Simmonds Penny; Dean JacquiPENNY SIMMONDS (National—Invercargill): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'm pleased to be speaking in this general debate. I would like to talk about our education system. People contact us on a daily basis with their concerns about our education system. We know that if we want to have world-class living standards and world-class income we have to have a world-class education system. My goodness the alarm bells should be ringing at the moment. I listened to the previous speaker who talked about what they are delivering for under-18-year-olds. I'll give him a very clear of picture of what's delivering. I'm disappointed that Minister Willie Jackson is leaving because I was going to give him credit for the—Hon Willie Jackson: I'm here!PENNY SIMMONDS: Don't leave don't leave—for those charter schools.So we should be looking with concern at what's happening in our education sector. In 2018 our performance in maths put us in the bottom half of OECD countries: 22nd out of 37. We used to be fourth. Our education standards have been falling under the watch of Chris Hipkins. Students who attend regularly pass NCEA. Students who are absent half of the time fail NCEA. We are getting very close to half of our school students not attending school nine days out of 10. Who are the worst with absenteeism? It is our Māori and our Pasifika students that are attending less than anyone else.Now we used to have a bit of a solution here. They were called charter schools. They had in their contract a requirement for high attendance. None of our State schools have such a requirement. So despite all this virtue signalling by the current Labour Government that they are doing so much for our Māori young they are doing very very little except setting them up for failure.We know that our prison population is full of people who have significant numeracy and literacy challenges. So our young Māori and Pasifika students who are not attending school regularly; we are setting them up for failure for gang recruitment for unemployment and for poor health outcomes. That is not acceptable and my golly there might be some apologies in the future being needed.This Government has been fixated on lifting incomes through artificial means like lifting minimum wage and restricting new migrant labour. They didn't care how much that impacted on our businesses. But the only real gains in income you get is when they are sustainable through increased productivity. Increased productivity only occurs when we have people with the right skills and the right qualifications. From early childhood through to primary and secondary school through to tertiary education we must ensure that New Zealanders are being equipped with the skills and attributes that will help to grow this economy.The National Party has always understood the power of education. That is why the last National Government set and achieved ambitious targets to improve NCEA outcomes for school leavers and particularly for Māori and Pasifika students. National understood that one size doesn't fit all and that we must provide choices for people to learn in different ways. For example the charter schools which provided better cultural context better experiential learning and a much better environment for many people to learn under—but the previous Labour-led Government took that choice away and Minister Willie Jackson should be ashamed of that. He owned one he knew how successful they were and he should never have let it happen.In 23 years leading the Southern Institute of Technology I saw the transformative power of second-chance education. But Minister Hipkins has systematically gone about disestablishing that wonderful vocational education sector because he has an ideology that central is better. He took a $40 million problem and he turned it into a $120 million solution by spending more and more on layers of bureaucracy layers of management he took the accountability away—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! The member's time is up.