Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Bill

Right, the House is resumed. Welcome back, everyone. When we finished, prior to the dinner break, we were about to start the third reading.

on behalf of the Associate Minister of Education: I move, That the Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon SCOTT SIMPSON: I’m pleased to bring this bill to its third reading. Today marks an important milestone in reforming the early childhood education (ECE) regulatory system. To recap for the House: this bill is part of the Government’s response to the Ministry for Regulation’s regulatory review of the early childhood education sector. The review identified a number of issues with the approach to regulating ECE, in particular the following: a lack of clarity around regulatory decision-making; a lack of role clarity and accountability of the regulator; and, thirdly, a reactive approach to compliance monitoring.

The bill addresses these issues so that parents who use licensed or certificated early childhood services can have confidence that their children will receive quality education from a service provider that is supported and incentivised to keep children safe while in their care. The Director of Regulation, a new role established by the bill, will be responsible for licensing and certificating services and for proactively monitoring and enforcing compliance with regulations that are underpinned by a clear legislative purpose and objectives. The Director of Regulation will also be required to adhere to guiding principles that make children’s health, safety, and wellbeing paramount.

The bill has clarified the purposes and objectives for the regulatory system. Service providers will have greater clarity and certainty about regulatory requirements. They will also receive information, support, and guidance from the Director of Regulation on how to meet these requirements. The bill enables regulations to be made that would allow the Director of Regulation to use a graduated set of enforcement tools. This would enable more proportionate approaches to be taken to enforcement than is possible under the current regulations.

The bill’s commencement date was amended at committee of the whole House to be 23 February 2026. On this date, the role of the Director of Regulation will be established in the Ministry of Education. As has been said at first and second readings, responsibility for these regulatory functions and the role of the Director of Regulation will be transferred from the Ministry of Education to the Education Review Office by a separate bill. This will address the lack of clarity and consistency the review identified in relation to regulatory decision-making.

The Government is committed to the successful implementation of this bill, which will update the early childhood education regulatory system and align it with good regulatory design and practice and improve its effectiveness. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to make a contribution in the third reading of the Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Bill. Sadly, in the committee stage that we have just completed, none of our suggested name changes made it through the amendment process, so I suppose that’s the one we’re going with.

I just want to make a few high-level comments before going into some of the detailed points that we want to make in terms of this bill. I think it’s really important for those that are listening at home to understand that this bill shifts the focus away from children, who should be at the heart of any changes to early childhood education. The role early childhood education plays in a child’s life is immense, and what happens in their early years, including how they learn, affects them for ever.

Narrowing the focus on the kids and loosening the rules from centres may result in greater risk of harmful situations and lower quality of education, and this opens the door to early childhood education (ECE) centres operating at the bare minimum for profit, which will erode the quality of our youngest children’s learning.

It was really concerning to receive really thoughtful submissions and contributions from the public and two that I want to highlight, in particular, in this contribution, are the submissions from the ECE Parents Council Aotearoa. Early on, they say they are disappointed in the lack of consultation in the development of this bill, that it has been rushed, it was opaque, and it compromised consultation. What the ECE Parents Council of Aotearoa say is that it excluded the very stakeholders it claims to serve—that’s parents, families, and whānau. They say that by sidelining parents’ voices and experiences with ECE, the process undermines the legitimacy and any resulting changes.

They also pointed out in their submission, as was pointed out by many of the contributions in the committee of the whole House stage, that this waters down Māori as tangata whenua and Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Many times, the opportunity was put to the Minister to engage in debate on that, to consider amendments put forward by my colleagues, to answer questions, but the Minister was very dismissive, yet submitters highlighted that there is an omission of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. One of the central criticisms is its failure to acknowledge Te Tiriti o Waitangi. We talked about kōhanga reo, we talked about puna reo, but we also talked about all early childhood centres.

So the bill does not recognise Māori as tangata whenua nor ensure Māori participation in decision making, and the concerns persist that Māori language, culture, and pedagogies will not be adequately supported and the omission threatens aspirations for bicultural and culturally responsive ECEs. The ECE Parents Council says that the design hides major quality reductions behind intimidating jargon and complexity for whānau.

One of the key concerns raised is not having children at the centre of the purpose of early childhood education. Many submitters pointed out that the inclusion of and embedding of workforce participation as a core purpose—a core purpose—shifts ECE away from child development and learning and family support. Education legislation, they say, should have tamariki and their learning at its centre—social, emotional, physical and cognitive—rather than adult employment needs.

I want to also draw on the submission that we received from Mana Mokopuna, the Children’s Commissioner. They too pointed out that this was being pushed through while things were still being worked through, that it fails to ensure the rights of mokopuna are the first and primary consideration in ECE regulation and decision making, and also that it fails to ensure that Te Tiriti o Waitangi is a primary consideration in ECE regulation and decision making.

They recommended that actually this bill be paused until work on all the proposed reforms had been completed and further consultation was undertaken with key stakeholders on final reform proposals. They also recommended that the Government undertakes a child impact assessment on the final reform proposals to ensure they uphold children’s rights and prevent or mitigate negative consequences for children.

They also, though, given that the Government is clear that it wasn’t going to pause or slow down, or—you know, we had questions and contributions on the commencement date and those suggestions around that were also dismissed. So Mana Mokopuna had made recommendations that if the bill were to proceed, there were a number of things that it should be amended to, which included recognising and protecting all children’s rights under the children’s convention—sadly, that was ignored in the previous stage; explicitly stating that children’s rights are the first and paramount consideration in ECE regulation and decision making—sadly, it isn’t, and parents working is in there with the primary objectives of these changes; clearly state Te Tiriti o Waitangi must be given effect in ECE regulation and decision making—I don’t think anybody in the House is surprised that the Minister David Seymour rejected that suggestion—and require the Director of Regulation to undertake the child impact assessments to ensure they are exercising their functions, duties, and powers consistently with the children’s convention and Te Tiriti o Waitangi—again, all ignored in the previous committee of the whole House stage.

There are real concerns that this is going to lead to the lowering of the quality and the deregulation in the early childhood sector. Recently, I attended a kindergarten meeting on behalf of the Hon Jan Tinetti, who cannot be here today to give the speech as she is remembering, along with others, Pike River and the anniversary of that event. So I attended that meeting on her behalf, and they played a documentary about what has happened in Australia—the prioritising of the privatisation of early childhood education, the profit-making in early childhood education, the deregulation in the sector, and the disastrous impact that that has had.

It was really concerning to all of us who were at that meeting that it feels like and looks like, and here tonight we have in the third reading steps that could be working towards a very similar situation that we are seeing in Australia. So we only have to look across the Ditch to see the disastrous impacts of deregulation in the early childhood sector education sector could have here in Aotearoa.

So we raised these concerns, these points, and we put forward amendments for the Minister to consider. We outlined the concerns of submitters: parent voices ignored, the voice of Mana Mokopuna, the Children’s Commissioner ignored. Whose voices are being prioritised in this legislation change? Once again, I have to remind the House that this is actually as a result of a coalition agreement. The regulatory impact statement pointed out that there is a problem definition, that there has been a rushed process, there hasn’t been sufficient consultation, there is evidence lacking in many areas, and we should all be very concerned here in the House tonight that this type of lawmaking is once again going on.

Last week, I stood and talked about how policies were not educational; they were ideological, and here is another example of that. It is political and ideological and it is based on something the Minister campaigned on and negotiated into a coalition agreement. It does not put children, our babies, at the centre of this decision making. We do not commend this bill to the House.

Before I call the member, can I just remind members about referencing members who are not in the House. Just a reminder.

Hon Dr Duncan Webb: Point of order, Madam Chair. I’m aware of the convention and Speakers’ rulings on not mentioning the absence of people who aren’t here, but the Speakers’ rulings do also point out that there is a balance to be struck and that there are instances where the absence of a member is so significant that it’s appropriate to identify the fact that they’ve chosen not to participate in the House at that given time. So I’m just wondering whether you’re saying that the member’s reference recently didn’t meet that threshold, or whether you’re just making an observation for our guidance.

Well, wonder away, but it was a general reminder to members. I’ve done it on several occasions in the last couple of weeks, but obviously we need to keep remembering.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. For the House , the context of this bill is that the Associate Minister of Education essentially wants to—to put it plainly—destroy our education system. But how did we get to this stage in the first place? Well, like the previous speaker, Willow-Jean Prime, said, it all started with the coalition agreement and also with the desire that they are going to get the Ministry for Regulation to do this survey and then consult on what is going to be happening. Yet as we see from the report of that bill, and as I see when this bill went through select committee stage when we did ask the Minister questions, when we did ask officials questions—there wasn’t a clear link between what they produced and what is being produced here as the final form of this bill.

Despite the fact that, during the committee stage, the Minister said on multiple occasions that this has been consulted on, we’ve done a survey. That survey is not the same thing as a bill and a consultation on a particular bill—as we’ve seen in the regulatory impact statement and as the officials themselves have expressed. The bottom line of this—and, again, as we are drawing on different resources because, as we said, the consultation process has been opaque—is the fact that it’s about cost, but not actually about children or safety.

One should expect that children are being placed at the centre when we are making decisions on education, but it is not the case with this bill. In fact, for a political party and for a Government who love to talk about red and green tape, we’re seeing an awful lot of blue and yellow tape when it comes to bills like this and the introduction of a ministry or the introduction of the Director of Regulations.

But on this bill and what some of this bill is doing, I think it needs to be mentioned, first and foremost, the lack of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in this bill. The fact remains that Te Tiriti o Waitangi is for everyone. We have a Minister in the chair who wants to talk about, “Well, what happens for the Chinese people?” You know, as a Chinese person, I can say, hand on heart—which the Minister couldn’t—that Te Tiriti is for everyone, that tauiwi [non-Māori] of colour are here to honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

What we are seeing is that the Director of Regulation will also be overseeing kōhanga reo and puna reo. But there is no requirement for this director to have any understanding of Te Tiriti o Waitangi; any understanding of what is expected of that person when it comes to the oversight and potentially setting policies and potentially even intervening and assessing and quality controlling kōhanga reo or puna reo without an understanding of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. As we see in the state of te reo Māori report by Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori, the number of kōhanga reo or Māori-medium early childhood education (ECE) centres in Aotearoa has reduced. That should be a concern for everyone in this House. That should be what we’re discussing here. That should be what we’re seeing in terms of the bill in front of us, how we place our tamariki and mokopuna at the centre of our decision making.

But, no, instead what we see is a bill that creates more bureaucracy and shifts the obligation from the Ministry of Education (MOE)—from the Secretary for Education—into this ephemeral Director of Regulation that the Minister himself, through the committee stage, could not clearly articulate what that person is really going to do. To be fair, the Minister spent a lot of the contributions in the committee stage throwing little comments and patronising comments here and there about like, “Oh, that member isn’t listening.” You know, that’s fine. Kei te pai. We forgive that Minister. We know the Minister has been a little bit sensitive recently considering all of the other projects within education have failed and fallen flat on that Minister’s face, but it still doesn’t excuse that Minister and the Government from introducing a bill that is going to actively harm our tamariki.

What is also peculiar about this bill—and, you know, again, the Minister liked to, during the committee stage, talk about the fact that, in terms of the principles, the purpose, in terms of the objectives, that’s existing in the current legislation. But you know what isn’t existing in the current legislation? The idea that ECE is there to support parents to work. That is the most peculiar thing to put in the Education and Training Act. The Government is saying, “You know what? We want our early childhood education system to be in place, and its sole purpose is so that you can spend as little time from your children as possible.” That is what is happening here and that’s what that clause is really saying. Rather than saying we want to provide jobs, we want to provide sufficient resources so that way for families, for whānau, they’re able to spend as much time as possible with their children, with their tamariki, what we’re seeing is now that a purpose of this bill is, “We want you to just work and leave your child to be babysat by ECE.” That is what it’s saying here in this bill.

The thing is the Minister talked a lot about what’s happening here. But to be honest, talk is cheap. There is no substantial evidence in here and no international evidence that we can see where, if we have an ECE system that does not centre the experience of the children and the staff who work in those ECE centres and the teachers but instead focuses on the privatisation of ECEs and how we can squeeze as much money out of parents as we can, there’s no international evidence that that is going to provide a safe space where tamariki will have a sense of belonging, where they’re able to learn, and where they’re able to thrive.

We have seen evidence in Australia of what happens when you deregulate the ECE sector. We have seen harm to their children, and we have seen systemic harm to their children. Because, you know what? For the governing members, this is going to be their legacy: the legacy of putting our children in harm’s way. Every single parent, when we’re looking at the survey that’s being produced, I do acknowledge the fact that for parents, the most important issue—the most important thing for them—is to ensure that their child is safe in the ECE centre. Because that is their taonga that they are placing in the hands of someone else. That should be what’s really important here. But what are some of the criteria that ensure safety and health? Not a Director of Regulation. No, it is having good ratios, it is having qualified teachers, it is putting children above profit. They are the things that are going to be benefiting. They are the things that are going to be most reassuring for our parents.

I gave the Minister an example of the play sand and asbestos that we’re seeing currently that’s a live issue. And the Minister couldn’t even respond on how the Director of Regulation would work with MOE in that situation to resolve the issue. If the Minister himself could not even respond on a bill that he has introduced, what confidence should the public have on this bill and on their vision and this Government’s vision for early childhood education?

But what I will finish with is the Green Party has a solution. In our Green Budget, we have made a commitment that we will bring ECE into the public system like schools. We will make sure that there are qualified teachers in our ECE centres. We will ensure that Te Tiriti is front and centre in ECEs because it benefits all children. We will ensure that the teachers are well remunerated and well resourced for the work that we do, because we are here for our children.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. On the same day that the Education and Workforce Committee sat in this building and heard from the Education Review Office on the implementation of maths and English, and the success that that has been—unprecedented success—we continue to have an Opposition that says no, that doubts, that doesn’t want to have confidence in a Government that’s actually delivering educational results for parents. So trust that this bill, in relation to early childhood education, does what it says on the tin. For once—for once—I ask the Opposition to just say, “Hey, we’re going to support this because this is a Government that’s delivering for parents and for education.” I commend it to the House.

I think the Opposition is reading a different bill to the bill that I think we on this side of the House are reading. They talked about profit in the early childcare centre area; that’s been around for years. There’s been a strong private sector component to the delivery of early childhood education.

The second thing they talked about is saying that the child is not at the centre. I invite them to look at new section 14, inserted by clause 5 of this bill. What does it start with? It starts “set and implement minimum”—so you’ve got to be above that “standards to provide for quality early childhood education that allows all children to establish strong foundations for learning, well-being, and life outcomes;”. That sounds like putting the child at the centre.

The second bit there they talked about is the choice of parents to go to work. Well, guess what! That’s the reality. Most parents want to get out and go to work and have their children be looked after properly.

The next two things: they’ve also talked about the safety of their children—that is one of the supporting objectives right below that—and then improving educational development outcomes for those children.

I think they’re reading a different bill to the one that we’re reading. I commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā rā koe e te Pīka. Tēnā rā tātou e te Whare. E tū ana ahau ki te waha i ngā kōrero mā Te Pāti Māori i te pō nei, me tēnei pire e hāngai ana ki te mātauranga.

[Thank you, Madam Speaker. Greetings to us all in the House. I stand to give voice to the comments on behalf of the Māori Party tonight and this bill that relates to education.]

Te Pāti Māori opposes this bill, which in our view applies regulatory standards principles to early childhood education (ECE), in a violation of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, while placing profits over the wellbeing of our mokopuna. This bill completely flies in the face of proven kaupapa Māori movements and efforts to restore the rightful place of tikanga and te reo Māori in the only country that will for ever remain the permanent home of taonga tuku iho, inherited to us by our tūpuna. E te iwi, we continue to see sustained attacks on Māori initiatives, undermining kaupapa Māori education, pushing policies on to our whānau, and championing privatisation over whakapapa. Te Pāti Māori stands with our people, who are the only true kaitiaki safeguarding one of the most important Māori institutions ever created by our kuia and koroua. We stand with you in full opposition to the direction this Government intends to take on Māori education.

Education should be led by experts, not economists. The whakapapa of this bill shows that these reforms never had the best interest of our tamariki at heart. Econo—econom—tēnei reo Pākehā, he āhua uaua mōku [this English language, it’s a bit difficult for me]. Me kōrero au i roto i te reo Māori, he pai noa iho tērā. Ko ngā tāngata e whai pēhi nui ana ki te ao penapena moni, nui ake i ngā kaiako i roto i te kura. Ko ngā tāngata kua whai wheako i roto i ngēnei momo wāhi, i roto i ngā kura kaupapa, kua kitea ka utaina ko Te Whare Tapawhā o te tamaiti, i mua rā anō i te pūtea.

[I should speak in Māori; that’s quite easy. The people who are subjected to suppression in the financial savings sector, they are more than just teachers within schools. The people who have experience in these types of places, within kura kaupapa, it has been seen that the holistic health of the child is addressed long before any funds.]

Lowering safety, building, and teaching standards will reduce the quality of our early childhood education. This bill will push the wages of early childhood educators down by removing the need for qualifications. Now our kaiako, holders of one of the most important roles in society, who have been historically underpaid, are having their wages diminished even further. They will suffer, the quality of teaching will suffer, and, ultimately, our mokopuna will receive a worse-quality education, all because of this Government’s agenda to maximise corporate profits. There is no table fit to make decisions about the education of mokopuna Māori [Māori grandchildren] without Kōhanga Reo and Te Rūnanga Nui o ngā Kura Kaupapa Māori at it. They are more equipped than any Government body to know what our tamariki need, not just in the classrooms but for their future.

This bill is a violation of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. It will remove the legal requirements for the ECE sector to acknowledge Māori as tangata whenua, to support children’s rights to cultural confidence, and to teach our tamariki about Te Tiriti o Waitangi and our history. This is a continuation of the assimilation agenda that has dominated the education system since the Native Schools Act 1867. We cannot afford to take a step backwards in early education. We cannot return to a time where mātauranga Māori was sidelined and speaking te reo Māori was punished. Research shows that a strong sense of identity is central to the success of tamariki Māori. Instead of removing Te Tiriti responsibilities, defunding key programmes, and continuing to allocate just 1 percent of the total education budget funding to Māori education, the Government should be investing in the Māori educational systems that are already delivering for our tamariki.

In conclusion, as it currently stands, this bill will violate Te Tiriti o Waitangi, harm our kaiako, and harm our mokopuna. The Government must be held accountable for its commitments to the recommendations made in Wai 2336. That’s means creating stand-alone legislation with policies specifically designed to support Māori education and give whānau real, meaningful choices. Our mokopuna deserve an education system shaped by their needs, which must be led by the total immersion Māori education sector. Ko ngā hua kei roto, ko ngā rongoā kei roto i tēnei ko te uta i ngā penapenanga moni ki ngā kura kaupapa, ki ngā kōhanga reo puta noa i te motu. Tēnā rā koutou.

[The benefits within, the solutions within this, are the contribution of financial savings to Māori medium schools, to kōhanga reo all across the nation. Thank you all.]

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the Greens, supporting the comments by my friend Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan. I begin with a whakataukī. The whakataukī goes, “Ko te manu e kai ana i te miro, nōna te ngahere; ko te manu e kai ana i te mātauranga, nōna te ao”.

[The bird that partakes of the berry, theirs is the forest; the bird that partakes of knowledge, theirs is the world.]

The people over there might appreciate that. The bird that partakes of the berries of the forest, their domain is the forest. But the bird that partakes of the berries of knowledge, their domain is the world. The issue there is, of course, what happens if you privatise those berries? What happens if you swap out those juicy berries and replace them with burnt school lunches?

As we were going through the committee stage, I was reading the select committee report and I was worried. I was worried about the digestive tracts of our National Party colleagues who once again have to swallow another “Burnt School Lunch (ACT Party) Bill”, because we’ve had the Regulatory Standards Bill go through the House, we, of course, have the Ministry for Regulation, and now within this bill we have a Director of Regulation. It’s Orwellian in its reach. It’s Orwellian and its doublespeak because who is going to regulate the regulators? These people are going to trip over themselves trying to do the job, and trip over themselves to figure out what exactly they are doing.

When we posed questions to the Minister at the committee of the whole House stage, the answers were less than fruitful. I only have to look at the select committee report and notice that, actually, the commentary which comprises the differing views outweighs the rest of the report. I could only surmise that there was a bit of Stockholm syndrome happening for our National Party colleagues who were forced to once again push through another ACT Party bill under duress.

One of the questions that we asked the Minister, and I think it’s really important to put on record again in this third reading, was about the role of the Te Tiriti o Waitangi. I get that that side is completely allergic to Te Tiriti o Waitangi. They are allergic to the constitution, they are allergic to the founding document of our country, but it actually is important. It is an important document and there are a lot of people around Aotearoa who recognise that importance, but we understand that their allergy is very real on that side of the House.

So, instead, we asked the Minister, “Well, actually, what about the benefits that Te Tiriti o Waitangi brings? What about the benefits around te reo, around cultural competency?” You’re going to have this Director of Regulation, but how are they going to support kōhanga reo? How are they going to support puna reo? How are they going to be culturally competent to actually get in there and to help those Māori-medium setting early childhood education places? We did not get an answer. And so we’ve got the Regulatory Standards Act, the Ministry for Regulation, and this new Director of Regulation and no clarity from this Minister or this Government.

The other question, and it was picked up by my friend Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan, was around ratios. This is an incredibly important issue within the early childhood sector as well. The health and wellbeing of our tamariki and our mokopuna is incredibly important. The working conditions of our teachers—those are the learning conditions of our children. So it is important that we do everything to support teachers as well. So we posed questions around the health and wellbeing: what is in place from this Director of Regulation? How can this person be used to actually address some of the health and wellbeing issues that are very live issues within the early childhood sector, particularly on ratios? How will they make sure that our tamariki and our mokopuna are well looked after? Every parent in this House will know that looking after babies is a lot different than looking after toddlers and a lot different than looking after older children as well. So that’s why ratios are really, really important. But where is the follow-through? Where is the link-through?

We did get one response saying that “Actually, this is going to be a compliance thing, and those will be made by the policy makers.” But where is the link? We’re going to have all of this regulation, and we’re going to have all of this “yellow tape”, as it has been put, and the guise has been around deregulation, around getting rid of all this other sort of tape, but, actually, we’ve got lots of yellow tape that is happening. There is no clarity at all about how this is going to help our tamariki and mokopuna, and how this is going to help those people that are in front of our tamariki to do their jobs. We do not commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is the third reading of the Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Bill, and some people might have mistaken it for being a Treaty bill, but this is about making sure that there is actually a position that is created, which is the Director of Regulation for early childhood education.

No one is imagining that that person will be the one who goes into all of the different kinds of centres. There will be a team of people around this one person, so I’m sure that if there are other skills that are needed, they won’t need to reside in one person. This is a sensible change, and I commend the bill to the House.

Well, we follow the soothing tones of Vanessa Weenink. You know, Erica Stanford, the Minister of Education, talks a big game on educational achievement, and that’s OK—that’s OK. She talks a big game, but we’re up for more educational achievement. We want our kids to do better, and so with Minister Stanford, we can at least have a debate about how we get there. We all want our country to succeed. We want our kids to do as well as possible.

But with the Associate Minister of Education, David Seymour, it’s a whole other kettle of fish. This is the man who brought New Zealand millions of burnt plastic school lunches. He’s the man who subjected the nation to months and months of needlessly divisive undermining of our country’s race relations with the Treaty principles bill. He’s the man who put in place the charter schools framework that allowed in West Auckland over the last few weeks a bizarre, hostile takeover of a highly regarded local high school, Kelston Boys’ High School, that has only just been resolved with this dodgy community organisation who was trying to mount the takeover withdrawing their expression of interest.

And so to let David Seymour loose on the early childhood education (ECE) sector is a cruel trick to play, because—I think for most people in this House, actually, and certainly for members on this side of the House—the early childhood education sector is one of our most treasured parts of the education system. We entrust our most vulnerable, our youngest children, into the care of an early childhood education sector. We want them to be safe. We want them to be well looked after. And yet this bill raises all sorts of alarm bells with right-thinking people, because David Seymour, with all of the kind of right-wing libertarian baggage that he brings to this Parliament, has set out to reform the regulatory system within which early childhood education operates. He’s put in place a regulator that has—from our reading, our interpretation of the provisions in this bill—a mandate that has shifted away from education and the wellbeing of children.

He’s taken the regulation of the early childhood sector out of the Ministry of Education. Well, why? Is it not education? Why wouldn’t it sit with the rest of the education system? It doesn’t deserve the same kind of priority that tertiary education does? It doesn’t deserve the resources and the focus that our compulsory education sector does? Why? The Government benches haven’t been able to answer that in the course of these three readings and committee of the whole House stage. What are we supposed to think when not only is he taking it out of the Ministry of Education but, in the mandate and the framing of the mandate for the regulator, they explicitly say that the purpose is to give parents the option—the choice—to be able to enter the labour market?

Now, we all know that’s a big part for parents all over New Zealand who want early childhood education for their kids, because it’s very hard for working families to get by on only one income. Both parents have to work if they can, just to survive. But for that to be a key part of the framing of the mandate of this regulator—that says to us that, actually, the whole system is being dragged and dropped out of education into a more economic framing. That has sparked for members on this side of the House what is really a values clash that has been brought to the surface with this. If we were drafting a new regulatory framework for the early childhood education sector, we would be putting the wellbeing and the learning achievement for children at the heart of it. That would have to be the paramount objective—and yet it is not, under this framework. Why?

We are deeply suspicious that the regulatory framework and the appointment of this regulator is designed to do what we know, from all his other public statements, David Seymour wants to do, and that is run the early childhood sector on the basis of a competitive market. We know from experience that when you do that, inevitably, the quality outcomes, the safety of children, the quality of the learning environment, the educational experience that they have—the whole experience of setting our kids up for a successful life in those crucial early years is likely to suffer. We know that that Minister is not committed to having 100 percent qualified early childhood education teachers—and for us on this side of the House, that’s an article of faith.

Many colleagues have commented in the course of this debate that the omission of Te Tiriti o Waitangi is a glaring gap, and it’s par for the course: this Government, in one bill after another that comes before the House, have been stripping out the clauses that would direct whatever institution it is—the other day it was our compulsory education sector that would have required schools to give effect to the Treaty of Waitangi. That’s gone. There’s nothing in here that would say to the sector that delivers early childhood education that they should give effect to the Treaty; that they should be mindful and conscious of the special place of Māori as tangata whenua in this country, and the need for the ECE sector to give appropriate importance to the worldview, the values, the culture, and the experience of Māori in that system. There’s a reason we talk about it as our founding document, but this Government is hell-bent on stripping out from every bit of law that they can, any kind of commitment to the Treaty.

Many submitters expressed real concern that a child-centred approach was being taken out and put to one side with this bill in favour of a more economic, market-based approach, and we share those concerns. If we were drafting a bill like this, we would be looking to put equity and access issues at the heart of the regulatory framework for the early childhood sector. Access is still expensive for many families around New Zealand and, of course, what that means is that lower-income families struggle to get access to early childhood education for their kids or to have good choices about where their kids are going to go, and so what we would want to see is a much stronger commitment to ensuring that the non-profit part of the early childhood education sector is supported and has the conditions that would enable it to thrive.

I mentioned the importance of qualified early childhood education teachers. That is something that is extremely important to us. There’s nothing that even comes anywhere near talking about that as an important priority in this bill. It’s a terrible gap. We think there has to be more support for teacher qualification, for professional development, and, above all, paying our early childhood education teachers properly so we can retain good skills. I’ll leave it there.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to take a call on this very important bill. I just find out rather ironic that here we are getting lectured on how to fix the early childhood education sector from the member of Parliament who couldn’t build one KiwiBuild house, let alone 100,000.

Look, moving on to the guts of this bill. Honestly, what we’re trying to achieve here is to give great education for young children in New Zealand and break through the red tape to allow the people that are prepared to risk and invest money in providing these services so that we can have more options for parents and more affordable options for parents.

That is what it’s about. It’s about the children being able to get provided with education. Up until we’ve got through this, to this opportunity here today, early childhood centres were shutting down and that is not what we wanted to see. I commend this bill to the House.

This is a split call. I call the Hon Jo Luxton.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I want to begin my contribution tonight by acknowledging all the early childhood (ECE) teachers out there in the sector, all the ECE teachers who chose early childhood teaching as a career and trained for many years to become qualified in this sector.

Being an ECE teacher is not easy job, but it is a very rewarding job. I know this because I was an ECE teacher before coming to Parliament. I was also an ECE centre owner. When I was an ECE teacher and then an owner, it was under the previous National Government—the John Key National Government—and even then I felt hugely concerned that that Government held no value against early childhood education and what it provided to our young people, and this piece of legislation just simply cements that in my mind.

I am really concerned that this is just the beginning of the deregulation of the ECE sector, and I am concerned that Te Whāriki our curriculum document will be next, and I think everyone should feel very concerned about that.

I am not a part of the Education and Workforce Committee so I wasn’t there to hear the submitters and all the things that go along with being a part of a select committee, but I was concerned to hear that the majority of submitters opposed this piece of legislation, and I was really concerned to read in the regulatory impact statement about the lack of consultation.

The Minister today said that there was consultation with the sector. There was consultation with the sector from the Ministry for Regulation but not on the specific piece of legislation. Actually, I think this piece of legislation is completely unnecessary and a waste of time, and as members who spoke before me have said, it’s just part of a coalition agreement and it serves no purpose to improving the educational outcomes for our tamariki.

And be aware that that is what early childhood education centres are all about—educating our children. And this piece of legislation has wording that says that the purpose is “supporting parents and caregivers to participate in the labour market.” It sounds like some kind of robotic factory that will send our children off to stand in line to have nappies changed, be fed, and be put to bed without any value on the actual educational outcomes for our youngest and most vulnerable children in the years where their brains are just absolute little sponges. They learn through being curious, through making mistakes, through problem solving, through learning, and through building trusting relationships with other adults.

This piece of legislation simply makes it sound like, “Here’s a facility where you can drop your children off to babysit because we want you to get back to work.” And whilst it is absolutely necessary for a lot of families to have two-parent working families—it is essential—that is not what the purpose of the ECE sector is fundamentally about. It is about educating our preschool-age children.

I come back to the lack of consultation I was reading about in the regulatory impact statement. There was some real concern in the advice that was given to the Minister with regard to—I won’t be able to find the piece I’m looking for but one of the documents I have here in front of me relates to Treaty of Waitangi obligations. There were several limitations and constraints on the regulatory impact analysis, including limited time to both undertake detailed analysis of the impacts of the proposals and undertake consultation with key stakeholders. And it goes on to say that the Minister of Education advised Ministers that these limitations on the regulatory impact analysis create risk of policy failure and litigation.

This is an absolutely unnecessary piece of legislation. The early childhood regulations were very clear about the health and safety requirements, standards, and licensing requirements about ECE centres. Early childhood education is about educating our youngest and most vulnerable children. I do not commend this legislation to the House.

It is my privilege to take a very short call on this bill. Let me mihi to the kōhanga reo and the many kindergartens and childcare centres in the electorate of Maungakiekie. There’s over 70 of them.

We’re excited about this piece of legislation. We’re excited about what it brings to that sector. I also mihi to the childcare centre on whose board of the charitable trust I sit. I tautoko the many comments that I’ve heard about the fact that serving the early childhood centre is as much a calling as it is employment. We totally tautoko that on this side of the House, and that’s what this legislation is about. I am delighted to commend this bill to the House.

This bill is really a race to the bottom when it comes to our kids’ education. For some reason, I have an image in my mind of chickens in a barn just being herded in. It’s kind of babysitting; it’s “Let’s get the kids into a babysitting place so we can get the parents out to work.” It’s going to be deregulated, and the pedagogy is not going to be there.

Then I compare that kind of image with the Dunedin Study—an internationally renowned study—which has shown unequivocally the importance of the first 2,000 days. I had the privilege of having a walk through some really exciting programmes that have been rolling out through our ECEs around New Zealand—programmes like Enrich and Engage—which really are play-based and have a strong pedagogy, fantastic evidence base, and results to show behaviour regulation and decision making, the types of behaviours referred to by my colleague the Hon Jo Luxton. Enrich, as well, adds language skills so that, by the time our children go to school, they are really well set up to be able to continue to be curious and to learn in the best possible way.

What this bill does is flies absolutely in the face of that, and it’s hard for me to believe that it’s even allowed to be called the Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Bill, because when we look at the Education and Training Act, in section 4, the purpose of that Act states very clearly that this is about learning outcomes, it is about supporting Te Tiriti, it is about supporting Crown-Māori relationships, and it is about supporting equity. There is nothing in there that talks about the labour market and getting people into the labour market as being one of its fundamental values. In fact, it goes in the opposite direction because the failure to include Te Tiriti means that it flies in the opposite direction of what the primary Act has legislated. I have real questions around the potential ultra vires, if you like, of section 3 of the principal Act. When I asked the Associate Minister of Education about it at the committee stage, I had dissatisfactory answers. In fact, I don’t believe the Minister in the chair at the time even bothered to answer.

We heard numerous complaints that came via the submitters, the ones that I read, but also through the regulatory impact statement (RIS), about the lack of an evidence base for this amendment, the rushed process, and the lack of options that were able to be considered. It was no wonder the Minister was not able to answer our questions when we asked about specific things. At one point, he mentioned that Te Tiriti was extraneous. He could not tell us whether the inclusion of kōhanga reo and puna reo and bilingual units meant that Te Tiriti was nevertheless implied, because it is certainly explicit in the primary Act. We have no Hansard recording for that; there will be confusion there. He could not answer our questions around that when we queried in Schedule 2.

The other concern I have, actually, is that we didn’t really get to the bottom of some of the critical clauses in Part 1; it was a fairly truncated debate, in my view. We had some questions around the role of the director and the secretary. The RIS makes it very clear that there is potential for confusion because the director is quasi-independent. There are question marks over their accountability to the Minister, but also there are questions over the decision-making hierarchy, particularly in the transitional period with the director and the secretary—and the RIS points that out. The Minister was not able to answer our questions on that.

We didn’t even get to clause 8 and onwards. I’m quite concerned about those because any time a member of this House sees words to do with enforcement powers and—let me have a look, I’ll find it in the bill—the director’s powers, which are much broader than the secretary’s, I have to say, we have sections that we couldn’t even ask about to do with administration of Part 2, with being able to use regulatory actions that could be seen as punitive, especially if the information demands were onerous. That was mentioned in the RIS at page 33.

We didn’t get to clause 10, which expands warrantless entry and inspection powers. Now, warrantless entry and inspection powers are not things to be taken lightly in democracy. They deserve to be considered fully. They are human rights based. This is New Zealand. We expect this to be done properly, and yet there are multiple references in the RIS that we did not get to ask the Minister about: page 33 with inspections being perceived as punitive potentially; that major structural shifts could cause confusion over the regulatory powers—that’s page 30—that the State’s regulatory actions must be proportionate—as a warning on page 29—and that there was no consultation with the sector on expanded enforcement powers, on page 48.

There was a trivialisation, in my view, of the human rights elements of this. When people raised the rights of children, there was a bit of sneering from the other side of the House; the Minister looked disengaged and bored. Let’s not forget that we have just gone through an abuse in care royal commission. Let’s not forget that there should have been a New Zealand Bill of Rights Act report on this. We did not get to ask questions about that because of the truncated debate. We did not get to ask questions about the ACC liabilities in the event that there was an overreach of these powers. What would the police involvement be with some of these extended powers of the director? What would the rights of appeal be? There was evidence in the submissions about more mistrust of the State by Māori. Now, if I go back to the primary legislation that this is supposed to be amending, one of the clear purposes in section 4 is Crown-Māori relationships and also supporting Te Tiriti. How on earth this can be seen to reconcile with that, I do not know.

We then also had a whole lot of information-gathering powers, which are broader than those of the current secretary. We didn’t get any satisfactory answers about how that would be managed, when it comes to privacy rights. Again, these are fundamental human rights in a democracy.

What I would like to do, though, is really challenge what the Minister said when he tried to suggest that this is about best practice and regulation. We have an OECD report that is widely recognised as best practice in countries that we compare ourselves to called Starting Strong. It repeatedly highlights that fragmented ECE governance systems can lead to uneven service quality, confusion amongst parents, regulatory inconsistency, weak accountability, and gaps between educational goals and regulatory enforcement. We can see, from the way this bill is written, that it absolutely does risk doing all of those things, because it fragments the governance so that you have a director who isn’t responsible or answerable to the ministry. That’s been done very deliberately and in quite a Machiavellian way, in my view, to essentially privatise, as has been said, and to avoid accountability.

There are numerous places in the OECD report that stress that child-centred and not market-centred regulation leads to the best educational outcomes. New Zealand was in the group of countries that had done that pre-2024—with Norway, Sweden, Estonia. The research was bearing out those results. Mark my words, when this comes into effect in the coming years—if there is even adequate monitoring and evaluation of the impacts of this, and that is questionable given the lack of accountability—we will see educational achievement go down and, most specifically, we will see it go down for Māori and for our rural sector, and they are the most vulnerable.

Andy Foster: You saw it go down for ages, and what did you do about it? It’s accelerated it. You wrecked the education system.

INGRID LEARY: Point of order, Madam Speaker. If the member would like to take a call, can he please take a call?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): That’s not a point of order.

INGRID LEARY: Well, it’s really hard to hear myself think when someone’s yelling. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

We’ve heard a lot about Māori being the ones who have been most disadvantaged. When we asked about the rushed time frame, which was mentioned in the RIS many times, and there was no evidence base for doing that, we said, “Please, at least for our Māori-medium providers and our rural providers who would not be able to get their affairs in order to be able to respond quickly enough and for whom there was no impact assessment done, at least push the start date out to six months.” The Minister didn’t even bother to answer that question, and so I really feel for the rural ECE providers in my electorate of Taieri. I also want to acknowledge the tireless workers of the ECE sector who do the work for love, not for money. This is going to be a very sad day for them.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Just like my colleague over here, Greg Fleming, I just want to start off by thanking all those that look after and care for our young ones in the early childhood sector and thank them for their passion and their care.

This bill provides clarity. It provides clarity around regulating early childhood education. It introduces principles to inform the decision making while keeping children’s health and safety as a paramount objective. I commend it to the House.