SpeechHon CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's kind of interesting really that in the speeches this afternoon from the National Party they've all focused on the deciles 8 to 10 schools and there's been very little talk about the rest of the schools in the country from deciles 1 to 7.Last Monday night I visited one of my schools and sat down with the board of trustees and the principal. They told me about the very high percentage of at-risk children from vulnerable families at their school who had suffered enormously under the policies and actions of the previous Government. They told me that this Government's school donations policy in this bill that's going through Parliament to provide the regulatory framework for that is going to make a huge huge difference for their school because more than half of the families at the school could not afford the school donation. The school never put those parents under pressure and as a result really struggled. This policy and the legislation that we're debating today are going to make an enormous difference to so many schools around the country.Gosh I listened to what the Minister said. He has not ruled out extending this legislation to deciles 8 to 10 but can anybody in this House get up this afternoon and say that we should not have prioritised the deciles 1 to 7 schools. I mean that's really the guts of it and the other points that are made around shambolic process" and "hastening things through" and changes that are made at select committee—goodness gracious often those comments were made largely from first-term members who clearly haven't sat on that many select committees which is where you do the work to make sure that you bring back the best bill possible to the House. And that is our job. That's our job—all of us—to make sure that the bill that comes back to this House is in the best possible shape and that's what this bill is even though the National Party members didn't support it.The Minister and the Associate Minister have acknowledged that it's not the most perfect that it could be but it's dealing with one of the long-term issues that we have in this country—and boy did we have a lot of issues particularly in the education sector: huge infrastructure deficits with school buildings; the high cost of the donations that families just simply cannot afford; the cost of NCEA. The vocational reforms that this Government is putting forward in less than two years are enormous reforms that are needed for our education sector looking forward 30 years not just the three-year cycle which is what that Government when they were in Government always did.This legislation is an example of how we cannot fix all of the problems at once but this is an enormously important step. The amendments that have been made—and we are going to be discussing one of them in the committee of the whole House stage—all of the questions around how that's going to work can be put to the Minister then. As my school told me on Monday night they are enormously grateful. They of course want more and of course learning support is the other area that every single school that you go into talks about—learning support for children with special needs. We're making huge strides in that. This is a Government a reformist Government that's looking to the long term and is taking a balanced approach. I commend this bill to the House."