Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker and I should start by thanking you for your service in this House towards the end of this year upholding the rights of minorities—as I asked in the speech to congratulate you on your election. I want to thank all of your staff and the clerks supporting you but also all of the people that make this place tick—the messengers; the Table Office; the Bills Office; the librarians who are very very good; security; the caterers who took up a lot of the previous member's speech it seemed; and even the IT department—for keeping this place operational. I want to thank my colleagues here in Parliament. I want to congratulate the new Government and I have to say that Grant Robertson is right that the country has had an enormous civics lesson. You need to be able to count to 61 in this place and it doesn't necessarily matter how you do it. MMP has been in place for 21 years now and we have to accept that or change it. Options are there but those are the only ones we have. I want to thank my colleagues and erstwhile confidence and supply partners in the National Party and I think that we should be back if we're smart if we're collegial and if we're strategic. Those are the questions that we have to ponder over the summer. I particularly want to thank the people of the Epsom electorate. It's a great honour to be elected and sent to this place to represent your neighbours especially when you have such a fine set of neighbours as I do in the Epsom electorate suburbs of Epsom Mount Eden Parnell Remuera Newmarket and a lucky section of Greenlane. I also want to thank those people that helped with the campaign. It's very humbling to lead a political party campaign. The result is well-known and not something I'd like to dwell on in this stage of the proceedings but nevertheless I'm enormously grateful to all of those people who delivered literally hundreds of thousands of personally addressed direct mail letters up and down this country who gave hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars who managed our campaign and who delivered our messages. Those people I am enormously grateful to and I appreciate all of the confidence that you have shown me in the last few months that we can refloat and make this soufflé rise yet again. Thank you to the board the members and the staff of ACT. I want to thank the people who are in my own parliamentary offices and in particular Kristen Brian Christina and Mitchell up in Epsom—thank you very much for the outstanding work that you've done serving our community. To my staff both before the election and after the election—such is the way of parliamentary staffing—who have helped me do my job down here in Wellington thank you very much indeed for all of your help. I couldn't help but think as I listened to Jacinda Ardern's speech that I have a pretty simple message for her: Government is basically a service industry. I hate to tell you this but you are there to provide a basket of services to New Zealanders as the Prime Minister said in her address when this Parliament resumed—to provide services together that people can't provide alone—and the question is whether or not those services are efficient. You can do the marketing—or stardust as Bill English called it—but you actually have to provide services that work. It's not good enough just to take 18 billion bucks—which is the surplus this Government has inherited over the next four years—spray it around and hope that it'll work. It'll make the Government popular for a short period of time. But as Margaret Thatcher once said the problem is we eventually run out of other people's money and when that happens people are going to ask: Do the schools work? Does the Government have a solution to the enormous inequity between Māori and Pasifika and Pakeha and Asians in this country?" It is a national shame and to close partnership schools for purely ideological reasons without thinking about the impact that is going to have and to remove the only initiative that the Government currently has in the tool box that has been proven to close that gap—that's not how you run effective services. That's not how a Government that wants to stay in power after the surplus runs out operates. That is a Government that has lots of marketing but not enough ideas. One of the tests of this Government is: can they actually come to a clear conclusion on the future of partnership schools kura hourua? There's so much contradiction right now. The Prime Minister says that they can continue so long as they teach the curriculum and have registered teachers that are funded at the same rate as State schools. Well guess what? I can tell the Government as the person who was involved in designing the legislation five years ago and as the person who was responsible for the policy for the last three years—Hon Chris Hipkins: He wasn't even here five years ago. DAVID SEYMOUR: —that they already do all of those things. They already do all of those things. Chris Hipkins says that I wasn't here five years ago. Well Chris Hipkins will learn pretty quickly that if he wants to get things done as a Minister he should respect his advisers because they are here and they are part of the work. But maybe Chris Hipkins knows it all and doesn't need any advice. I don't know. [Interruption] He says he does. He says he does. Well we're going to enjoy watching that particular train wreck from this side of the House. What a disaster. Maybe that explains why—on a serious note—he has given so many mixed messages to a group of people who have given their all to provide better educational opportunities for kids who've been missing out. What a shame. I would also say to members thank you to the overwhelming majority of you who supported the End of Life Choice Bill at first reading. This is a critical issue. Someone said in the New Zealand Herald today that it is perhaps the last major human rights issue that this country has to debate. So thank you to the people who supported it to first reading. To those who didn't I would ask you a simple question. This bill offers you a choice that you may not wish to take. Your morality can be contained in a world where this bill is law. The question is: does your morality require you to deny the choice from others who may not share your particular world view? That's the question. If members could ruminate on that over the Christmas break that's all the present that I ask for. Hon Phil Twyford: But it's not just about individual rights. DAVID SEYMOUR: But I also ask people why they do not take advantage of some of the wonderful policies that are available in the ACT manifesto. Phil Twyford there—I could tell him that if he wants to get houses built and remember he's in the service industry it's going to involve actually removing the land use restrictions including the Waitakere Ranges heritage protection area. I hope he's got in touch with Kathleen and Steve Vitasovich as he promised. He's going to have to fund infrastructure better and he can find the answers to all of that in my wonderful book Own Your Future. I'll give it to him as a present. It's available online and it has the answers. I wonder about the recidivism problem that the Government faces. If you'd like to know how it is that you get people to learn to read in prison—well that's also in there. We know it's a good policy because Bill English started campaigning on it three weeks before the election so it must be a policy that works. The Government would do well to introduce the idea that if you learn to read in prison you get out early. The Government is facing a teacher shortage again. The ACT manifesto tells the Government how to solve this. You've got to make teaching more attractive by moving teachers to the kinds of contracts that most New Zealand professions have not the kinds of contracts that most watersiders had in the 1950s and if you do that you'll actually find a much broader range of people are attracted to the profession. This Government faces educational failure and inequity on a vast scale and I've already spoken about it. This Government is going to have to come up with a rational answer about what to do with partnership schools kura hourua and this Government is going to be judged apparently on whether or not it can reduce child poverty—that's in there too. But I'm running out of time so there's nothing left to do other than to thank all of my colleagues to wish my colleagues in Parliament and their families a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year and to say that I can't wait to see you all back here when the House resumes for 2018. Thank you Mr Speaker."