Hipkins Chris; Rurawhe AdrianDr PARMJEET PARMAR (National): Thank you Mr Chair. My question to the Minister in the chair the Hon Chris Hipkins is about the early childhood education approval process. So through this legislation the Minister will be actually giving the approval to entities to open an early childhood education centre. This is through allowing them to apply for the licence so the approval actually will come from the Minister. So the criteria that have been set in here for a Minister to provide that approval—when I go through that list most of those things are easy to satisfy for any operator. But there is one criterion which is going to be really difficult for any operator to satisfy if that operator is a new operator and wants to enter into the early childhood education sector and that is in clause 17(2)(d). This is the licensing history and it says (i) any other early childhood services previously or currently owned operated or managed by or otherwise connected with the applicant; and (ii) every person involved in the governance of the proposed service."So there could be some operators. They want to enter into the early childhood education sector. They may not have any history. They may not have operated any early childhood education centres but they know that there is a need in the community. So I want to know from the Minister if this is intentional to rule out some kind of operators like home-based operators because it's really important that people those who are new in the sector also get the opportunity to enter into the sector because these people are in the community and they understand what the need is. They do the assessment based on what is needed in that community and they come up with their plan of a centre which could be for 40 children it could be for 100 or it could be for 150 children. But if the Minister sitting here in Wellington makes a decision about that person just based on this criterion that may not serve the community's best interest. So I want to clarify from the Minister why we have this kind of criteria where the history is actually a very significant criterion amongst other things that are listed here and what the Minister will actually be doing to go out and look for that applicant's ability to provide in this particular sector. Thank you. Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): I think that's a very fair question. The way the early childhood education licensing regime works at the moment we've seen significant and rapid expansion of some very high-quality early childhood education providers—and no one should want that to stop. But we've also seen some expansion of providers who are not providing a high-quality early childhood education. So under the current licensing regime if a provider has conditions placed on their licence in one service i.e. there are quality concerns around them there's nothing to stop them continuing to open new services even though we know they are not a quality provider. So these provisions are designed to ensure that a service that is not a quality provider—the provisions the member's specifically referenced—can't continue to proliferate the number of services they own. On the other hand if they are providing a quality service that should be a factor that's taken into account in the licensing. The final point that I would make though at the moment is that there's nothing to stop the proliferation of services in areas where we don't need them—sometimes to the exclusion of growth in areas where we do need it. So we do need to have some better tools to say that it isn't just a matter of saying to someone "Anyone can set up an early childhood education centre. I mean as long as you make the licensing criteria you can go forth and do it." Actually we don't need the huge amount of proliferation we've got now. But we do want to direct the growth into the areas that are currently underserved.CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): I call the Hon Tim Macindoe."