Tolley Anne: General Debate 
Tolley Anne: General Debate 
[Volume:656;Page:5462] 
Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister of Education) 
: 
 I want to stand in the House today and talk about the really exciting package for young New Zealanders that our Prime Minister John Key launched in Christchurch on Sunday. What a fantastic package that is! It will create almost 17000 opportunities for young people in this country and it will spend $152 million. We should be out there applauding this initiative by this Government. It just goes to show that the rolling maul that our Minister of Finance Bill English and our Prime Minister John Key have been talking about as an answer to the economic recession is the right one. It enables us to wait and watch evaluate what is happening and move in and take action when we have identified where we are needed. We know that our young people are starting to suffer in greater numbers than many other sections of society. 
I was on the radio this morning talking about the opportunities that this package provides for young people in Gisborne. Half the population in Gisborne are Maori. Many many of them are young people. My electorate of East Coast has I think one of the highest proportions of young people in the country. We are an area that has suffered over the last months some quite severe shocks to employment. Grape growers have been told that their contracts will not be picked up this year by Pernod Ricard. A sawmill has closed which has resulted in the loss of a large number of jobs and Cedenco has closed its sweetcorn processing factory. So we have had a large number of shocks which will have a ripple effect right throughout our rural community. 
The ones who suffer the most are the young. They are first ones to be put off—Maori and Pasifika youth in particular. They do not get the opportunities. So I think the Government’s package is fantastic. Four thousand opportunities will be created through Job-Ops a straight wage subsidy for employers. There is also Community Max. I know my community will respond because they care about young people. There are lots of jobs around to be done and I am absolutely confident that the community will come to the party. 
I want to talk about two specific parts of this package that I am really excited about. The first is the Youth Guarantee. The National Party went into the election talking about the Youth Guarantee and about making sure that 16 and 17-year-olds have an entitlement to free education so that until one is aged 18 one can attend school polytech wananga or a private training establishment—whatever suits the student. When we came to put that together in policy we found it was quite complicated. It is not as easy as it sounds for a whole variety of reasons but out of the Job Summit came the idea that we needed a tightly focused early roll-out of that Youth Guarantee to get the whole thing started. 
So what has the Prime Minister done? He has topped up that fund and said we will fund 2000 places next year and another 2000 places in the following year. Those places are specifically for the Youth Guarantee and they are specifically targeted at our Maori and Pasifika youth and I think that is fantastic. I can see that all around the country polytechs wananga and private training establishments are working away to find how they can provide courses to engage with these young people. 
The second part of the package that I really want to draw attention to is the service academies. Currently a number of service academies are operating in schools around the country. Some are run by the Tertiary Education Commission and some are run by the Ministry of Social Development. Each has different criteria and each has different funding. We will bring all those into the Ministry of Education because they are in-school opportunities for young people. I said to the people of Gisborne that a large number of our young people go into the armed services. I am sure that my Gisborne area can see an opportunity for a service academy in one high school or a collaboration between local high schools. These service academies will enable young people to get up to speed with the physical requirements for the armed forces. It will give them National Certificate of Educational Achievement level 1 in English and maths which is the entry point and it will give them some idea of the discipline and the requirements of the armed services. That in itself is great for our young people. I have met some young people who are in a service academy and they say it is fantastic.