Source: New Zealand Parliament – Hansard
TUESDAY, 24 SEPTEMBER 2024
(continued on Wednesday, 25 September 2024)
EDUCATION AND TRAINING AMENDMENT BILL
Third Reading
DEPUTY SPEAKER: The House is resumed. Good morning, members. Yesterday when we finished, the Education and Training Amendment Bill had been set down for third reading. I call the Hon David Seymour.
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Associate Minister of Education): I present a legislative statement on the Education and Training Amendment Bill.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliamentary website.
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: I move, That the Education and Training Amendment Bill be now read a third time.
I want to thank all of the people who have contributed to this legislation. I want to thank my colleague, the Hon Erica Stanford, Minister of Education—and I see Katie Nimon, chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, along with other members of that committee, who shepherded the bill through the committee stage faster than usual but with no less care and attention, and made valuable improvements to this legislation. It has been a very good example of what Parliament can do when people are committed to a cause.
I don’t believe that there’s any greater cause for this country’s long-term future than the simple equation of how much knowledge is transferred from one generation to the next. Because a knowledgeable and educated population can overcome whatever challenges we may face with the economy or foreign affairs or climate change or public health. An educated population will be able to solve those problems, but an uneducated population that hasn’t learnt the best knowledge from generations before them will be able to squander even great prosperity that this country currently has. That’s why it matters so much and that’s why I think we saw so much commitment from those people involved in this legislation, and perhaps more than any for the enormous detail that has been meticulously put together. I thank the employees at the Ministry of Education, the policy team, particularly Andy and Jen and all those who support them; they have done an absolutely outstanding job.
What is the cause in this bill? Well, this bill has three parts; two of them, relatively simple, and one of them, more complex and, I would argue, ultimately more important. The first is that we are removing the network management requirement for early childhood education centres. This comes from many complaints from early childhood educators that it is absolutely insane that in order to open up a business that people in your community want, you have to go and ask the Government if the people in your community want it as much as you know they want it because you’re risking your money to do it. And yet somehow the people at the Government are supposed to have a better idea than you do.
Members on the other side, we’re going to have a bit of a history lesson later in this speech, so don’t worry, that’s coming. But actually there’s a country called Russia where they tried this approach to economic management for about 70 years; it didn’t work. Even they’ve abandoned it. It’s only the Labour Party and the Greens that persist with trying to centrally plan economies with these kinds of decisions.
So now you don’t have to do network management. If you want to expand or open a new early childhood education (ECE) centre, then you can just do it. But the real judge is the parents. And do you know what the parents say to me? When I go and visit ECE centres and I ask the parents, they say I want my child to be happy, I want them to be safe—
Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan: Will they be?
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: I want them to be growing. I think parents of New Zealand are better—the Opposition is asking: is that what the parents say? Yes. And if the member would like to visit some of these centres or, you know, venture out of academia or out of this House, he might find that is what the parents say. And actually, I think the parents are better to judge it than the Government.
The second thing we’re doing is we’re updating the attendance records. It’s interesting, Madam Speaker. The attendance records actually are set under 1951 regulation, which was made under 1914 legislation. So you could almost argue—not quite, but almost—that our attendance regulations predate World War I, and this is a Government of the future. So we are going to update the way that attendance regulations are made. Every day from next year, every school student management system will be pushing rich data about student attendance into the Ministry of Education’s data warehouse so we can understand who’s not attending and we can start to dig into why, and we can start to work out if the things the Government and schools are doing to improve attendance—and parents, for that matter—are working so that we can do more of the things that work and less of the things that don’t. It sounds simple. To most New Zealanders, to most people in business or running a farm or their household, it is simple; it’s how you do business every day. And it’s actually how this Government is going to start getting stuck into the business of getting children back to school.
But coming to charter schools, we’re introducing the simple idea that not every insight into how to engage children in learning and pass that knowledge from one generation to the next can be found in the Ministry of Education or Wellington, or even amongst the wise members of Parliament in this House. Sometimes the best knowledge exists out in the community.
Mariameno Kapa-Kingi: Most times.
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: Sometimes those—”most times”, the Māori party say, and I actually for once think Te Pāti Māori are right. You’ll notice when I talked about communist adherence, I talked about Labour and the Greens, not the free-market Te Pāti Māori for whom I have great hope. If they could just get over themselves, I think they could contribute a lot to this House and life in New Zealand.
It’s not surprising, because the iwi leaders forum have written to me in strong support of charter schools, because they know that communities know more about how to engage their children than the people in Wellington most of the time. So we’re going to invite people in communities to start up schools and they’re going to get the money the State would have spent on the same child at a State school. It’s going to go to the school they choose to go to if—and this is important—high standards are met. If high standards of attendance are contracted in, if high standards of achievement are contracted in, if they show that they’re using their money wisely with financial probity, then they will continue to get their money and they will be able to use that money for the best effect, to get those children at school engaged, achieving, and learning, so that they can actually learn skills that turn into qualifications, that turn into jobs, that turn into careers, that turn into a sense of achievement and feeling good about yourself. That’s why we’re doing it.
I heard last night from the Labour Party that they would like to shut these schools down. Now, their bark’s worse than their bite. They didn’t do it last time. All the schools carried on, but with one change; that they don’t want them to operate without union contracts. You see, that’s the thing about these charter schools; teachers get paid, like most New Zealanders, on individual employment agreements, and if they’re good they can get paid more, and if they’re not good they can get fired.
Here’s why that matters. We run education for the children. You see, the thing is—I was looking at some statistics the other day—we spent $20 billion a year on education; 60,000 kids are born in this country every year. If you do the maths—it can be challenging on the other side, but that is $330,000 per citizen, lifetime education spending. And yet what do we get for that? I look at the UE, the university entrance achievement, and for the most prosperous, wealthy and advantaged students, 82 percent get UE, but for the most disadvantaged students 30 percent get UE.
Now, I said there was a lecture coming. There’s an old book called The God That Failed, and the God that fails is the stories of former adherents of the Communist Party who realised it didn’t work and left. They wrote this book and it’s a wonderful set of essays. Now, I would put it to the Labour Party that when you spend $330,000 per citizen and the most disadvantaged students are nearly three times less likely to get university entrance than the most advantaged students, your God has failed. Sorry Labour, your God has failed, because you spent all the money but the wealthy kids from the good backgrounds are still doing pretty good and the poor kids you were supposed to help are still failing.
That’s why I’m proud to be here in this Government, standing as an ACT MP, setting up schools that allow people to choose their own destiny. Tino rangatiratanga, we might call it—the ability of people to use the knowledge in their society, in their community, to take the funding that the Government would have funded and use it—you’d have provided for those children—for better effect: to make sure that children have that opportunity to feel good about themselves, to learn, to engage, to have it done their way, not to feel unsafe or bullied, but to actually go along and build their own future, not only for themselves, each in their own way, but for the future of this great country of ours. That is what this policy of charter schools really means for the future of our country.
I challenge the Opposition. Where are your ideas other than more money for our union mates? Not for teachers but for the unions, because that’s what it comes down to at the end of the day. Charter schools don’t have to use the unions’ contracts. That is what we are here to end, to give freedom and choice to New Zealanders to make their own future. I’m sorry, Labour, your God’s failed.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is that the motion be agreed to.
