Education Legislation Bill

I am very keen to take a call on the title and commencement of this piece of legislation, the Education Legislation Bill, because I am not entirely clear why this one is called the Education Legislation Bill, but the next one that we are debating is called the Education (Update) Amendment Bill when arguably the Government says they do the same thing—which is to update education legislation. So if that is the case, why two bills? Why are those members so disorganised that they could not get their act together and put it together in one bill, given that they are both omnibus bills anyway? In fact, they probably could have done a better job of drafting it.

Let us turn to the substantive issues that have been raised during the course of this debate. Part 2 of the bill updates education legislation, is broadly supported by members of the Committee, and was supported by the submissions that we received, with a few minor amendments. Part 1 of the bill—which is an omnibus provision because it amends a number of different policy areas within the Education Act 1989—does a whole grab bag of things, some of which are good and some of which are not good, and some of which have attracted considerable debate. The areas that have attracted the most considerable debate, of course, have been around the extensions to charter schools and the failure of the charter schools policy—as evidenced by the changes that are being made in this legislation. But there are further changes around the employment of a principal by more than one school board of trustees, on which the Government has not yet answered questions about how that is actually going to operate. So we could argue that this is the “Education Legislation (No Answers Yet Received) Bill” because we have not actually received answers on how those provisions in the legislation are going to work and are going to be applied. I think that that is actually quite significant, and it is quite important for the Government to participate in that part of the debate.

We also have concerns about school opening hours and how the consultation provisions around those would be applied. I want to be clear here that I do not actually have any concern about the consultation provisions in the bill—I think that the consultation provisions are perfectly adequate. All I am concerned about is that the outcome of the consultations is going to be inconsistent and that that is going to potentially create a nightmare for school communities where kids from the same family are split over more than one school. So I think that the consultation provisions are perfectly adequate—they are fine; they are robust enough—but, actually, I am worried about the outcome. At the moment we have a safeguard on that outcome by the Minister having to approve changes to school opening hours outside the existing rules, and this bill does away with those.

So, overall, the totality of the issues that I have just canvassed means that we cannot really support this legislation, even though there are aspects of it that the Labour Party is in favour of. We certainly want to see education legislation modernised, and Part 2 of the bill does a good job of that. There are aspects of Part 1 that, again, focus on aspects of the Education Act 1989 that needed to be updated, and we, again, are broadly supportive of some of those changes—but there are some of them that simply go too far, which means the Labour Party will not be able to support them.

I do, however—seeing as we are on the title and commencement, and I will try to be as relevant as possible to the title and commencement—want to commend the Minister for one thing: that is that the commencement clause in this bill is, at least, a nice, simple one. I have criticised the Minister and the Government for not drafting this bill in accordance with parliamentary norms, but the commencement clause, at least, has been, in the sense that it is very simple, and it does not have any retrospective provisions. That is a rare thing these days, because the Government is increasingly passing retrospective legislation. It also does not allow the Government to choose which parts of the law come into force at which times by Order in Council. It simply says that, effectively, once Parliament has passed it, it gets the Royal assent and then it becomes the law. That is actually a pretty positive thing, and the Labour Party will certainly support the nice, simple commencement of this legislation—although, as I have said, we will not support the bill.

Order! The time has come for me to leave the chair. The member Chris Hipkins, notwithstanding what it said on the clock, has 15 seconds left the next time we come back to it, because we were a little slow in starting the clock. I will report progress.

Debate interrupted.

House resumed.

The Chairperson reported the Judicature Modernisation Bill with amendment and that the Committee had divided it into 23 bills, and progress on the Education Legislation Bill.

Report adopted.

The House adjourned at 9.58 p.m.