Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Tertiary Education) : I move, That the Education (Polytechnics) Amendment Bill be now read a third time. This bill introduces new legal arrangements that will enable polytechnic councils and the Crown to respond decisively and appropriately to the educational and financial challenges facing the sector. The new arrangements need to be in place as soon as possible to give the reconstituted councils time to start addressing the financial pressures on their polytechnics. I therefore thank the members of the Education and Science Committee for their consideration of this bill within a shortened time frame. I also acknowledge the hard work of officials, select committee staff, and parliamentary counsel in progressing this bill.

This National-led Government is committed to establishing a world-leading education system—one that equips New Zealanders with the knowledge, skills, and values to be successful citizens in the 21st century. A key priority is the development of high-quality, relevant, and efficient tertiary education provision that meets the needs of students, employers, and the economy. The polytechnic sector has an important role to play within the tertiary education system as the primary provider of vocational education and training opportunities for New Zealanders. It is critical, therefore, that New Zealand has well-governed polytechnics that are educationally sound and financially viable.

At present, educational performance across the polytechnic sector varies from good to poor.

Hon Members: Oops, she’s lost her place already.

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: Of concern to this Government are the six polytechnics—

Hon Trevor Mallard: Read the book.

Sue Moroney: She’s looking for the pictures.

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: There are no pictures. Of concern to this Government are the six polytechnics whose educational performance has been identified as poor. Indications are that without major changes, these polytechnics will be unable to achieve significant improvements over the medium to long term in the quality of education provided to students.

Historically, financial performance has also varied across the polytechnic sector, for a number of reasons. Some polytechnics have not managed costs within revenue. Others have faced increased competition from private providers. Regional polytechnics have been unable to take advantage of economies of scale, because of the decline in their local population base. Since 2005-06 the sector has received $416 million in extraordinary funding to address issues of poor financial performance. Despite such assistance, six polytechnics will not be financially viable in 2011. A further six can become financially viable, but only through compromising educational quality. Across the board, polytechnics are not living within their means. In 2008 polytechnics spent on average $1,131 for every $1,000 of core income earned. Given the tight financial environment within which this Government has to operate, the polytechnic sector can no longer rely on additional funding being made available to address financial viability issues. Rapid, innovative, and decisive action will need to be taken by polytechnic councils and the Crown to address the educational and financial challenges facing the sector.

The bill establishes new legal arrangements that provide polytechnic councils and the Crown with greater decision-making flexibility. For the benefit of the House I will reiterate the bill’s objectives. This bill’s first objective is to improve the governance capability and effectiveness of polytechnic councils. The second objective is to allow the Crown to more effectively respond to the risks posed by polytechnics with educational or financial performance issues. This bill introduces new governance arrangements for polytechnics, with the aim of building the capability of councils for decisive and responsive decision-making.

As a number of submitters commented, a reduction in the size of polytechnic councils from the current 12 to 20 members would be of considerable benefit. From 1 May 2010—or earlier, if circumstances require—polytechnic councils will consist of eight members only. Each polytechnic council will comprise four ministerial appointees and four council appointees. Again, I thank the Education and Science Committee for its recommendation that councils be given the discretion to appoint four members. This pragmatic approach recognises the advantages of giving a polytech council greater flexibility to tailor its composition to reflect the particular needs and interests of its community. It will also enable the responsible Minister to appoint the chairperson and deputy chairperson from amongst all eight members instead of only five.

Under the bill, there will be a new emphasis on achieving and maintaining good governance practices. Appointments to polytech councils are to be made on the basis of relevant skills and experience, especially governance experience. Council members will be expected to comply with new individual duties, which will reflect the primary obligation of members to act in the interests of the polytech as a whole. The introduction of such duties was welcomed by submitters. This Government regards the need for adherence to good governance practices as a serious matter. It is important, as is demonstrated through members being made accountable to both the responsible Minister and the polytech council itself for breaches of the new individual duties.

A feature of this bill is the collaborative governance arrangements, which include the formation of a combined council governing two or more polytechs. The decision to enter into such an arrangement is a voluntary one to be made by each participating council. The inclusion of collaborative governance arrangements within the bill enables councils to consider innovative solutions to future governance issues and ensures that the legislation will not pose a barrier to their implementation. The bill also addresses the Crown’s ability to respond appropriately and in a timely manner when individual polytechnics are at risk educationally or financially. On the passage of the bill, an extended interventions framework will come into effect for the polytech sector; one intervention will provide for a gradually escalating series of responses to situations of risk.

A number of miscellaneous amendments are included in this bill. The most significant are those enabling the Manukau Institute of Technology to establish a tertiary high school from the beginning of 2010. I am delighted at the endorsement of the proposal for a trial project received from submitters and members of the select committee. This Government is committed to reducing the number of 15 to 19-year-olds who are leaving school early and without adequate qualifications. The operation of a tertiary high school is a significant step, and I thank members of the House for their support. I am pleased to commend the bill to the House.

Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) : I will begin with something that has been lacking in the contributions of the National members to the entire passage of this Education (Polytechnics) Amendment Bill, and that is a vision for what the polytech sector ought to be able to achieve and contribute to New Zealand. Polytechnics provide an extraordinary range of educational opportunities, which an intelligent Government should be able to use in order to guide them to meet the future needs of this country. The skills development that is required at this time in our history depends on the kind of vision that one has for the country a decade or two—or more—on from here. We know that that kind of vision, and the kind of energy that could be given to the polytech sector, is missing, because this is the only piece of legislation that the Minister for Tertiary Education, the Hon Anne Tolley, can come up with to direct our polytechs for the future.

This is a bad law. It is a limiting, constricting, and restrictive bill. We should be looking at how to harness and energise the polytech sector to do what is needed to provide the skills for the future of New Zealand. This bill is not a response to regional learning needs. Polytechs are a response to regional learning needs. That is their purpose. They fulfil an extraordinary need. They fill a gap in an essential part of the delivery of tertiary education in New Zealand. Part of it concerns the preparation and the upskilling of the workforce—that is, the current workforce, not just the future workforce. So for those people who are not able, because of family commitments, to migrate to large cities to go to universities, then polytechnics are exactly the right place for them to access tertiary education opportunities—whether they are diploma, certificate, or degree programmes—locally, and as close to them as possible.

If this was a visionary piece of legislation that equipped New Zealand to meet the educational needs that would prepare us adequately for the future, it would be applied to wānanga and to universities, as well. If there was anything visionary about this legislation, why would it not be applied to wānanga and universities? The answer is that the Māori Party would not have a bar of this legislation being applied to wānanga, and therefore there was a political reason for the Government not to extend the provisions of this legislation to wānanga. The reason it is not extended to universities is that they are too hard for the Minister to deal with. So we are left with the polytechs.

What is the basis of this legislation? The Minister has tried to outline—for the first time, I have to say, in the entire presentation of this bill before the House—some rationale for the development of this legislation. It goes like this. It is based on old information; it is based on a mentality that the Government had when it was in Opposition. I thought that it might have got out of that mindset by now, a year into its tenure as the Government. Government members are stuck back in their Opposition heyday of accusing everything in polytechs of being a twilight golf course—that everything was a twilight golf programme that they could mock, parody, and ridicule. Any concerns about those objections, raised in the 9 years those members were in Opposition, were—if they were justified—addressed by the previous Labour Government. This Government is acting on old information and outdated data. It needs to get out more and go and visit the local polytechs to find out what they are, in fact, offering. They are upskilling not only our young people, and not only our second-chance learners, but adult and working people in New Zealand who are looking to upskill and reskill themselves, in the event that they have lost jobs. So this Government has taken this legislation to address old, outdated information. Its members have not kept up, the analysis is inadequate, and the recipe is not appropriate.

This legislation cuts back the numbers on polytechnic councils. That is the major thing that this legislation does. Nothing in the bill is about a vision for polytechs. Nothing in it is about the skill needs of the present and future workforce of New Zealand. It is simply all about governance. Who said that governance was in trouble in the polytechs? I absolutely dispute the Minister’s claim about viability in the polytech sector. If the Minister had some vision about polytechs, she would know that it costs to provide tertiary education opportunities in a long, skinny country like ours, just as it costs to provide hospitals in regions. The purpose of having polytechs in regions is to enable educational opportunities that are post-compulsory to be made as available as they can be, to as many people as possible. That is a vision; that is the start of a vision. In response to that legitimate vision for polytechs, this Government is cutting back the numbers on councils. In so doing, I say to Māori Party members, it cuts iwi representation—it cuts them out. The bill says that it is desirable to have Māori representation, but it makes no effort to ensure that that happens.

The bill cuts out student representation—representation from students who have contributed. I will quote from chief executive officers who made submissions to the Education and Science Committee. The chair of the Wintec council, Gordon Chesterman, said of the students association that its members had contributed greatly to the council in the 9 years he had been chair. They had been very professional and had made a great contribution. He said: “I certainly wouldn’t be frightened of having that continue around the table.” So what is it that the Minister is frightened of? What is it that the Minister does not want to have around the polytech council tables that could assist appropriate governance? It is community input, community representation, and people knowing what is required on the ground in each region. It is, in fact, people to direct the polytech, through the governance structure, to deliver its mandate to provide relevant tertiary education offerings and courses to the people in those regions.

So we have the cutting out of iwi representation, of representation from students and staff, and of industry representation. Surely, this Minister could have listened to employers around the country, but that is not the pattern of her tenure in this portfolio. She does not make a habit of listening to anybody, so even industry representatives, who are able to say what industry requires in each region, are unable to be guaranteed a position on a polytech council. This is not a visionary piece of legislation. It is not even about a tight financial environment, as the Minister said in her speech. This is about a lack of vision for the tertiary education sector.

ALLAN PEACHEY (National—Tāmaki) : I would like to take a moment in the short time that is available to me to thank the officials who serviced the Education and Science Committee and who, on many occasion, were required to work under considerable pressure, as indeed were the committee members themselves. It became very apparent early on that there was a sharp division between the Opposition parties—Labour and the Greens—and National and ACT about the nature of representation. But I am gratified to be able to report to the House that all members engaged in a constructive and positive manner, and I believe that the submitters who were heard by the committee were given fair and considered consideration and were treated with respect. I thank all members of the committee on both sides of the House for that.

I want to make a couple of comments about the division that exists between the two sides of the House. Labour members have, in their work in the committee—and fair enough—and in their speeches during the Committee stage yesterday, made a lot of the point of representation. It seems to me that the critical issue concerns what is more important: whether it is the structure of representation, or the quality of the learning opportunities that exist for students in the polytechs. What this bill attempts to do is restructure the system of governance to make it more responsive to the needs of students in the lecture rooms, the workshops, the laboratories, and that sort of thing. The big work is yet to be done, and that is the appointment to councils of top-quality people who will be able to give the polytech sector the standard of governance it will require if it is to move forward. Thank you.

Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South) : I regret that the member who has just resumed his seat, Allan Peachey, did not take his full time, because in my opinion that member, of all the National members—in fact of all the people on that side of the House—has the best grasp of the Education (Polytechnics) Amendment Bill. He worked hard, as chair of the Education and Science Committee, to try to broker a compromise that was in the interests of the polytechnic sector and of long-term stability in that sector. But, unfortunately, the woman was not for turning, and for that reason we were unable to make that sort of progress. I think Mr Peachey understands the potential of the sector in a period of relative turn-down. During a recession and coming out of a recession are really important times for polytechnics to be involved in skill development and in working with the business community, in particular, in order to prioritise and get the resources where they need to be, so that we have the skill development that this country so desperately needs.

I think all of us accept that the current shape of polytechnic governance is not perfect. I think all of us believe that there are too many members on some of the councils. There is an acceptance that we could bring the numbers down without losing anything, and that from that we could get a coherence that would work. I see that the member is nodding. But I think there is also a view amongst many people that the changes have gone too far, and that when the Minister for Tertiary Education forces her appointments to be made, then, at that point, the gaps will become apparent. There will be communities, or communities of interest, that will not have any input at that particular level, although we all think that input is important and valuable. Obviously, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating in that particular area.

I join the chairperson of the Education and Science Committee in thanking the officials. They did do a good job. It is fair to say that during the process they were under some pressure, because, as I have discussed with the chair, they forgot, I think, whom they were advising. I think that for a period of time they thought they were advising the Minister, and they were getting the Minister to clear their reports to the select committee. That, of course, is constitutionally inappropriate. They were appointed as advisers to the select committee on the bill, and for them to brief directly someone who was not a member of the select committee was not appropriate. In the end, I think we cleared that issue up and got it sorted, but there was a period of tension when the officials indicated that it was their intention to breach the privilege of this House and to report directly to a member who was not a member of that select committee. It does not matter whether that member is their Minister; for the purposes of this exercise they were appointed as advisers to the committee. I can hear the Minister chirping. She does not understand the legislation, and she certainly does not understand the importance that this Parliament has put on its privileges and the approach that should be taken in that area.

I say to the Māori Party members that I regret that their amendment was not passed. I regret that they did not do some work on it earlier, because I think it was the sort of amendment that had the potential to garner further support from other parts of the House if, in fact, there had been a proper process. In fact, I think a member who sits directly behind the Māori Party whip, if he had been pushed pretty hard, could well have been talked into supporting it, because it is absolutely consistent with the things that he has been pushing for over a period of time. But the records will show—and I regret to say this to the Māori Party—that on the first reading and the second reading, the Māori Party members voted for the continuation of this legislation, which wipes out Māori representation. It is all very well for those members to say other people did that too, but Mr Flavell would never have accepted that sort of excuse from children when he was involved in the education system. The fact that Johnny and George did it does not mean that Sam should do it, as well. That excuse is the approach that Mr Flavell is using at the moment, and it is just not good enough.

I turn to the Minister and say I really appreciate seeing her in the House today. I appreciate that she gave a speech. I appreciate that she covered the areas that were missing in the second reading, in the speech that she did not give. I appreciated her fleeting visit to the House during the second reading, and I appreciate how fast she moved when she realised what was going on in the House. It is pretty sad when a member who has been here, I think, for 7 years, and who has been a Minister for a year, does not understand that she has to be present in the House to make a second reading speech. Anne Tolley used to be a whip—

Paul Quinn: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Yesterday a number of points of order were taken against that member for referring to a member who was not present in the House, and he continues to do that now.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Rick Barker): I say to the member that if he wants to raise a point of order, he should come directly to it. What happened yesterday is in yesterday’s newspapers, and it is not particularly relevant to what is happening today. I listened very carefully to the member’s presentation. He made comments about how he appreciates the Minister being in the House and appreciates the time that is spent here, and he did not refer directly to the Minister being absent from the House, which was the subject of the member’s point of order. Therefore, the member is in order and I invite him to continue.

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I thought you might have dealt with the fact that Paul Quinn referred to the Minister’s absence from the House in his point of order. That, in itself, was out of order.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Rick Barker): That is not a point of order. The member will continue.

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: As I say, I very much appreciate the fact that the Minister has turned up today and has used her second reading speech, so that all the work of the officials has not gone amiss. I regret the fact that she appeared to get her pages out of order and lost her way as she was giving her speech. My advice to her is that it is very useful, before one comes to the House, to read through a speech, and to make sure that the pages are in the right order and that it makes sense. Then she will not make a mistake again of the type that she made.

I cannot remember back to the Minister’s first reading speech, but I must say that—

Hon Anne Tolley: You do have trouble with your memory.

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: The Minister’s first reading speech did not create a great impression on me, but I know that her “second reading speech” made no impression at all. In the Committee stage she did 3 minutes and 20 seconds over a period of 2 hours, during which time she was signing her Christmas cards, and I say that showed very well on Parliament TV. I compliment the technicians, who showed the Minister on a number of occasions, when they thought she was going to speak, writing on her Christmas cards. But I think we are having the third reading now, and what did the Minister do? She got the pages of her speech wrong. She got at least three pages out of the four wrong, and the first one I cannot remember.

Hon Anne Tolley: Have you got anything to say about the bill?

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: The Minister is chirping away, asking whether I have anything to say about the bill. I have actually been in the House and I have talked about the bill right through the debate. I am sorry that that member has not chosen to get on her feet and speak properly on the bill, up until now.

The Minister can chirp, criticise, wail, and cry, but in the end this bill will go down as the legislation that has struck out representation from iwi on polytechnic councils. National has said to Business New Zealand that it does not want its representatives, who know about the local economy, to be on councils. National does not want local business people to be on polytechnic councils, because Anne Tolley knows best. I say people should talk to Anne Tolley about the WelTec council, talk to her about the people from the Wairarapa who are on the Universal College of Learning council, and talk to her about Gordon Chesterman, who used to run the election campaigns for the National Party in Hamilton. He came to the select committee and said we should not do this. A whole pile of people who are members of the National Party know about polytechnics. We know that they are members of the National Party, because they told us that. We have worked with them in the past, and we know them well. They are good people, mainly. I appointed numbers of them to polytechnic councils, because they had the talent to do the job. The Minister has said that what they say does not matter. Anne Tolley does not care what her National Party members say, and she does not care what the chairs of the councils say, because she knows best.

CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) : Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. Tēnā koutou katoa. I will start by recognising the officials who worked on the Education (Polytechnics) Amendment Bill, the chair of the Education and Science Committee, and all the members of the select committee. I think it was a fair process, even if there was not a constructive outcome. As a part-time member of the select committee, it took me a while to grasp what this bill was all about. I thought it was about improving education, but eventually I grasped that it was about extending control and facilitating business governance. Thus I came to agree with some of the other speakers in the Committee stage yesterday, who said that the bill had been misnamed. The bill could be more accurately described as the “Gut the Polytech Councils Bill”, or the “Desirable in Principle Retro-racism Bill”, or perhaps the “Yes, Minister, You Choose Bill”. What does the bill have to do with improving tertiary education? We do not know. The Government was certainly not able to explain it at the select committee.

I do agree with Maryan Street’s comments on the speech the Minister has just made to explain it, but it has not really helped. It seems like one of those weird niche ideas that someone has dreamt up in response to a challenging educational environment. Maybe if we severely cut the numbers of people on councils, everything will magically be more efficient. Sometimes I think if I hear the word “efficiency” in education again, I will have a tiny breakdown. What is so efficient about reducing tangata whenua, community, union, and employer representation on a polytech council? What test of efficiency are we using? What is so efficient about reducing councils to eight seats, and then ensuring the Minister selects half of them? Who will be efficiently marginalised?

This bill is built on a number of bad marginalising concepts. Bad idea No. 1 is to get rid of any Māori representation as of right. The Māori Party put up perfectly good amendments on this issue, and Maryan Street also attempted to get the bill back on some kind of fairness track. The Māori Party described positive working models whereby mana whenua and polytechs are now working together on councils to ensure that the interests of the many Māori students are well looked after. The Minister just implied in her speech that the problem with this kind of representation is that it represents a particular interest group, not the interest of the polytech as a whole. This ignores the fact that some parts of the community get systematically forgotten unless their interests are actually at the table. It ignores the fact that although we can work for the good of the whole from our different places, we cannot speak for each other. I cannot speak for Māori student needs, even though I have spent many years teaching Māori students in polytechnics. That is why we need Māori and students at the table, to make sure that the invisible is made visible.

It is a bit like Parliament: who would want only one culture, one gender, one class, or one age group making all the decisions in this place? Who is made invisible in that process? Then there is the small matter of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the articles that relate to governance of tauiwi and rangatiratanga of tangata whenua. Without giving members a 3-hour lecture on the articles of the Treaty, I would like to point out that the relationship—

Hon Maurice Williamson: We would like the 3 hours.

CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: I know that members opposite would love it; I could do it brilliantly. I would like to point out that the relationship was established in 1840, and the opportunities to make that relationship vibrant and effective exist through arrangements between mana whenua and Pākehā institutions now. To deliberately reduce Māori representation at the same time as endorsing a Māori flag is a deep contradiction that the Government needs to explain. This issue is important not just for Waiariki Institute of Technology or Tairāwhiti Polytechnic, but for the southern campuses and city campuses as well. Honouring Te Tiriti is not just about the number of Māori students on campus. It is about the right of mana whenua to assert the issues associated with the whenua, whānau, hapū, and iwi where the polytechnic is situated, and from a mana whenua perspective. Why would we step back from that relationship and write a bill that reduces rights of representation to the phrase “desirable in principle”?

Student representation is very important on polytech boards. It is very hard to get student representation, as polytechnics are traditionally less organised and unionised, especially in the smaller regions. A student representative plays a vital role in grounding the council decisions in the reality of the experiences of the student body. A teacher or an administrator or a ministerial appointment cannot see the world through the eyes of the student, who is living with the debts, the workload, the campus infrastructure, and the social challenges of that particular environment. To meet the student needs, a council needs to hear a student voice, not as a lobby group at a meeting but as an equal with a place at the table as of right. The staff or union representative is also important, because the teaching staff live with the consequences of all council decisions and have a unique perspective.

There are many community people who should be at the table presenting their views and knowledge, not just one person alone amongst a group of insiders. How well the group of at least 10 people serve their polytech really depends on a good process, on trust, and on good leadership within the group. So why would the Minister be the one appointing the chair and the deputy chair? The Government tells us that a council can appoint any configuration of eight people. We can choose which representatives one’s particularly community requires. But the Government is saying that with four ministerial appointments, we can choose only four from either the former statutory appointees or from our community. We cannot have both as of right.

As I said in the Committee, the issues facing polytechnics are very challenging. They include financial survival in a difficult economic environment, and walking the line between being a community education provider and user-pays pressures, which successive Governments have ratcheted ever upwards. Polytechnics are required to be in touch with the needs of local employers—now without necessarily being able to include those employers on their councils. They are supposed to provide for cultural and educational diversity, often in communities where people have very little money and no extra resources.

I am speaking from experience, having worked in the Bay of Plenty, at Tairāwhiti, at Waiariki, and in Wairoa, in various outposts of polytechnics. I know firsthand the struggle to resource and meet the needs of students in these environments. It is not about reducing the governance input. In order to keep up the growth in financial expansion that polytechs are expected to do, they have to keep inventing courses and getting students signed up. In some cases, the courses are severely undersubscribed and on the brink of being unsustainable. The solution is not necessarily to cut the governance or cut the courses, but to actually invest in education. The pool of suitably qualified tutors can be very small, and small-town pressures to graduate students can be very real. We need to be resourcing these institutions. On top of this, those polytech councils will now be 50 percent externally appointed by people who are not necessarily connected to those communities in any way.

Therefore, we say that this bill is not helpful. If polytechnics are to flourish, the issues they have brought to the select committee need to be respected. Although I was only one of the Green members who sat on that committee, I heard a lot of the submitters and I read all of the submissions. It is simply not true to say that there was enthusiasm for this bill or respect for the proposal around governance. Instead, we have this very, very strange law, which nobody seems excited about, or proud of, or wants to speak very long upon, yet it will pass. No one will be better off and the real challenges in tertiary education have not been addressed. The Green Party is very aware of those challenges. We think that we should be addressing those challenges through legislation and through the select committee consideration. But those challenges have not even been discussed, because they are not on the table through this legislation. I have to say that this is a bad end to a sad year for education. We will not be supporting this bill. Kia ora.

TE URUROA FLAVELL (Māori Party—Waiariki) : Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. Merry Christmas to you, in case I do not see you later on, and a happy New Year. Kia ora tātou katoa e te Whare.

I do not think it is any surprise that every time the Māori Party stands in this House we stand firm, I think, and I hope, on the foundation of kaupapa Māori. What is kaupapa Māori? It is the inherited values of our ancestors. We hope that we bring those values to every debate as we seek to represent the authentic, independent voice of Māori in this Parliament. Central to our approach has been the commitment to kotahitanga, to a common unity of purpose. A commitment to kotahitanga is not mutually exclusive. It can also embrace diversity and difference. Importantly, it requires the representation of all interests within the scope of the overall design.

When we looked at the proposals for the new interventions framework for the polytechnic sector, we thought about how best to ensure representation issues were taken seriously. Our aspiration has always been for increased Māori representation on tertiary governance bodies, including mana whenua and Māori student representation. Yet the Education (Polytechnics) Amendment Bill moves in the opposite direction, in that the size of the polytechnic councils would be reduced from between 12 and 20 members to eight members, with four of the eight members to be appointed by the Minister for Tertiary Education. In effect, this means that there will be no guaranteed seats for staff, students, iwi Māori, and community representatives. This is completely against the aspiration we hold in the Māori Party, and as a consequence we voiced our opposition in our vote in the first reading. We knew that providing for only one community member would mean that most Māori representative seats would be scrapped.

There is no provision in the current legislation for Māori representatives of any kind. Although some might refer to the requirement of section 171(4) of the Education Act, that “It is desirable that the council of an institution should reflect so far as is reasonably practicable,—(a) the ethnic and socio-economic diversity of the communities served by the institution;”, in practice it is basically a toothless provision.

In the Committee stage I noted that we cannot rely on those sorts of clauses for the special status of Māori, because they do not address the constitutional significance of the Treaty in any debate on Māori representation. Our constituencies have elected us into Parliament to do everything we can to advance their aspirations. Fear of failure cannot be a justification not to try something. Our members have always urged us to act, believing that it is far better to try and fail than to fail to try in the first place.

During the Committee stage I put forward an amendment to establish a process for Māori representation that would be transparent and clearly stated, whereby the appointee truly reflects the values and aspirations of the community. The idea was to create not only a requirement for Māori representation, but also for it to come from across the board: two academic staff positions with one for Māori, and two student positions with one for Māori, as well as Māori community representation. All community representative nominations would need to at least be passed by local hapū and iwi. The amendments increase the membership of the polytechnic councils from eight to 12, and they reinstate compulsory seats for the vice-chancellor, academic staff, students, and community-appointed members. In addition, specific provision is made for Māori membership on the council in order to give real expression to the Treaty of Waitangi.

The issue of Māori student representation on councils has always been of great importance for Māori students and to Te Mana Ākonga, the association of Māori students across all campuses. That organisation has a Treaty claim to amend the Education Act to explicitly provide for Māori student membership, so the amendment we put forward was a positive signal to that very large constituency that there are members of Parliament who are willing to listen and to learn from their leadership.

The issue of a Māori staff representative has also been of much interest among our membership and, indeed, right across the education sector. We were keen that the polytechnic councils would be able to benefit from members who have the capacity to uphold academic standards in teaching, learning, and research. It was also a deliberate effort to try to layer in greater recognition of kaupapa Māori, in both standards and methodologies. Of course, it is not solely an issue of representation but is also one of the complexity of well-intentioned legislation with mismatched policy, inconsistent strategy, and mismatched business plans. I am reminded of the saying by another great Te Arawa philosopher: “Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic.”

The legislators, policy makers, writers, and architects of the tertiary education governance arrangements sure had the highest intentions, but if it does not make a difference on the ground then surely we need to take the risk and look for solutions that will. That was where we were coming from in terms of our bicultural model that recognises Māori representation on polytechnic councils. The Māori Party has greatly valued the support of the Waiariki Institute of Technology in developing this model. It is about representation within a new paradigm that was all about our recognition and representation against the Treaty model. What we want is very simple. As far as is possible, we want to see councils reflect the ethnic and socio-economic diversity of the communities they serve. It is pretty simple.

There is an important element to the discussion that I believe members of the House need to consider. If we acknowledge that the larger proportion of Māori constituents fall within the lowest socio-economic bracket, which we also acknowledge stems largely from Crown policies retarding Māori social and economic growth from as early as 1840, then surely it makes sound economic sense to recognise that the clauses alone will not serve the wider interests of the group. The greatest of high-flying intentions will amount to nothing unless there are faces at the table to speak to the immediate, short-term, and long-term needs of all the people across the community.

Inconsistency within the legislation, the Treasury allocation to each ministry, the policy writers’ approach to give actual meaning to these clauses, and the strategic and business plans within our public agencies are what have let us down. This repetitive failure forces us as a party to demand more on behalf of Māori, but what we are really asking for is clear consistency and equal access for all people within Aotearoa who sit every day within a less privileged position. Unfortunately for all of us, Māori make up a far greater majority within that grouping, and this is why we are forced to ask the hard questions.

At the select committee stage, Te Rūnanga o Manukau Institute of Technology took these views to the table. It recommended that consideration be given to the inclusion of a Māori directorate function, in its case known as Te Amorangi. In the legislation there is an acknowledgment of the high percentage of unemployed and uneducated tangata whenua in the Counties-Manukau area. Other submitters also echoed that view. The New Zealand Nurses Organisation suggested that diverse communities cannot be adequately represented by a single person. The students association of the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology also made the point that students are key stakeholders in polytechnics and contribute a lot to their councils, so their views should be heard.

It is all now part of the record that we were unsuccessful in having our amendments voted into law, but we tried, and we will continue to try, to ensure that polytechnics are of the people, that Parliament is of the people, and ultimately, that the people are why we are actually here. We will continue to work with the Minister to find a way to address our pleas, and we are hopeful of some momentum being gained.

In closing, I reflect on the Hon Trevor Mallard’s statement. Even he will acknowledge that if legislation is going to pass in this House and it can be done without Māori Party support, I suppose that is the situation in terms of the democracy of the House. But we have stated our case, and we will continue to state our case into the future. As a parting shot, I hope that if there are members who wish to espouse the place of Māori at the representative table, then over the holidays it would be good for them to look towards the correct pronunciation of Māori words as a starting point. It would then give some meaning to the notion of allowing Māori to be at the representative table. Kia ora tātou.

COLIN KING (National—Kaikōura) : It is a pleasure to speak to the third reading of the Education (Polytechnics) Amendment Bill. In doing so, I say that good governance is the most basic of needs for a successful polytech sector. No matter how we look at it, until now that has been lacking. This bill is an appropriate framework for that good governance model. The absence of good governance has seen many polytechnics lurching and staggering to perform their very basic functions. Good governance is the foundation of building a trusting relationship with others in the tertiary sector, like the industry training organisations, which are the industry representatives. That relationship, too, is lacking.

When we look at it, we can see that the Opposition members’ hissy fit is all about the reduced number of representatives on councils—going from 12 and 20 down to eight—but those members have failed to acknowledge the important role that industry training organisations have been meant to play in representing industry. Over the last 9 years of a visionless Labour Government, we have observed the development of a totally dysfunctional relationship between the Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics of New Zealand and the industry training organisations. It is called the “overlapping provision”. The less-than-optimum relationship has greatly hindered the performance of the skills and trade training sector. This legislation will develop the necessary framework to improve that essential relationship between industry and the industry training organisation sector. That is why we want to see a much stronger working relationship between polytechnics and industry training organisations. This Government recognises the importance of a dynamic and responsive institutes of technology and polytechnics sector, and in doing so has implemented a more progressive intervention framework that I am sure we in the House all agree with.

This intervention process has two new stages: firstly, specialist help, and, secondly, performance improvement plans before the existing Crown commissioner intervention. When enacted, this bill will ensure positive working partnerships between the Tertiary Education Commission, industry training organisations, and polytechs. Gone will be the wasteful days when polytechs headed to Wellington, asking for more and more money. Gone will be the rorts and the soft courses that did nothing but fund the wasteful appetites of dysfunctional polytechs. Gone will be the days when the Government masked the bailing out of polytechnics with cleverly named reinvestment funds to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

This bill is the architect of a first-class polytechnic system that will work in tandem with industry and the needs of its students. This bill is urgently required for good governance, but, equally as important, for a first-class tertiary education system, which this country needs going into the future. On that basis, I commend this bill to the House.

SUE MORONEY (Labour) : There we have it: at the eleventh hour in the third reading of the Education (Polytechnics) Amendment Bill, the Government is scrambling to find a reason to pass this appalling bill. Colin King, a Government member of Parliament, has come up with yet another reason why this bill has been put before the House. Apparently it is because it will force the industry training organisation sector and the technical institutes and polytechnics sector to talk to each other. I wish we could go back to the select committee deliberation on this bill, because I sat on the Education and Science Committee—as did Colin King—which considered this bill, and nowhere in this legislation is there any requirement for the industry training organisation sector and the technical institutes and polytechnics sector to meet and discuss anything. I think this demonstrates to us that the Government does not have a clue why it has put this legislation in place. At the eleventh hour a Government member is scrambling around trying to come up with something that makes him feel a bit better about it, but, sadly, the reason he has come up with has absolutely nothing to do with the legislation. It would be laughable if it were not so serious that the Government, in its scrambling around for reasons to justify this appalling bill, is taking the community voice out of our polytechnic sector.

These are challenging times, when we need a Government with a specific strategy for skills and skills development, particularly for our young people. As we speak, far too many of our young people end up on the scrap heap, in the dole queues, and on the unemployment benefit, and that number is growing. Sadly, that number will grow significantly in the coming weeks and months, as young people leave the compulsory education sector and look for training opportunities. Many of those young people will be looking to our polytechnics for those training opportunities. Unfortunately, this legislation does nothing to enhance their opportunities for training. It has been well traversed in this House that the Minister for Tertiary Education, who put forward this legislation, has been so short-sighted in her approach that she refuses to lift the cap on the number of students who can be trained through the polytechnic sector, even though growing numbers of people are going on to the dole queue. This Minister would rather pay the unemployment benefit to growing numbers of our young people than have them trained, their skills enhanced, and their opportunities in life enhanced by lifting the cap in the polytechnic sector.

Instead, what she has to offer this country on the last sitting day of Parliament is this bill. What does it do? It dumbs down the community voice, and it particularly takes away the voice of Māori on polytechnic councils. I think that is a disgrace in this day and age in Aotearoa. It is disgraceful, and it also show us exactly where this National Government stands in its complete disregard for the Māori people and the rightful place they have in decision making in this country. Yesterday this Government told Māori people that on only 1 day of the year they can fly a flag from some buildings—and it is a flag that only some of them agree with. They cannot have a seat around the table, and they certainly cannot have a guaranteed voice in the decision making on polytechnic councils, or on local authority bodies such as the super-city. Any time that Māori get some real power and some real decision-making opportunities, this Government shuts them down. So it is complete and utter symbolism to fly a flag on some buildings for one day of the year, when on every occasion that this Government gets the opportunity to keep and retain a Māori voice around the table it gets rid of it, as the Government is doing in this bill. It is not as if the Labour Party, the Māori Party, and the Greens have been asking the Government to add something that does not already exist; we have been begging it not to take away a voice that already exists for Māori around the polytechnic council table. But what has the Government done? It has completely ignored that.

The symbolism of a flag will not mean a thing if this Government will not give a real voice to Māori concerns, Māori futures, and Māori directions. That is why I was so surprised to see the Māori Party support this bill in its second reading. I think it shows how misguided the Māori Party members are. I know they were well intentioned. They thought they could talk this Government round. It was absolutely clear to every other party in this House that that was never going to happen. But in their naivety they believed that their party had a working relationship with this Government that meant it could make a difference. Well, that was naïve, and it continues to be naive that the Māori Party can trumpet the fact that a flag will be flying for a day but it cannot get any traction when it comes to stopping this Government from removing the voice of Māori from around the council table. That is the reality of the very sad position that the Māori Party is in today.

This bill has also been used to remove the voice of students. If there is a group that ought to have a say in the future of the polytechnic councils and what they deliver, it is, of course, students. They are, after all, the client. They are the people whom the polytechnic councils are there to serve. Yet if we join the dots between this legislation, put forward by the Minister for Tertiary Education, and another bill being promoted by this Government—it happens to be a member’s bill, in the name of Sir Roger Douglas, to make student union membership voluntary—we can see what is happening to the student voice in this country. There is a common theme, and it is about dumbing down the voice of students. That alarms me, because I wonder what the Minister and her Government have coming forward for tertiary education, if they are taking such major steps right now to dumb down the student voice.

It is not just the student voice that will no longer necessarily be around the polytechnic council table; it is also the representation of women. Although women were not specifically prescribed for in the current legislation that we are, fortunately, still working to, most of the gender representation of women on polytechnic councils came from the staff representatives and the student representatives. After 1 May next year they will no longer be mandated to be sitting around the council table. So I fear for the gender balance on those councils. Why is that balance important? Polytechnics train all of our nurses; the polytechnic sector trains all of our early childhood educators; and that sector provides trades opportunities for many, many women. So the voice of women on the polytechnic council is incredibly important. I am surprised to see a Government that is busy telling private businesses to get their act together in increasing the number of women on their boards, while doing everything in its power legislatively to ensure that there is not such a strong voice for women on the boards and councils that it has control over.

I am also concerned about the removal of the industry voice from the polytechnic council. If we hear one criticism about our tertiary institutions, it is that sometimes they care more about academic achievements and they are not so connected with industry and what it needs in terms of skill shortages and its training needs. This bill takes away the Business New Zealand representation and the union representation from around the table. So the very people who have an intimate knowledge of what the local workforce looks like are no longer around that table. I fail to see how that improves educational opportunities, how it improves training outcomes, and how it improves employment opportunities for our young people in the polytechnic sector.

In closing, I say that we have seen this before in this country, and it has been a dismal failure. This is going back to the dim, dark days of the 1990s. The last time a National Government tried this on, it was with our hospital boards. It appointed all of the members of hospital boards. It took away community representation then, and what an utter shambles that was! It was the forerunner to user-pays and the forerunner to privatisation. I hope I am wrong, but I see that around the corner for our polytechnic sector, as well. I am proud to stand here as a member of the Labour Party and oppose the third reading of this shocking bill.

Hon Sir ROGER DOUGLAS (ACT) : The Education (Polytechnics) Amendment Bill is, or at least it should be, all about students. It should be about which governance structure is most likely to deliver a quality product for the student: the subject and the skills that they require. But if we listen today to the Greens, to Labour members, and to the Māori Party, we would think it is all about representation on the board. Labour wants representation for the sake of it, whether or not the person is qualified. If we listened to the Labour Party, we would hear that we simply have to have a student on the board, whether or not the student is up to it. We have to have a staff member on the board—forget the conflict of interest. We have to have a union representative, we have to have a businessman on the board, and we have to have Māori representation. Nothing whatsoever is mentioned about a quality product for the student, yet I always thought that polytechs were there for the students. Labour members do not ask themselves what will deliver a quality product, but rather, they talk about the tokenism of having students or unionists. When Labour’s previous leader, Helen Clark, was Prime Minister, she sent out a letter at election time about education. She mentioned public schools 12 times in the letter, but never once mentioned students. We have heard that again today.

This sector needs to have a quality board at every polytech throughout the country. The fact is that we will have a quality board if the Minister appoints a quality chairperson and a quality deputy chairperson. If we get a quality chairperson and a quality deputy chairperson, they will ensure that a quality chief executive officer is appointed. If we have this in place, the system will work.

The first question any quality board will ask is what the needs of the people who live in this area are. It will ask what the potential students’ needs are and which subjects and skills they need. We are talking about having to have a student on the board—one student, picked at random. What about the 1,000 or 2,000 students who actually attend the polytech? They would rather have a polytech that meets their needs. They would rather have a board that understands their needs and is able to deliver quality governance. But, no! Labour would prefer to have a student, or a staff member, or a union representative on the board. It does not care about the quality of the product; it simply cares about representation.

Iain Lees-Galloway: Is that right? The staff members don’t care?

Hon Sir ROGER DOUGLAS: I am not saying they do not care. The first point is that it is not good governance to have a staff member on the board, in my view. It is not good governance to have a student representative on the board. Any board worth its salt will meet regularly with the staff representatives and with student representatives. There is one key thing that will mean this sector goes ahead, and that is the whole issue of the appointment of the chair and the deputy. If we can get that right, if the Minister selects those people right, then they will ensure we have a good chief executive and the whole thing will move forward.

Without that, frankly, we will have the shambles that the previous Labour Government created and left. It left the shambles of having 20 people on a board. It left the shambles of having every interest group on the board, and those groups did not go there with the view of looking at the governance of the institution as a whole, but rather, went there with the narrow interest of what was good for the student, what was good for the staff, what was good for the union, or what was good for whomever they were representing on the board. Any board functions only when the seven or eight members are looking after the overall governance and the interests of the institution. If we have that we will move ahead, and we will not have the shambles that Labour left us.

JO GOODHEW (National—Rangitata) : I rise to take a call in the third reading debate of the Education (Polytechnics) Amendment Bill. I begin by congratulating Sir Roger Douglas on bringing us back to what really matters—the students. The students really do matter—believe or not, I say to the Labour members—and because they matter, the governance of these polytechs matters. I will address, and perhaps counter, the culture of fear, evil prophecy, and scaremongering that we have heard about from the other side. This is not just today in the House; it happened repeatedly throughout the process of this bill.

There are 20 polytechnics. They have been allocated $596 million for 2009, and we as taxpayers should want value for money. We should want good governance. We should want delivery of good education standards coming out of these polytechs, and educational outcomes that improve those who actually study there. There are more than 186,000 students at our 20 polytechnics. There are 68,000 fulltime-equivalents and they deserve no less than good governance. The sector is diverse. There are many subject areas and many communities to serve. Polytechs need to run effectively; they need to run efficiently. So why do we need this legislation? Well, I ask members to think about the $416 million, good money after bad, that was spent by Labour in trying to correct—no, no, it just threw the money at the polytechs and hoped that they would get better from the gift. It does not work like that.

This bill does not remove the voice of students. It does not remove the voice of staff. It does not stop Māori representation, Pacific Island representation, or female representation. Believe me, it does not. Four members of a polytechnic council will be selected by the current council. They can be four students if the council wants them, four staff members if it wants them, or whoever it thinks represents the community. They can be four Māori.

Hon Member: The Minister’s choice!

JO GOODHEW: The current polytechnics will select them, not the Minister. The Minister will appoint four members. It is clear to me that Labour members have not been awake in the select committee process. They have not read the bill. Maybe they simply do not want to understand.

However, good governance is what polytechnics like my own, Aoraki Polytechnic, are looking for. They have accepted the challenge of making selections prior to the implementation date. They have said that they are looking for good governance skills, good high-level business and financial skills, legal skills, strategic thinking skills, governance experience, leadership ability, and knowledge of the sector. They have said that eight members can achieve that, and they look forward to being able to rise to the challenge of selecting four. They have also said to the Minister that they will be looking for her help in appointments to their council. Having 12 to 20 members on a council did not mean good governance, nor does eight. Good skills mean good governance, and eight members are plenty to achieve that. This bill addresses the issues within the sector. It is a good bill and I commend it to the House.

DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert) : I would like to take a call on the Education (Polytechnics) Amendment Bill, because at the end of that speech I was more confused about what we are doing here, at the end of the sitting, than I was beforehand. I will correct the previous member who was speaking, Jo Goodhew, on what the Waiariki Institute of Technology actually said about governance. It said that it wanted nine to 12 members. That is what the people in your community want, and you are telling them that they want something else. That is exactly what they want.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Eric Roy): Mind the pronouns. Do not include the Speaker.

DAVID SHEARER: I am sorry, Mr Assistant Speaker; I apologise. I sat through the hearing of the submissions by the Education and Science Committee, and I agree with my colleagues that they were handled with courtesy. We listened very carefully to those who came and spoke to us. But the overwhelming impression from those people who came along to submit to us was their unanimous disagreement with this legislation. It is bad legislation. This is what they said. The Universal College of Learning said it does not enable communities to be represented well. The Council of Trade Unions recommended eight to 12 people on the boards; the Waiariki Institute of Technology, as I have said, recommended nine to 12; and the Manukau Institute of Technology said up to 12. They wanted to keep their community input. Without the numbers, they did not believe they would be able to keep their community input. They did not believe they would be able to meet the gaps in skills.

Paul Quinn: Why? Did you ask them?

DAVID SHEARER: They run these polytechnics, as that member quite rightly knows. That is the reason why they believe they need to have those numbers. Unitec said that membership of eight would impact on the skills of the representatives. It recommended that discretion to increase the number to 12—

Paul Quinn: Why? What was their reason? They didn’t give you one?

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Eric Roy): Order!

DAVID SHEARER: Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. The bottom line is that there is an assumption here that somehow the system is broken because, as the Minister for Tertiary Education said, half a dozen polytechs are not financially viable at the moment. The bottom line is that, in the end, we are not sure that reducing the number of representatives on the boards to eight will fix the problem. We could be coming back here in a year or two to look at the polytechnic situation again, having realised that limiting the boards to eight representatives has not worked. Why? Because we have done no analysis. There has been no analysis of those six polytechnics to see what the problem is. Polytechnics such as Unitec, in my own electorate, have said that they have had a 13 percent increase in students and no increase in funds. That is one of the reasons why polytechnics are not doing well at the moment. They have not had the funding to meet their needs.

Sir Roger Douglas talked about the need to look at the student and the student’s needs. Yes, of course that is right, but then he digressed about the need to look at the boards, and that is exactly what this legislation that we are looking at does. Maryan Street mentioned the fact that all that is done by this legislation, which we are debating on the last sitting day of the year, is to change the boards, without any analysis of whether that will improve the functioning of those polytechs. I believe that it is a complete waste of time, particularly when submitter after submitter who came to the select committee unanimously disagreed with the legislation.

The Human Rights Commission, which does not have a vested interest, said one size does not fit all. We have an extraordinary range of polytechnics, yet we are restricting them to having only eight members: four appointed by the Minister, and four coming from the communities. A number of polytechnics have multiple campuses and multiple communities, and they will not be able to be represented under this new legislation. Their boards simply will not have the scope. It is not about numbers; it is about management. Jo Goodhew just said that. Why are we sitting in the House today, on the last sitting day of the year, debating the numbers? It does not make any sense. It is about competence and it is about community. Those are the key issues—not the numbers.

What else did the Human Rights Commission go on to say? It said that smaller does not mean better management. Again, I agree with the Human Rights Commission. I think Allan Peachey agreed with the Human Rights Commission, and so did other National members, who are feeling rather uncomfortable in their seats. People from their own electorates who had come in to submit were disagreeing with the legislation, which was being rammed down their throats.

The other thing that people brought up was their worry over the ministerial control. They asked where is the independence of these organisations; where is the independence of polytechnics to be able to run their own affairs, respond to their own communities, and respond to the business and work environment that is around them. That was what they were asking. They also asked why there are to be eight members. Eight is not a good number. They asked why we should not have an odd number of councillors; at least, that way there could be a majority, rather than the boards occasionally being tied four-each and unable to get a good decision.

This is a bill without any analysis of what the real problem is. It is designed to fix a problem about which we have no analysis, and it is being applied not to the polytechnics that are failing or not doing well but to all polytechnics, regardless of their size, regardless of their location, regardless of their make-up, and regardless of their community involvement. That is what is happening in this legislation. As I said, only a handful of polytechnics are not performing. It was mentioned to me that there were 13 percent more students but no increase in staff to support them. My colleague Sue Moroney also mentioned that the real issue is that student numbers are now being capped; students not being able to go to polytechnic is the real issue. It is not about reducing the number of board members from 20 to eight; it is about good management, and it is about polytechnics that are responsible and responsive to their own communities.

Quite bizarrely, the Minister said in her 20 August press release: “We are ensuring that in the future polytechnics have strong, skilled Councils, which will make them easier to govern, more effective, and responsive to their communities.” I am at a loss to understand how polytechnics can be more responsive to their communities with a smaller number of people from their communities on their boards. All of the polytechnics talked about the value of the range of experience they have on their boards, whether that experience be from the local community, the business community, the union movement, or Māori people of the area. All of the polytechnics spoke about the value of having those people on their boards. Now we will be restricting that responsiveness, as well.

Lastly, I will say that the proposal by the Manukau Institute of Technology that is part of this legislation has the backing of the Labour Party, even though we are voting against the legislation as a whole. Mr Stuart Middleton from the Manukau Institute of Technology has done an excellent job, and he deserves to be commended. He is a former teacher of me and of others in this House, and we support his proposal. Thank you.

LOUISE UPSTON (National—Taupō) : I stand in support of the third reading of the Education (Polytechnics) Amendment Bill in the name of the Minister for Tertiary Education. If I might say so, she is a hard-working Minister who is relentlessly committed to educational excellence.

I believe that the children are our future. We need to teach them well and let them lead the way. We need to show them all the beauty they possess inside, and give them a sense of pride to make it easier. Our young people deserve the best education possible. This bill will ensure better governance of polytechnics. It will ensure that our young people receive higher-quality education. This bill is about students and it is about what they deserve.

Polytechnics are extremely important to all of our local communities as well as to our national economy. We need strong institutions that are financially sound as well as responsive to the needs of their communities and their local economies—institutions that meet changing needs. This bill proposes that the membership of polytechnic councils be reduced in size from 20 to eight members. Submitters told us that they agreed that the number on councils was too high; they agreed that they wanted flexibility. That is what this bill delivers. Four members will be appointed by the Minister and four by the councils themselves. The Government will not dictate to the council how those four members are made up; the individual councils will have that choice. That allows them to choose what suits them best.

This bill is yet another fine piece of legislation that has been passed by the National-led Government, led by the fine Prime Minister, John Key. Goodness, I have lost count of how many bills we have passed this year! There have been over 70 bills and they are delivering the promises that we made to New Zealanders. They are delivering a brighter future for all. I commend this bill to the House.