly some of the changes. The police vetting provisions: the proposal is to ensure all non-teaching and unregistered employees of early childhood education (ECE) services and schools must be the subject of a vet before they begin working in the service or school and to remove the two-week period in the Education and Training Act to apply for a vet for non-teaching and unregistered employees after they start work. On the face of it this makes sense; less confusion and we all like keeping kids safe. But the practicalities really haven't been considered and police must just be shaking their heads.Teachers council: there's not a lot of love lost between the teachers and the Teaching Council. They've lost the trust and it's not an ideal relationship. But to strengthen teaching council disciplinary processes is a good thing. Complaints are taking far too long to process and to reach an outcome and this is unfair on everyone involved. Complaints—along with registering teachers—is the Teaching Council's core business and any streamlining in these areas is very welcome. Then there's the compulsory student service fees where the proposal would give Government more flexibility to regulate these fees enabling a wider range of options; to regulate to support broader Government objectives. The current disaster that is Te Pūkenga must make everyone worry that the Government wants to interfere more in the running of tertiary institutions and I think we should just park that and watch this space. Enabling national student numbers to be used when there is funding to support work-based training makes sense—more streamlining. The change to the private training establishments to enable the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to exercise discretion about whether to cancel the registration of a private training establishment in relation to immigration breaches we believe is overkill. It reeks of a not so subtle attempt to get rid of private training establishments by stealth and we don't support that. Education Review Office: the bill seeks to amend the Education Review Office's mandate to enable it to review professional learning and development amongst other things. No teacher thinks this is a good idea. Departments and schools know the professional development that they require and they're currently doing it. It's another example of consultation being completely ignored by this Government. There are other changes to make—minor and technical amendments—but the main sticking point with this bill is the network provisions in the ECE sector. The reasons for this have been explained in previous speeches much better than I ever could. The extra power the Minister wants points to a much bigger agenda that this Government has quite openly admitted—control and centralisation. It shows a huge mistrust of the private sector—We know best." Lastly we cannot support the exclusion of kōhanga reo and Māori immersion services from the network management. We have a lot more faith in Māori providers than the Labour Party do. Madam Speaker this bill has some good points but the overreach is just too much and ACT opposes this bill. Thank you."