Stanford Erica; Hipkins ChrisERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Madam Chair. I wanted to question the Minister—and I'm sure there'll be no surprises on this—around the Supplementary Order Paper that was introduced by the Minister and then incorporated in the bill the one that we spoke about and deliberated on at select committee around network planning for early childhood. I want to start by questioning the Minister around my tabled amendment to this part of the bill.The changes that the Minister made to this part of the bill will extend the start date effectively of network planning to 1 February. Now he did this after consultation with the select committee and representations that I'd made to him in that the 1 August date was unworkable because there were many early childhood education providers who were in the middle of building and wouldn't make that date. It was a great thing that he went away and changed that to 1 February. The problem though lies in the fact that—and I have made this clear to the Minister and he hasn't taken it into account—over the December/January period the Christmas period basically Auckland Council shuts down and the ministry shuts down. So my amendment goes to this very point and asks the Minister to push the start date out another six weeks to account for this. The reason is that the early childhood providers are not able to apply for a building or resource consent or a CPU—a certificate of public use—from the Auckland Council between the dates of approximately 1 December and mid-January and even into late January it's a bit patchy because of a lack of staff that are around. They need those sign-offs in order to get their licence application ready to give to the Ministry of Education on 1 February and they've lost six weeks.Furthermore the Ministry of Health and the public health entities that are required to do sign-offs for that licence are also closed for applications between again approximately 1 December and mid-January and again are a bit patchy towards the end of January. So that whole six- to eight-week period is lost because the applicants won't be able to get the documents they need in order to get their licensing application ready for submission to the ministry. Furthermore the Ministry of Education themselves close off for receiving applications for licensing around 1 December for six weeks and again have about a quarter of their staff from mid-January onwards for a little while.So that whole period is effectively a dead period for applicants wanting to get their licence into council. So this amendment asks that the Minister push out the date for another six weeks to account for this loss in time. My question to the Minister is: did he receive representations around this why hasn't it been taken into account and will he support our amendment to make this bill better and fairer for applicants who have effectively lost that six- to eight-week period? Will he consider the amendment? I have other amendments that I will talk to but those are my questions for now.Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): The Government doesn't support the amendment that the member has just spoken to for one simple reason and that is I think the member suggests by the way she speaks that if centres haven't applied for their licence and got their licence by the date in question suddenly it's all over for them. In fact it's not. Centres will still be able to apply for licences after that date—they will just have to follow the new process. The process is designed to stop the proliferation of services that attract Government subsidies in areas where there isn't sufficient demand for them. We know that when demand is spread across centres that are struggling to survive educational quality for children suffers. So these provisions are designed to ensure that where Government subsidies are being applied—and these are quite significant subsidies that get applied to early childhood education services—there is actually a need for them acknowledging that there are some services that are currently under construction that won't have had the opportunity to be able to comply with the new process because it was introduced after they had started building their services. We have allowed for that in terms of the time frames in the bill.