Franks Stephen: State Sector Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
Franks Stephen: State Sector Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:616;Page:12191] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 As we debate the title of this bill I make a genuine complaint about bills whose titles do not tell anyone what they mean. When I was told that I had to assist in debating the State Sector Amendment Bill (No 3) I could not remember that this is a bill in which I had been taking an interest because of what it does to employment relationships. It would have been a very small thing for this bill to have something descriptive in its title that would mean that when people looked at the bill as it went through its stages or saw it on the statute book in the future they would have some idea that it effectively reinstated the State Services Commission as the employer and shunted the boards of trustees aside in terms of the most tense or difficult part of the negotiation of wages terms and conditions—the annual collective agreement round. It would have been a very small thing to have the title reflect in just two or three words what this bill actually does. 
The title might have been something like “Bulk Funding Repeal Completion Bill” because the bill is a consequence of the repeal of bulk funding. On a more depressing tone it might have been something like “Teachers Indenture Bill” but the bill does not have the kinds of provisions it ought to have if we were really going to liberate teachers from their current semi-feudal relationship with the mass employer. The title should reflect what the bill does and that is try to cement New Zealand into a pattern whose days are numbered. The teaching “profession” should not be a profession in name only. It is a profession in name only because of the collective agreement that this bill is trying to buttress and reinforce. 
No occupation that involves the application of judgment in the way that teaching does will have its practitioners respected as professionals when they are all on industrial factory-type terms and conditions of employment. Real professions are marked by peer review and assessment. Real professions are marked by an enormous range of incomes reflecting subtle calculations of the contribution that real professionals make. If we followed the pattern around the world I say to Mr Mallard and if we were trying to bring in a bill that really treated teachers as they should be treated we would have schools with a wide range of ownership and employment. We would have schools where the teachers were all partners in ownership. We would have schools where the teachers were principals or directors of companies and the heads of departments all had titles like “director”. We would have schools that were charities and run by trusts as we do now. But most of all we would have schools where the Government had absolutely no role in setting their terms and conditions of employment. It would have a role of providing money to those schools which would then decide how best to achieve their objectives and satisfy the parents. 
That is the way that professionals work all around the world. What profession does not have peer review? What profession has its terms and conditions of employment set by a State Services Commission? Not architects not lawyers not doctors not engineers. Even doctors in our hospitals essentially are able to benchmark themselves against people who are in self-employment—people who are in partnerships or who are specialists and who can therefore set terms and conditions of employment and can experiment free of the great clobbering machine that a Minister unavoidably has to supervise. 
I have not put up an amendment to the title because it would have been futile but it should not blandly state “State Sector Amendment Bill (No 3)”. It could actually be something like “State Sector Reinforcement (Teacher Indenture) Bill”. It is no wonder at all that teachers find themselves disrespected when the worst teacher in a particular range is treated almost the same in real terms as the best teacher.