Turei Metiria: Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Turei Metiria: Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:651;Page:648] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 I am not at all surprised that the National Government has not allowed the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill to be referred to a select committee because of course there is an agenda behind the face of the legislation and that is around the privatisation of education. It is pretty clear that privatisation is certainly ACT’s policy. Some members may have been on the hustings with ACT candidates who talked about how schools should be part of the marketplace like any other company and who said schools should be run as companies with all of the corporate culture that is involved with that idea. This is clearly the ACT Party policy. Even Heather Roy when I mentioned the No Child Left Behind policy in the US was quite happy to discuss her party’s policy of vouchers and charters. Of course ACT is part of the Government now. It has Ministers in Government and no doubt the National Government is following that philosophy and ideology in this legislation. 
Perhaps we should rename this bill as the “Education (First Step) Amendment Bill” because it lays the groundwork for the opportunity to have increased privatisation of the public schooling sector. We see National’s intention to increase privatisation already in the large funnelling of public money into private schools. It is worthwhile looking again at how the neo-liberal agenda has impacted on schooling policy in the US particularly with the use of standardised testing. I refer to two further articles on that issue. The first is called “Assessing No Child Left Behind and the Rise of Neoliberal Education Policies” and the second is called “The Growth of High-Stakes Testing in the USA: Accountability Markets and the Decline in Educational Equality”. 
We are talking about the agenda of neo-liberal deregulation and privatisation of public services and it leads in some ways to the kind of rhetoric that we have heard from National particularly around the privatisation of public education and the blaming of public education for our lack of international competitiveness and the increasing gap between rich and poor. We have heard those comments all through the National Party statements on this legislation. We had Allan Peachey blaming education for poverty and for the long tail of poverty. That is exactly the kind of rhetoric that George W Bush has spouted about the US policy as well. We have heard Nick Smith describe poverty as the politics of envy completely failing to understand that the long tail of underachievement in this country is a long tail of poverty. What is National doing about that? It is doing absolutely nothing; it is simply punishing the poor for being poor. We have been talking about that all week. 
Sandra Goudie 
: Oh what a stupid thing to say! 
METIRIA TUREI 
: Sandra Goudie is shouting from the benches because obviously it gets to her that we know what National’s agenda is. We know that National’s policy is about punishing the poor which the Employment Relations Amendment Bill and tax increases for the poor have done. 
We know from research around the No Child Left Behind policy and the way that that policy is sold particularly to what in the US would be considered underprivileged communities—here they would be low-income communities such as Maori and Pacific Island communities—that although it is supposed to be an objective assessment and reliable in fact it is highly politicised and highly unreliable and the outcomes are very much related to the incomes of the families that are involved. In the discussion on this bill we have also heard a lot of rhetoric around blaming teachers. Somehow the impact of teachers is undermined and degraded. The Government is investing another $30 million in private schools rather than investing in teachers when we know that teachers are the key to making the changes that lead to success. 
The other issue we have to look at here is that quality education is not the issue for the National Government. For National the issue is private access to public services. We have seen that in the early childhood education sector where National refuses to deal with the burgeoning of low-quality private sector early childhood education services in this country. Australian companies are coming in with expensive poor-quality teaching and care in the early childhood sector and National will do nothing about that. Those kinds of processes lock out the community sector from providing early childhood education services. We know from the research in our own country that community-based early childhood education is the best-quality early childhood education in this country as opposed to the private investment of international corporations such as ABC Learning Centres. But quality is not the issue here for National.