Hipkins ChrisHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): Thank you Mr Chair and if I could begin by introducing the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) that you just mentioned that the Business Committee agreed to allow the Government to introduce as it sits slightly outside of the original scope of this bill but it does respond to many of the issues that were raised during the select committee process and so I thank members across the House for allowing the Government to progress with this particular change.By way of history this all stems from the establishment of what was then the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand back in about 2015. It replaced what was then called the Teachers Council. It had an extended remit so a wider range of powers than the previous Teachers Council and it also introduced some new and more stringent disciplinary procedures for the council to follow in dealing with members of the profession whom there were complaints against.Ultimately the council was renamed to the Teaching Council by the current Government in response to some concerns when the Education Council was established by the profession though they wanted the word teacher" or "teaching" in the title and we restored elected representation to that council. Other than that the council has remained pretty much as it was established by that 2015 series of legislative changes.The council was provided top-up funding by the then Government in 2015 to transition to new arrangements and to establish itself and to deal with some of the longstanding issues that the council had faced including the fact that it had never been in surplus I think for its entire existence; it had always run at a deficit. The transitional funding as announced by the previous Government through the Budget process was to allow for that transition to the point where the council would become self-sufficient; it would pay for its functions out of its fees—the fees that it would charge the teaching profession for the purposes of registration.Our Government extended the transitional support that was provided and that transitional support would have run out—except we extended it again. Then the council went through a process of determining what fee they wanted to affix. They determined that they would move from a three-year fee to a one-year fee. The fee would go up recognising that the council had additional costs that it needed to meet. There'd been inflationary pressures. The council had never been particularly living within its means even before the purposes of the council were changed. The profession took a judicial review against the fees and that courts found that the council had made mistakes in the way that it set the fees; it set the fees under the 2015 law but the courts found that those fees had been inappropriately set and so the court set those fees aside. What that means is the council then reverts back to the fees that existed prior to the 2020 fee setting. The challenge there is that those fees were also set under the law that the courts had found was problematic in the sense that the council was charging for all of its functions when the courts found that the legislation only allowed it to charge for some of its functions. So the council was left in a position which was untenable because potentially all of the fees that it'd collected since 2015 could have been drawn into question and at that point the council was in some serious difficulty.So the legislation as introduced did two main things. First of all it validated the previous fees collected under the 2015 law change—not the fees that were overturned by the courts; they remain overturned by the courts. The second thing that it does is it allowed the council to credit fees that were paid towards the one-year registration fee against the reverted-to three-year registration fee and that's to avoid effectively a circular arrangement where people who paid their one-year fee get that money back and they then have to pay the higher three-year registration fee pretty much straight away. It means they will just have to pay the top-up in order to get that three-year registration fee.The council will now have to go back and start re-consulting on its fees and they will have to do that in accordance with the law. Of course if they mess that up again they're also subject to judicial review again. But this law change absolutely clarifies what they can and can't charge fees for.The SOP that I introduced makes it clear that the leadership functions that the council has and these are leadership functions that were inserted by the 2015 law change cannot be paid for through teacher registration fees or levies. If the Government asks the Teaching Council to take on additional leadership roles then the Government of the day—whomever that is—should pay for that separately and teachers should not pay for that through their fees. So I think that responds to a lot of the criticism.In terms of the quantum of the fee increase I do intend to bring forward further legislation to the House that deals with the increased costs arising from those changed disciplinary functions and disciplinary processes that were introduced in 2015. It is clear now that the inability of the council to effectively triage complaints the fact that they have to send a much-greater number of the complaints to a formal disciplinary tribunal hearing has resulted in a significant escalation in cost; it has resulted in the need for the council to employ significantly more staff to deal with those complaints and that is not necessarily going to increase the robustness of those processes—in fact there is a real concern that we're putting people through an unnecessary trauma when they shouldn't have to necessarily go through that process. So further legislation is coming on that and that will further address the levy and fee concerns that the profession have been raising."