Moroney Sue: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Moroney Sue: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:662;Page:10643] 
SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 As a member of the Education and Science Committee which considered the Education Amendment Bill I will rise and speak to Part 2. Because it is now some time since the select committee considered the wording in this legislation a lot has happened since then and I wonder whether committee members may have had some different views if we had known then what we know now. 
Part 2 requires early childhood education centres to have some additional costs put on them for going through some vetting procedures and to do those procedures as my colleague Maryan Street just said in a truncated period of time compared with what the original legislation said. Of course at the foremost of the minds of select committee members at the time when we wanted that time period truncated was the safety of children which is as it should have been. We wanted to make sure that there were as few loopholes as possible. But that was before we learnt that there were to be Budget cuts for the early childhood education sector. I think that now on reflection as I look at this entire bill and in particular at Part 2 the costs that are contained in there for the sector were not a major concern for committee members at the time because we believed then that the Government would not tamper with early childhood education funding. We believed that the funding was in place because the Government had promised that. National had promised it before the election and we had no reason to doubt that but this week we suddenly learnt that the early childhood education sector is costing too much. Suddenly the Government has decided just this week that the early childhood education sector is costing too much and that funding must be cut from the sector. 
In Part 2 the sector is required to undertake police vetting procedures that it has not been required to undertake up until this point. The timing of that will be incredibly important because Part 2 concerns the transitional provisions and because we do not know when this legislation will come into effect—it commences on the day after it receives the Royal assent so there is no named date in the bill—we do not know whether its enactment will occur before the Budget. It is unlikely to be enacted before that. It could be but the transitional provisions are likely to be set in place and be requirements for the early childhood education sector following the Budget. We do not know because the Government will not say what cuts-to-funding situation the sector will be placed in by then. As a member of the select committee I find myself in a very difficult position: I am supporting this legislation because that is the right thing to do for the safety of our children but I am now very very worried about the sector’s capability to put these measures into place—to go through these police vetting processes and to make sure that that is done thoroughly and property—because I do not know and neither does the sector the level of the funding cuts that it is facing in the Budget coming up on 20 May. 
Here we are today in the Committee stage debating with a new piece of information. When we were debating in the Committee stage last week I felt less worried about the funding position of the sector than I do this week. I do not know when we will be debating this bill’s third reading but I wonder what on earth we will be facing then. What situation will the sector be in? Where will its capability be to deliver what we supported in good faith in the select committee and what the submitters told us about in good faith? The submitters wanted these changes to be put in place as well but they did not know—and neither did we on the select committee—about the plans that the Government had for cutting funding to the sector. The reason we did not know about those plans is that National had promised that it would not tamper with early childhood education. It said that it would keep the same level of subsidies and it would keep the same fee controls in place. It promised that before the election but now those promises look shallow. They are ringing completely hollow. Now all the Government can do is talk about how much it will cost it to support children through early childhood education. Well for goodness’ sake. When the Government keeps saying that it wants to improve participation and have more children in early childhood education of course the cost will be larger.