Lubeck Marja; Dean JacquiMARJA LUBECK (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker for the opportunity to take this call on the Education (Strengthening Second Language Learning in Primary and Intermediate Schools) Amendment Bill. Now I like my previous colleagues rise in opposition to this bill. I also rise as the chair of the Education and Workforce Committee who considered this bill and many of my members on this committee including the member who just took a seat Chris Baillie have spoken on this bill already.I guess for the benefit of the House—we haven't really gone through the history of this bill. So I'd like to just quickly run through the history that this bill has followed. It got introduced in September 2018 and then initially referred in the 52nd Parliament to our select committee on 1 July 2020. Submissions were opened up with a closing date of 28 January 2021 and we received a lot of submissions 313 to be to be correct and many people also submitted to us in person. So 35 submitters in total came either to Wellington or submitted to us by Zoom. I know that Erica Stanford singled out a specific submitter and it is a bit dangerous to do because many of the submissions were very passionate and very heartfelt. And it would be remiss of me not to mention the specific one from the Malaysian and Indonesian ambassadors on Bahasa Indonesia. But the president of the New Zealand Association of Classical Teachers his name was Robert Erica Stanford.Erica Stanford: Oh Robert. He was amazing.MARJA LUBECK: His name was Robert. And so here is the proof—the living proof for you. So I had six languages in school and as they say it improves your neurological and other pathways in your brain. I managed to retain for some reason this piece of information when I can't remember what I had for breakfast this morning. I don't know what I'm trying to prove here but anyway so there it is. We saw so many submitters from such a wide variety of backgrounds all really good heartfelt submissions. We saw educators education-based unions cultural groups community groups a district health board from Canterbury and also many who spoke on their background and experience as teachers and from their teaching backgrounds.The views of the submitters and main issues raised can fit into a few distinct but clearly interconnected categories as we have detailed in our final report. And many have spoken on it but I'd just like to reiterate that. Firstly there was an overarching concern when it came to the resource and funding that would be required to give effect to this bill and the Minister himself mentioned the hundreds of millions of dollars of extra funding that would be required. But also we did hear very clearly from our advisers that this bill would impose obligations on schools that they cannot fulfil. Submitters told us that there was a relatively small workforce equipped with teaching second languages and that leads to predictable issues with retention of teachers or even just having to resource them in the first place. Already there is an obligation on schools we mentioned this in our report and I quote Take all reasonable steps to make instruction available in tikanga Māori and te reo Māori." But several principals and education unions expressed that meeting this obligation is already a real challenge for the school's capacity. We heard from the Waitakere Area Principals' Association representing over 100 schools and he told us that while they're in support of any initiative for our children they also called themselves pragmatists. They said that this bill would increase the workload and put pressure on the schools to a point that it wouldn't be to the best experience of the students because of that additional pressure. So we heard that from several principals with up to and even over 30 years of experience and teaching background.The second main issue that we put in our report was in the way we were thinking about te reo Māori in relation to other languages in schools. The Ministry of Education noted in their report to our committee that in their view "The bill is so significant for Māori that enactment without full consultation with iwi hapū and whānau Māori would be inconsistent with the Māori-Crown partnership." So they said that the passage of this bill in itself in fact without the consultation would be a breach of Te Tiriti. And they said it couldn't be resolved by amending the bill.So we also saw a similar concern from NZTI Te Riu Roa noting in their submission that te reo should be a priority as one of the official languages of New Zealand. Particularly they also mentioned the challenges that schools already face when it comes to teaching te reo. They mentioned and I quote "We need to make sure we look after the priority languages we have already recognised before we move into others." The Post Primary Teachers' Association also spoke about another concern basically saying that having a student go through primary school learning a language and then perhaps only finding out once they go to intermediate or college that the language is not available would be a source of great frustration. It was already noted before that the smaller workforce of teachers that can teach te reo is an underlying issue which is leading to limitations in support for those teachers to be able to take non - class time for further development. And this is something that we heard very clearly from NZEI again who told us quite plainly that one thing needed to be done properly and then others will follow.We heard from submitters and many were at pains to tell us about benefits that they knew firsthand from knowing a second language some I already mentioned before with my particular example. But they also spoke about social development cultural competency and other real benefits. We did hear from submitters and from many cultural groups talking about many of the languages that they would like to see taught in schools and we had dozens of proposals put to us. But as it was said before what this bill doesn't do it doesn't recognise the huge workload the huge resource the huge funding that would be required to upskill our teaching workforce in being able to teach 10 different languages let alone to carry it out in practice as well. So while we recognise there is a very strong and a very justified support for improving access to learning other languages the majority of our select committee as is shown in the report didn't think that this particular bill is the most appropriate way of achieving it.Instead as has been mentioned we believe that a national languages strategy could help and provide a useful framework for both existing and new programmes so that New Zealanders would be given more opportunities to learn other languages. So what this strategy would do is it would allow for more comprehensive consultation to take place. And again as the Minister also mentioned taking of course forward the submissions that we heard taking the debate in itself that we have engaged in forward to come to a really good place when it comes to developing and having the kōrero on the national languages strategy. And in fact it was great to hear the Minister mention that he had already asked the Ministry of Education to start work on this particular bill.So I guess in my last minute I would like to just thank those who supported our select committee with their work on this bill. A lot of work goes on behind the scenes and not always are we you know thanking those enough. So that's our officials our advisers our fantastic Office of the Clerk team who's helping us in our select committee all my committee members and also not forgetting Nikki Kaye who was the member who brought this forward. As a previous speaker mentioned that all contributes to having that debate on the importance of a national language strategy. But I do have to finalise in my last few seconds by just making sure that I do not recommend this bill to the House. Thank you.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Five minute call Nicola Grigg."