Delahunty Catherine: Budget Debate 
Delahunty Catherine: Budget Debate 
[Volume:673;Page:19197] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tena koutou e te Whare. Budget day seems a long time ago now that dreadful day when we sat here staring at each other with those blue documents. It is amazing what has happened since. It seems to have been out there in the community and I seem to have been in meetings constantly discussing it. It was interesting to hear the speech of Louise Upston who has just resumed her seat because Sue Moroney Louise Upston and I have been in a lot of meetings talking about education and people do not seem quite as happy as she might have wished. 
It was a very calculated Budget. It was definitely very calculated and it pushed the middle-class people of this country right to the edge of their voting tolerance but not over the edge. The Government has further privatisation of State-owned assets on the books but it was quite careful to say that that would happen later. It was interesting to think about the Budget in terms of what we were paying for and how we are going to pay for tax cuts to the top 13 percent of earners in this country. Although the previous speaker claimed that the lower-income people benefited hugely I am not sure that 25c an hour for people on the minimum wage can be described as wonderful relief from their financial problems. 
The Budget did not lift people out of poverty and it did not assist people on low incomes. But it was very educational and I will talk about education because membership of the Education and Science Committee is something I share with the members I have just mentioned. This Budget was very educational but not actually as generous to the education sector as the Government likes to claim. As Sue Moroney pointed out there has been a 2.9 percent increase in operational funding to schools. We have to be clear that we can spin numbers any way we like but we cannot say that that will cover the cost of inflation or the absolute growth in rolls. These factors will strongly affect schools that are struggling with increased running costs and I am not sure which ones are not. 
An increase that fails the basic test of meeting inflation is actually a cut and that is not the only area of deep concern to the Green Party. In looking beneath all the rhetoric about protecting education from the cuts to public services we need to unpack the impact of that in terms of the way in which this was a zero Budget for schools. A classic example of this is the analysis of what schools have to pay for out of their operations grant. If that 2.9 percent does not cover the inflation and the schools have to pay for a lot of the services that they use from their operations grant something is going to give. An example is school support staff. They have to be paid out of that operations grant so there go the hopes of our workers—our school support staff—in terms of getting a decent wage increase or the hours needed to do their job. It is not just a matter of those people saying they want more money to look after our vulnerable and marginalised children and ensure that there is inclusion; it is the fact that they actually need the hours to do it. I will give an example of what that means to a family whose child has a disability and is currently participating in school with the support of a person whose hours are paid for out of that operational budget. That child loses that person; that child loses his or her human rights to participate and that should be of concern to all of us. 
The Budget continues to fund the implementation of national standards but as we heard at many of the meetings we have been to on education already what a waste of resources that is because $37 million is being spent to force something on to schools that in large measure cannot refuse to try to do it but would rather spend the money on rolling out the modern curriculum than measuring students according to the narrow and confused standards of success and failure which will not result in a national overview of any real value and will not set any standards worth having—unless of course one believes that league tables will create better results and that it helps young children to become confident learners if they are labelled. Labelling some children as losers at an early age has predictable results which is why countries as diverse as Korea and Finland have abandoned these assessment models and have broadened rather than narrowed their curricula. 
This waste of money on national standards is not the only problem; we have the Budget’s educational allocation. The Green Party is very concerned about the commitment to the privatisation of State assets which leads us straight to the pilot project for public-private partnerships in respect of school buildings. This Budget allocates $800000 in the next year to develop a detailed business case for public-private partnerships in the procurement of new school property. The Government has to do that because it got exposed by Radio New Zealand National for not having one that worked. So it is going to do that and it is going to increase the money to $6.7 million by 2015. Well I could save the Government that money right now and tell it that there is no business case for public-private partnerships in public schools. The existing business case obtained by Radio New Zealand National earlier already showed that developing the contractual models and conditions to allow these public-private partnerships to go ahead would cost as much as any supposed benefits achieved from them. 
The overseas evidence is clear that however we set up public-private partnerships the public ends up funding the project while the private partner creams the profit off the top. That is why the private partner is there; that is why it wants to be there. Meanwhile the ability of boards of trustees to make strategic decisions about the future of their schools will be constrained by the “private” partners. What happens after 25 years when the private partner returns a run-down asset to the State? The potential costs to the public are huge. That is the history and that is the evidence so why are we wasting Budget money trying to make a business case for a failed model? The Green Party has been the only party to consistently oppose public-private partnerships in the education sector and we continue to do so in the face of this educational allocation in the Budget. 
The public sector cuts and job losses across many departments will also impact on education. Already it has been signalled that the Education Review Office and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority will be merged. This may have little meaning in terms of them both performing functions related to the education system so they could therefore share an office. However that may not be the agenda; there may well be problems if the real issue is around cutting costs and losing staff in both organisations. That is what Public Service cuts are about. It is not actually about rationalising for the sake of meaning; it is about rationalising for the sake of money. The term “efficiency” can be the label for a multitude of sins. 
The Budget also failed to reverse last year’s cuts to early childhood education; $400 million was stripped from the sector last year and this year the Government has so generously put back $550 million. But this does not reverse the cuts to centres with more than 80 percent qualified staff. Those centres will continue to face the unpalatable choice of either firing their qualified staff or charging more to parents to make up the shortfall. Louise Upston Sue Moroney and I attended a kindergarten conference where people raised this issue with us. They were deeply concerned and were not supportive of this direction. They do not want the Government to pursue this path. We already know that thousands of children around the country are missing out on high-quality early childhood education. I emphasise the word “quality” because that is what “qualification” actually means; qualification and quality are connected words. They are missing out on high-quality early childhood education because of these cuts. In the current environment the $150 million that has been put back barely meets the expected roll growth and demand. This is not an investment in the early years of a child which all the evidence suggests is so important. It is barely enough to keep the sector afloat. 
The one ray of light is that the Budget provided money to target groups that are currently at a disadvantage in accessing early childhood education. Everyone supports early childhood education being available to all particularly to communities in most need. However we continue to have major concerns about who is missing out when aspects of universality are undermined in the name of targeting. On the one hand it looks good to say we know who is missing out and we will put the scarce resource with them but on the other hand if we lose universality we will miss out on all the people with mild to moderate needs. That has always been true in education and that is why the universal provision of things like welfare and education is so important: sometimes the research does not work. 
Everyone from the Children’s Commissioner to the Chief Science Advisor has called for more spending on early childhood education not less and also for high-quality and universal availability of early childhood education. So why have a Chief Science Advisor if the advice is going to be ignored? My colleague Gareth Hughes who has two young children recently said that he would not send his child to a dentist who was not qualified so why would he accept that in an early childhood teacher? I think that is a fairly irrefutable argument. We do not send kids off to get their teeth fixed by a dental nurse who is almost qualified or maybe not qualified but is an awfully nice person and loves children. So how come it is OK when it comes to their education? 
It is a curious fact that the Budget fails to prioritise children when we all know they require a greater investment in resources than motorways sporting cups and irrigation systems. The Government has a choice and it now has the evidence that children must be put first in our economy not last and that means their education from early childhood right through to high school. We have huge issues in education to address in relation to bullying and this needs a major investment in restorative justice in schools. Some good work is going on but we are not leading it from Parliament. It is being led by the community sector and by many of the academics and it is being piloted in very good schools. But this Budget is not helping those issues. Kia ora tatou.