Shearer David: Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Shearer David: Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:671;Page:17600] 
DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert) 
: 
 I will start by addressing one or two of the things that Heather Roy mentioned when she made her addresses before. She said first of all that one does not have to have a students association in order to be effective. She gave the example of the Christchurch earthquake. I am not sure whether that was true; I seem to think that the students associations had a greater role than she talked about. But somehow she says students do not need a students association in order to be mobilised and effective. If that is the case I ask Heather Roy why a student body cannot mobilise 10 percent of students and come up with the numbers needed to force through a referendum. Why is that not possible? On the one hand it does not seem that students need to have a students association to be effective but on the other hand a student body can never be effective enough to get that requisite 10 percent. 
Heather Roy also talked about the idea that a students association—or a student union as the ACT Party prefers to call it—is one of the only organisations left in this country that is compulsory and for which one has to pay a compulsory fee. I think this is a wrong characterisation of what a students association is. David Caygill and his son made an extremely good presentation to the Education and Science Committee on the Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill in which they argued that this fee is more akin to a tax than a union fee. In the same sense that people who belong to for example a council pay their rates students pay for things that they may not use but they pay for the sake of the greater good. The fee is compulsory only if students do not want to force a referendum through but they are paying for something that people overwhelmingly get great benefit from. I think that is the crux of the argument regarding clause 6. 
I come back to the point that Heather Roy talked disparagingly about Grant Robertson’s Supplementary Order Papers 190 and 191 and his other amendments. But many of those amendments were an attempt by members on this side of the Chamber to come to some sort of compromise so that this bill would be palatable legislation that might have some endurance out there rather than come November 26 be targeted for elimination. This bill could have actually been better legislation which might have had the agreement of all sides of the Committee. 
Heather Roy is absolutely wrong—and here are the facts. If this legislation is passed the students associations will wither considerably or disappear. That is a fact; that is based on evidence. It is based on the experience of Australia. What happened there? Students association membership dropped horrendously. Let me give members the statistics that came from the Australian students associations representatives of which actually came before the select committee by phone. They said the associations had effectively collapsed or had drastically reduced their services and implemented user-pays in many areas which had disadvantaged many of the students particularly those from low socio-economic areas. Tertiary institutions there have taken over services and assets previously owned by students. Here is the other thing that occurred when that happened: tertiary institutions began to charge levies for reduced services—more money than the students were paying to begin with. 
For most of the students associations—and I look at the Unitec one in particular—we are looking at paying about $120 a year. Now $120 is a substantial amount of money for many students but the services that students get from that are way beyond what a tertiary institution would be able to provide. The secret is that the students associations have an army of volunteers. All of that will disappear when this legislation makes its way through Parliament. 
I refer back to Grant Robertson’s amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 191 to add to new section 229A a requirement to hold a nationwide referendum.