Cunliffe DavidHon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): What a pleasure it is to follow that happy member Todd Muller. Members opposite will remember the days in their first year of this House when the air was fresh and they were tiptoeing through the tulips using words like leadership" with gay abandon and no matter that Judith Collins was sitting right in front of them gnashing her teeth thinking: "Don't say it too often Sonny Jim. You'll be a dead man." But apart from that at some point it is going to dawn on members opposite—one is tempted to say "these dudes"—that Government is finite. We are only 1 year from swapping sides in the House. Then we will see how positive the chipper Mr Muller really feels. Mr Muller is right about one thing. Colleagues do not get too excited. Those members are just so excited about being in Opposition because they will actually get to give speeches in the House rather than saying: "I move That the question be now put." Imagine having sweated so hard to get into the place and the whips tell him: "It's your big moment Todd. I know you used to work in the Prime Minister's office. Here read this: 'I move That the question be now put.' " Sometimes they get an IQ test for John Key's Cabinet. If you get it wrong more than twice it is another year on the backbenches. This brings me to the member for Hamilton—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): And back to the bill.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: Now the member for Franklin is eyeing up the race. He is like a greyhound coming into the benches and he is off and running—"I move That the question be now put."—thinking that if he just says it fast enough it will truncate his on-ramp. But honestly—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I think the member has had about 300 metres of slack and he should get back to the bill—or get to the bill.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: Mr Chair you are characteristically generous and correct. Let me turn my attention to the amendments in Part 1 which amend the Official Information Act (OIA) 1982 to exempt a tertiary educational institution that is a shareholder in a charter school from the provisions of the Official Information Act. I will sum up the Opposition's view of that clause: why? If it is spending public money—which of course let us acknowledge that dozens of tertiary institutions are currently rorting from this hapless Government and its useless Tertiary Education Commission—why would we not apply the Official Information Act? I challenge Minister Parata to take a call. We are very privileged to have the current Minister of Education—for as long as it takes Nick Smith to want a new job other than housing—to be in the chair for this. We would ask the Minister to explain the logic of why you would accept a provision that exempts from the Official Information Act an institution that is taking public money for the purpose of investing in a charter school. As if that is not enough it is also exempted from the provisions of the State Sector Act which governs every other expenditure item on the public account. And as if that is not enough the Ombudsmen Act—well that is perhaps less serious because let us face it this Government has been so single-mindedly adept at starving the Office of the Ombudsmen of resources that it takes about 2 years to get an OIA through and that is just fine according to Mr Key's Government because democracy it seems is a "nice-to-have" not always a must-have. At least as long as you can spin it out the better it seems to be. Charter schools—why do we have charter schools colleagues? What reason could there possibly be? Could it be that we enjoy spending five times the amount of resources per pupil on a charter school pupil that we would on a regular State school pupil? By a kind of National Government Cabinet logic if everybody was in a charter school we could spend five times as much on every student. No—no. In fact if charter schools represented just 20 percent of students we would have double the education budget but I do not think anybody has told Bill English that. Charter schools have been proven to be a failure. Whangaruru is the flag bearer for a desultory performance and a lack of clawback where public funds that were clearly not being properly used were unable to be returned to the Crown. I have been witnessing tertiary education institutions which are subject to the clauses of this bill routinely being caught out overstating student numbers overstating course duration using dodgy immigration agents promising the world and ending up in real trouble. Why would we give them—"