Education Amendment Bill

I have Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 120, around the commencement of the provisions relating to partnership schools, and I am hoping, Madam Chair, and this is a bit of a plea—hang on, we’re going to have Mr Chair, who’s coming in to the Chair—that this is taken very seriously. The reason that we need to take my SOP, which argues the provisions around partnership schools to, effectively, not kick in until three months after the Wai 2770 claim has been heard—there’s multiple reasons for this.

The first reason is the Government talks a big game around Crown and Māori relations, but at the same time, and I want to go to the Minister’s actions with regard to this, a series of actions by the Crown have been not only arrogant and negligent—and I’d ask all members in this committee to listen to this time line, because it relates to the SOP that I have. Not only from a legal perspective should we be agreeing to my SOP but from a cost perspective, this claim is going to cost the Crown a lot more at the end of this because of the Crown’s actions, and I want to take you through them.

The Crown is served by a number of iwi leaders. They are served regarding this issue of partnership schools. Multiple grounds, from consultation to the impact to young Māori—a range of different issues are set out in a claim. The claim is made public. Many press releases are put out by iwi leaders. The Minister puts his head in the sand. He doesn’t bother to read the press releases, doesn’t bother to read the claim, and then, extraordinarily, in response to written questions from me, after months of iwi leaders being out there, like Sir Toby Curtis and Dame Iritana Te Rangi Tāwhiwhirangi, and people like Lance O’Sullivan, he claims—which creates another grievance for many of these iwi leaders—that the Crown has not been served.

Now, subsequent to that, we all know that he admits his error, and I want to acknowledge the reply that he gave to written question No. 15640. He threw Crown Law under a bus and said, “Well, actually, do you know what? Even though there are all these press releases, even though the Waitangi Tribunal claim’s on record,”—and even though he now claims he’s been getting weekly updates that monitor the claim—“I didn’t believe iwi leaders that this claim was served.” We now understand that Crown Law advised him of the error of advising him, even though he didn’t bother to do any due diligence himself, which does create bad blood between iwi leaders but also a number of people who have fought for this claim in the Waitangi Tribunal.

So I am asking the committee to please consider the relationship with iwi leaders and many Māori leaders who support this claim. Why are we pushing ahead with getting rid of the model when all the Minister needs to do is call them into his office, have a conversation, show them the respect that they deserve, and also acknowledge that he made some fundamental errors, instead of sending out a corrected question to myself?

Then, the other question that I have for the Minister is: he does say to me in parliamentary questions that he’s receiving weekly updates, so can he confirm for me that there has been discussion about an urgency application? I think journalists listening to the House today should be asking the questions of those iwi leaders, which is what is the contact between Chris Hipkins and those iwi leaders regarding the claim. What contact has the Ministry of Education had? What contact has Crown Law had? Has Andrew Little, as Minister of Justice, been involved in this? Have the Crown, in any shape or form—particularly given their negligence around process on these issues—bothered to contact those iwi leaders to talk about the claim?

I have a very substantial SOP that asks that the provisions of the partnership schools are delayed while these basic issues of decency and process are worked through, through the Waitangi Tribunal claim Wai 2770. I am asking the Minister in the chair: please, this is our last opportunity as a Parliament to understand what is going on and what you are thinking around the respect and the mana of these iwi leaders. Why are you ignoring this claim? Why won’t you just do the decent thing and delay those provisions until you’ve had an opportunity for the claimants to be heard?

Why can’t we do that? I don’t understand why we wouldn’t do the decent thing in this particular instance and give the mana and respect to those iwi leaders.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I want to put the arguments behind Nikki Kaye’s amendment on Supplementary Order Paper 120, because it goes to the heart not just of this legislation but actually to the New Zealand identity. You see—Mr Chair, I’m sure you’ll be familiar—there’s a debate over what the Treaty of Waitangi means. Does it mean, as it literally says, that our property rights are safe and that we all have the same rights and duties, and the Queen is sovereign? Or does it mean, as the courts have interpreted it for the last 30 years, that it is a partnership between two peoples coming together? So I’d like the Minister of Education to just tell us what the Government’s position is these days. Is it what might be described as the Don Brash description of the Treaty, one which I and ACT have some sympathy for—or is it the one that came out of the lands case in 1987? Is the Treaty a document giving individual rights or is it a partnership between two peoples? I’d very much like to know what the answer to that is.

Once the Minster’s answered that basic question—what does Te Tiriti mean to this Government?—then here’s another question: what is the standard for respecting a Treaty claim? This is not some vexatious claim put up to claim radio airwaves or make trouble or test the system; this is a claim with some of the most respected leaders in Māoridom publicly putting their name to it: Dame Iritana, Sir Toby Curtis—serious leaders of Māoridom who you would think, if the partnership principle of the Treaty has any weight, would be taken quite seriously. That’s the question: is this a high enough threshold for the Government to take notice?

Let me put some other context around this. In the Speech from the Throne of this Government, they said that there would be no more irrigation contracts except the ones that were in place, which would be honoured. I asked the Prime Minister in this House why the Government was honouring contracts with people creating irrigation channels—bits of concrete on farms. The Prime Minister said, “We’re honouring them because they’re contracts.” I said to her, why does that not apply to partnership schools kura hourua, and she had no answer. So what is the standard here? The Government says it believes in the Treaty as a partnership. It should be respectful of major figures in Māoridom bringing a Treaty claim over a piece of legislation, and yet it applies a lower standard of respect to this legislative process, to those claimants, to those students and sponsors and staff in partnership schools kura hourua than it does to irrigation schemes.

And here’s another standard. This Minister of Education in the chair has spent $1.5 million consulting people about what he thinks education should be like. He very magnanimously sends education officials to my office—I’m not sure if that’s a blessing, but he sends them anyway—and they ask me what I think, as a party leader, should be the future of NCEA or Tomorrow’s Schools. This is a Minister who is quite prepared to consult people, in a Government that’s quite prepared to honour contracts, but somehow the standard is that when senior figures in Māoridom come along and say “We don’t like this. We think this is a breach of the partnership principle of the Treaty.”, there’s no attention whatsoever.

Well, the Minister can stand up today and remedy that, and, if he doesn’t, I suggest some members of the Māori caucus might like to stand up and put him in his place, because they’ve got the power. You know, I’ll say to the Minister, “The only real important skill in politics is the ability to count, and 46 minus 13 is not a big enough number, mate.” So I’d ask the Minister: is he committed to sanctity of contract? Is he committed to the Treaty as a partnership? Will he commit to due process as he has with the rest of his education portfolio on this legislation? And, ultimately, will he support Nikki Kaye’s Supplementary Order Paper 120 so that this legislation goes through after we have heard from the Waitangi Tribunal on the future of partnership schools kura hourua?

The arguments around the establishment or disestablishment of charter schools were well canvassed earlier. The question before the committee is around two amendments put forward by the National Party—one in the name of Simeon Brown and the other in the name of Nikki Kaye—to delay the commencement of the provisions relating to the removal of charter schools. The Government does not support either of these amendments.

With regards to Simeon Brown’s amendment, he seems to have plucked a date out of thin air, 1 August 2020, from which they would apply. Actually, there are two separate issues here: one is that there’s a contractual process that the Government is going through with those schools at the moment. The timetables for that are all clear and have all been agreed, and I don’t want to create further uncertainty for those schools. There’s no need for an extension in the timetable for that, because the transition provisions cover any issues that have arisen from the existing contractual discussions.

With regard to Nikki Kaye’s amendment around the Waitangi Tribunal claim, I’m not going to break with the previous practice, which is that I’m not going to comment on a claim that is before the Waitangi Tribunal. That’s not been the practice of Ministers in the past, and my intention, as is the Government’s intention, is that we will follow the standard processes and practices that the Government follows in responding to that claim.

Before I give the call to the Hon Nikki Kaye, can I just say that this is a very narrow debate on clauses 1, 2, and 3. I have allowed the discussion to go a fair way beyond those clauses, but I’d like to encourage members to speak and relate their arguments to those clauses.

Mr Chair, when the Minister makes a number of comments in response to this Supplementary Order Paper (SOP), I think I do have the opportunity to respond to those comments. The first comment that I want to make is that he has referred to uncertainty around contractual processes. That is not a legitimate argument, from my perspective, because what we also know is that he is not someone who should be lecturing us about contractual processes, given that he actually publicly announced the termination of all of the schools before he had even gone through a legal process. That’s the first point that I would make.

The second point that I would make is that the schools themselves have already made the decision to go into a designated character model. They’re very aware of what the processes are in terms of transition. There is no argument around the fact that they do need that certainty. They have that certainty; that’s been made public. They’re communicating with the Ministry of Education. But I do want to raise that I am aware that there are some multiple issues whereby the ministry has said one thing and now the schools are having to go back and ask for clarity around aspects of where schools are going to be located in the future and what they were promised financially. So I don’t agree with the Minister around the fact that, somehow, we need to pass these provisions for some certainty for schools, given they’ve had uncertainty for a period and also given his actions previously around the contractual issues.

The third point that I want to make is: let’s talk about the tradition. The reality is that he knows very well that Ministers have, in the past, commented on Waitangi Tribunal claims. That is not correct. They have commented on Waitangi Tribunal claims. The second thing that I would say is that this is a Government that has argued for a new era of Crown and Māori relations. The reality is that he has been negligent, as has already been set out, around the process of this claim, and all that we’re asking—even if he doesn’t want to comment on the nature of the claim—is whether this claim is progressing, from the Crown’s perspective, even a vanilla statement that says why the Crown wants to pass a law in the midst of that claim being considered.

The reason New Zealanders need to understand this is that if my SOP does not pass, New Zealanders need to understand there is a strong likelihood that the grievance of the people who have made the claim will be significantly more. That is the reality. The Crown has an obligation to consider this claim in good faith, and what members of the committee need to understand is that the action of not even meeting with the claimants, but also having negligent issues around process, and then passing a law in the midst of that claim being considered, could cost the taxpayer additional funds. That’s the reality. That is what the hard, cold reality is of the Minister deciding to progress with the legislation at this time. We have not had a satisfactory answer about, one, what other Ministers may be doing in relation to this claim. And there is no argument that they can’t say they are considering the claim, they’re meeting with the claimants, they’ve got a time frame whereby the Crown is going to respond—that does not at all jeopardise the nature of the basic elements of the claim. And, also, I think there’s a basic decency that they need to know that.

The other point that I made—and, again, I would like the Minister to respond specifically to this—is totally separate to a normal claim that’s going through the Waitangi Tribunal process. As I understand it, there has been an application for urgency. So does the Minister have a view around this? Because, ultimately, this Minister’s warrant will be in question if the taxpayer has to pay an extra $20 million to the schools and to iwi leaders as a result of the Minister deciding to push the legislation through rather than wait for the legislative provisions to be considered properly as part of the Waitangi Tribunal claim. Then people in this committee need to understand that and properly consider my SOP, which says, “Why don’t we wait until that claim has been properly considered and then effectively let those provisions go through?” We don’t agree with the provisions; we believe the schools have been doing an amazing job for vulnerable young people. We completely disagree with the Government’s actions in this regard, but at the very basic level, why not show respect and mana to those iwi leaders and allow due process? It’s not OK to hide behind a claim that somehow Ministers have never commented on Waitangi Tribunal claims.

I move, That the question be now put.

Well, thank you very much, Mr Chair. Look, I think that there may be time to accept a closure motion from Kiritapu Allan, but it should be after the Minister has responded to some very serious questions that have been raised that he appears to have skirted around. I sometimes wonder what his caucus colleagues think about that.

Really, you can boil down the questions I asked in my last speech—what’s the standard for honouring contracts; what’s the standard for honouring the Treaty of Waitangi; how does this Government see the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements?—to a more practical question that Nikki Kaye has alluded to just now, and it’s this: what will the Minister do if he has passed this legislation and finds that the Waitangi Tribunal has an adverse finding? It’s going to be very difficult legally, but what about politically? Will he have the political capital within his own caucus to steamroll the Waitangi Tribunal? How will it make his Government look if the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations, sitting here, said, “Well, look, the Waitangi Tribunal is something that we take seriously some of the time.”? I think that’s a real problem. And what will it look like for his ministerial warrant if he ends up having to go to court or pay out compensation as a result of that tribunal finding?

I think that the committee, before members vote on this amendment by Nikki Kaye, deserves answers, because if Nikki Kaye’s amendment was to pass, then the problem that’s being highlighted that the Minister doesn’t seem to have an answer for would be alleviated. It would be simple. The potential problem of the legislation being contradicted by the tribunal would be solved simply by not having the legislation come into force for three months after the tribunal finding. That would give the House three months to make any necessary amendments, to give respect to the Waitangi Tribunal. It’s actually not particularly complicated.

But I’d also like to talk about the commencement date more generally. If we imagine for a moment that the Waitangi Tribunal claim and all of the problems—political and legal—that it presents were not in place, then we might ask ourselves: well, what does it mean for New Zealand generally to have a commencement date that would make partnership school contracts illegal while many of them still have several years to go?

If you will excuse me, it is necessary to introduce a little philosophy. F A Hayek, when he tried to define liberty in his 1960 book, The Constitution of Liberty, saw that there were real difficulties with restraining the State in a principled way. He found that sometimes it was necessary for collective action to take place, that sometimes it was necessary for rulers and Governments to take arbitrary action. Liberty wasn’t as simple as just saying, “Every man is an island and nobody can coerce anyone else.”, because there are such things as public goods. There are such things as useful regulations. He sought to answer the question: well, how is it that people can be free and live in a free society? And Hayek’s answer—which is pretty standard, it has to be said, through most of the legal profession—is that we don’t know what arrangements people will make individually or collectively, but they do need the ability, as Hayek said, to plan their futures without concern for arbitrary coercion by another or others. In other words, people would not be bullied and would not have the rules changed on them.

Funnily enough, children in the playground, including at partnership schools kura hourua, are aware of this. They know it’s not fair to change the rules mid-game, but what this legislation is doing by making partnership school contracts illegal while they still have several years to go—some of them go through to 2023, 2024—is violating the rules that Hayek outlined, that most of the legal profession agreed with, and that children in the playground understand: that it is wrong to arbitrarily change the law and screw up people’s plans. I could go on—[Time expired]

I seek leave to table a press release that has gone out in the last four minutes by Sir Toby Curtis, entitled “Urgency sought for hearing to address Māori being prejudiced by the Crown’s destruction of Kura Hourua Partnership Schools”.

Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is objection.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. This is an extraordinary situation and I would like the time of the committee to be able to read this press release that has gone four minutes—

No. Order! I’ve put the leave. The committee has not accepted it.

💬 Hon Nikki Kaye: But it’s a separate point of order.

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Yes, and I’m ruling on both of them. We’ve put the leave. The committee has not accepted that. As far as I’m concerned that’s the end of that matter. If the member has another point of order she can make it.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. So I accept that Labour members—I hope that it has not been Green members—have denied leave around me tabling the press release. Now I am asking the committee to have leave to be able to read out a statement by iwi leaders, which involves them putting an urgency application to the Waitangi Tribunal in the last 10 minutes.

Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? Yes, there is objection.

Thank you, Mr Chair, and I think we just need to take some time to reflect on what’s just happened. The iwi leaders have just put out a statement requesting urgency to the application to the Waitangi Tribunal. This Government continues to push this legislation through regardless of the fact that the iwi leaders have taken this application through and that there is potentially a claim which will need to be settled, and they are continuing their ideologically-driven decision to push this legislation through Parliament, which is going to shut down the partnership schools and destroy that model which has had a massive, incredible difference in some of our most disadvantaged communities.

I would have thought that members opposite, on the other side of this Chamber, would have had a little bit more heart, a little bit more kindness, and a little bit more aspiration for some of our most disadvantaged communities—the ones that they purport to represent, the ones that they are elected in many of their electorates, and what do they do? They come here and they ignore them. They come here and they ignore them and they have no compassion, no kindness, and no actual diligence to do their job as representatives of those communities.

So it’s a shame that we in this Chamber are going through this committee stage, where we are debating the issue of the title and commencement of this legislation. This is the most critical part that this Government could show some leadership on, in delaying the implementation of this legislation to allow for that Treaty of Waitangi tribunal claim to be heard and to be decided upon.

I have a Supplementary Order Paper which will give this Government some time to do that. The Minister sitting in the chair could take some notice and actually delay the implementation of this legislation until 1 August 2020, which is what I recommend in my Supplementary Order Paper, which would not only allow these partnership schools the time and the opportunity to be able to properly transition—not be shut down and then be made to reopen as a new model with very little time—but give them the opportunity to actually transition and then to actually be able to address some of these challenges. But it also allows for that Treaty claim to be heard.

But what do we see? We see silence from the other members of this committee. Not one member opposite has taken a call to explain what they are doing. I ask the Hon Peeni Henare to take a call. He represents the Auckland Māori seat Tāmaki Mākaurau, and I challenge him to stand up and take a call and talk about why he is not going to allow the Treaty of Waitangi tribunal claim to be heard urgently, why he is going to vote for this bill to go through quickly without that Treaty of Waitangi claim being settled first.

I challenge him to talk to his community and explain in this committee why he is going to make those schools close down before this legislation has been properly considered and before the Treaty of Waitangi tribunal has been able to conclude and hear the arguments. I challenge him to stand up and take a call, because I think of South Auckland Middle School. It’s a school which is in his electorate, a school which has made a massive difference in many of the young people that he represents, many of the young people who have been failing in the State school sector and whose lives have been turned around by that school.

I think of a family friend, Haimona, who has been a student at that school, who is one of the students there who has had his life turned around. He was going to James Cook college and his life was falling apart. He had the opportunity. His mother was someone who believed in her children, who wanted to see her son not go down the same path that the other children and other people she knew were going down. She had the opportunity to send her child to South Auckland Middle School, and that was the biggest decision she could make, and had the biggest difference in that young man’s life. I’m proud of where that young man is today. He succeeded at that school. He succeeded after that—going to Manurewa High School. He succeeded, and now he’s working for Air New Zealand and has a successful career ahead of him, all because of what South Auckland Middle School could do for that young man. The aspiration for that young man that that mother had and that school had turned his life around and changed his life, and he is one of the people who lives in that electorate of the member opposite, and I ask him to take a call.

I move, That the question be now put.

Members, relevancy is becoming an issue in my mind, but I will call the Hon Nikki Kaye.

Mr Chair, thank you very much for the opportunity. The reason why I want to read out this statement from iwi leaders is it is directly relevant to my Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 120, and it does change my SOP, potentially, in the committee’s views, and I want to raise this issue with the committee.

In the last, sort of, 15 minutes, Sir Toby Curtis, but other iwi leaders, have issued this press release. The heading is “Urgency sought for hearing to address Maori being prejudiced by the Crown’s destruction of Kura Hourua Partnership Schools”. Again, the committee needs to remember that my SOP is arguing that these provisions should wait until consideration of the Wai 2770 claim. What the iwi leaders have done is they have watched what this Parliament is doing. They are watching us on TV. They have done that. They have realised this bill has now come to the House and it’s being pushed through. They don’t get informed by the Minister’s office, and they have gone and worked with their lawyers to—effectively, while we are debating this bill—file an urgency application in the Waitangi Tribunal. So all members should be taking a call and standing up, and it’s good to see the Minister of Justice in the chair, because I expect Andrew Little to make a statement, after I have spoken, about what involvement he may have had in the process around the consideration of Wai 2770.

So this is what they say: “Claimants Sir Toby Curtis, Dame Iritana … Dame Tariana Turia and Pem Bird have filed for their Treaty of Waitangi claim, Wai 2770, to be heard by the Waitangi Tribunal with urgency.” Again, my SOP was tabled before this action occurred, but it does strengthen the case for my SOP. This has only happened in the last 15 minutes. “Their claim, on behalf of themselves and Maori generally, takes issue with the acts and omissions of the Crown in respect of the closure of Partnership Schools | Kura Hourua. Notable Maori educator Sir Toby Curtis said ‘the state system has been failing our kids for 178 years, we finally get a schooling system that works for our young people and Minister Hipkins acts unilaterally,’ ”—that’s right, unilaterally—“ ‘without considering evidence of their success, and without consulting with our people, to destroy them. This Minister has resorted to bullying to have his way, and in so doing has disproportionately prejudiced Maori compared to non-Maori. From where we stand, [the] Government’s claims that the reduction of child poverty and the welfare of young people is a paramount focus lacks substance, in the face of Kura Hourua being closed they are empty claims. Educational success is key for our whanau who have aspirations for a better life for their children and who are seeking to escape deprivation and poverty. The State Education system might be working for a lot of people, but for the last 178 years it hasn’t addressed Maori and Pasifika educational under-achievement, which these Kura Hourua were’, he said. ‘[The] Minister has decided without consultation to close all 11 Kura Hourua by Christmas, while shortly after committing to extensive consultation around the review of Tomorrow’s Schools and NCEA. Minister Hipkins has acted in concert with the [teacher] Unions to treat Maori differently and decide unilaterally to close 11 schools that were achieving extraordinary results for our young people, that is inequity, pure and simple’, Sir Toby said.”

So my SOP stands. The question that I have—[Bell rung]

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): David Seymour.

💬 David Seymour: Thank you, Mr Chair, but could I just say I thought Nikki Kaye had a minute to go, but I’ll keep speaking in support of her in any case.

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): My apologies.

💬 David Seymour: Would it be OK to give her minute back, Mr Chair?

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Yeah, I apologise to the member. My vision of the clock was quite clearly incorrect. I should not have given the call to the member, but I will give it to him. I would encourage members not to jump up, because I should have looked at the clock, and members had risen to their feet.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I seek leave to have my minute of my previous speech.

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Yes.

OK. So the point is that we have this SOP before the committee, and I plead with Labour and Green MPs. This is an issue of process. You’ve already terminated the contracts of all of these schools. All that these iwi leaders are asking for is due process here. They have watched Parliament. They have gone to the step of filing an urgency application in the Waitangi Tribunal. Why do we need to proceed today?

I would very happily stand up shortly and move a motion that we, effectively, halt this bill while we enable Ministers of the Crown like Andrew Little and like the Hon Chris Hipkins to consider this urgency application. That is the decent thing to do.

I am now looking at Gareth Hughes. Please, Gareth, understand that this urgency application has been lodged. You could stand up and take a point of order, recognise that urgency application, and, at the process level, please allow my SOP to go through. New Zealand First, wherever—there you are. Why can’t you consider these iwi leaders and the mana and respect that they have?

Thank you very much, Mr Chair, and for accommodating those circumstances that just arose.

Look, I’d just like to come back to the commencement clause and, again, the fact that it is almost immediate, and the contrast between that and the term of contracts. All of the Round 5 schools—you see, there were five rounds of partnership school authorisations—go through to 2023, if I remember rightly. Around four go through to 2022, and so on. The first partnership schools that were contracted back in 2014—their contracts only end at the end of 2020. So every partnership school is going to have its contract made illegal in the term that it was supposed to be valid. That’s quite aside from the fact that this legislation prejudices any possibility that those contractees to the Crown might have had in respect of renewal, because they were supposed to be six by six by six year contracts.

It goes to the heart of the theme that we’ve heard from Nikki Kaye—and I’ve mentioned it—about what it means to have a contract, what it means to have a partnership. It’s now being violated at two levels: one we’ve heard about, which is the contract between Queen Victoria and a number of iwi leaders back in 1840—widely known as the Treaty of Waitangi—but the other one is the contract between the Crown and a number of sponsors of partnership school kura hourua, which we call partnership school contracts.

I developed a little bit, in my last speech, why the ability to carry out your actions and make choices without concern for arbitrary coercion by another or others, as Friedrich Hayek I think very eloquently put it, is so important to the prosperity of our society. It’s not just people who are in partnership schools who might be concerned about the Government legislating away a contract. This is actually much bigger than a Treaty issue. It’s bigger than a partnership school issue, an education issue; it goes to the heart of whether people in New Zealand can trust Parliament and whether they can trust the Crown to do what they say they’re going to do. As I pointed out, even school kids playing pick-up games at lunchtime intuitively get it: that it’s not fair to change the rules halfway through the game just because it suits the people in power.

Now, if schools kids can work this out, then I wonder whether the Labour Party caucus can work it out, because so far in this debate they’ve made two contributions. I was very excited when Peeni Henare stood up to his feet—as I always am, but particularly in this circumstance—and I thought he was going to give a speech. And he said, “I move that the question be now put.” Now, he may have read the Standing Orders and understand that technically that is a speech, but I think he is capable of saying a lot more than that. He’s capable, but the question is, will he? Does he have the gumption to stand up and say, “Actually, I think my party’s wrong. I think the Treaty is more important than anything we’ve discussed in caucus. It’s part of my soul and the reason I’m here, and I’m going to cross the floor on this.” That’s the question. Will he or Kiritapu Allan stand up and say, “I move that the question be now put.”?

CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): Order! Order! Come on; let’s get to the substance of the debate, please.

Absolutely, because if they were to do that, then they would be upholding the basic principle that in the Treaty of Waitangi, in partnership school contracts and in a whole lot of other contracts with the Crown, people can trust that the Government will do what it says it’s going to do.

And this applies to people who contract to the Crown in the welfare provision space. It applies to people who have commercial contracts to build infrastructure. It applies to anybody doing business with the Crown of New Zealand. If we have this particular commencement date that makes contracts with the Crown illegal before they end, then that is taking this whole country to a very dark place indeed.

I rise to make comments on a range of matters relating to both the title and the commencement of this bill. In doing so, I want to first respond to some comments by the Minister of Education, who, in referencing the debate around whether or not this bill’s commencement should be paused until the Waitangi claim has been heard, said that it was not appropriate for him to comment on a claim before the Waitangi Tribunal. I would contrast that with what he thinks is appropriate, which is that he believes it’s appropriate to progress a piece of legislation that is subject to that very claim.

He thinks it is appropriate to move through the House a bill which will commence as soon as the Royal assent is given and which will, at that point, contravene the wishes of those making the claim. So it is very precious, I think, of the Minister to say that, oh no, he can’t make any comments but that, yes, he can act in a way that so clearly defies the wishes of the claimants in this case, particularly because what we are debating here in this clause is simply that this should be delayed—that the commencement shouldn’t occur until the claim has been heard. The application has been put in for urgency, it would be possible for this claim to be heard quickly, and it is appropriate, therefore, to consider that this bill should not come into effect for partnership schools until a later date.

The second point that I want to make—having canvassed that point, which has been well-canvassed by previous speakers—is this question of when, in fact, this legislation should come into effect, because, of course, it does have a number of other provisions relating in particular to polytechnics and universities and to national standards at primary and secondary schools. In relation to a number of those sections, there are very detailed transitional arrangements in the bill.

So it is always relevant when we’re looking at the commencement of a bill to question whether the commencement is the right commencement date, given the huge breadth of transitional arrangements that will be triggered at that point, because those transitional arrangements take significant effort of implementation for all of those involved. I am talking about the mums and dads sitting around school boards of trustees who, the minute that this commences—which, if we are to believe the Minister, will be the minute that this bill is given the Royal assent—will then be required not only to get their heads around what this new piece of legislation means for them and their schools but to get their heads around the transitional arrangements that will occur prior to the specific clauses coming into effect for universities, polytechnics, and councils. This means distracting themselves from the business of how to improve the rankings of our universities in international eyes and distracting themselves from the business of the pastoral care of their students in order to look at the transitional arrangements that need to be put in place.

The third point that I want to make is around this question of extensive consultation, because the Minister, in briefly mentioning the title and commencement, was clear that he believed that extensive consultation had taken place on each of the matters here. I want to contrast that and suggest that this is yet another reason why the commencement of this bill should be delayed, because we look at the Tomorrow’s Schools review which is currently under way—and which has been under way for many months—we look at the review of the education system in general, and we look at the strategic review of early childhood education. All of these reviews have been going for a number of months, and their report-backs have been delayed because the Minister is of the view that there is sufficient view in the community that needs to be heard and that it is not time yet for him to report. So, given the level of debate that we have had about these partnership schools’ clauses and given the statement today by Waitangi leaders in relation to their claim, would that not suggest that more consultation is required and that this commencement date is inappropriate? I would put it to you that it would.

I want to briefly mention an amendment in my own name. That is an amendment that would change the title of this bill. The title of this bill is particularly lacking in imagination and particularly lacking in any sense of vision or an idea for the future. It is simply the “Education Amendment Bill”—very dull indeed—and I think it speaks to the fact that the Minister doesn’t actually have a central governing idea or vision for what he will do for our students. There isn’t a concept of progress or achievement that he’s able to put in lights in his title to the bill, and I’d suggest to him that the prosaic title of “Education (University and Polytechnic Council) Amendment Act”, as suggested by my amendment, would quite properly describe the contents of this bill.

I move, That the question be now put.