Turei Metiria: Education Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTurei Metiria: Education Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 04 June 2013. Volume:690;Page:10680. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): Charter schools have no future in our country Aotearoa New Zealand and I am pleased that the Labour Party has also made it very clear in the last address that it too believes that charter schools have no future in this country. We want to make it very clear to any of those who are considering establishing one that should there be a change of Government in the near future your schools will no longer exist as charter schools. I have said that we may apply the integration criteria to those schools just to give those kids at least a bit of a chance because changing schools is always very difficult. But if those integration criteria are not met or there are other reasons why those schools should be closed including the fact that the legislation will be repealed then charter schools will no longer exist in this country. It is important for those who are considering setting them up to know well in advance the risk they are taking in establishing charter schools in New Zealand. Why do we say that? Because we believe that the public money for education should be spent on a strong free and quality public education system not on lining the pockets of a few wealthy cowboys who will drain the public purse for their private profit.It has been very disappointing that the Minister of Education herself has shown no real awareness of her portfolio and the impact that the policy decisions she makes has on schools teachers children and their families. We have had the Novopay debacle report today showing that she did not even know who was responsible for managing this multimillion-dollar disaster. In this charter schools legislation and the policy behind it we see exactly that same neglect and frankly incompetence from this Minister in managing this policy.One of the key issues that was raised today in question time was the fact that this Minister will not guarantee that the schools that she has just closed in Christchurch will not then be rented out or used by charter schools for making a profit. Those schools were closed apparently because of population decline in those areas. Those schoolswere closed apparently because of earthquake damage that was too expensive to fix in those areas. But she still retains the power and obviously the intention to rent those schools out to the charter school cowboys who have no educational experience who will be able to make a quick buck off the public purse and who will in doing so exploit vulnerable New Zealand children because that is who will be running these schools—cowboys. There is no requirement for these cowboys to have experience in education management or its delivery. There are fewer checks on these cowboys than are currently applied to principals and to teachers. Not only that but they will be able to employ untrained people—these are not teachers; these are just ordinary people but without any training or expertise in education—to teach children who all of the research in New Zealand and before the Minister says need the best-trained most professional teachers in front of them. If you want to teach vulnerable kids they need the best possible teachers—those who are skilled and trained in this profession. But these cowboys will be able to get anybody they want including their mother and father and sister and brother and uncles and aunties and cousins—anybody they like—to come in front of these kids and get public money for that. It is significant amounts of public money for that.Not only that but they will be able to get money for for example dealing with children with disabilities. I do not know whether people realise that. But they do not have to spend it on those kids. There is no requirement for them to spend it on those kids and they can simply put it in their back pocket as a big fat profit from the public purse. At the end of the day it will be New Zealand children who are left to find a decent education somewhere in their area after being exploited and experimented on by John Banks and his mad ACT policies.Sometimes I think that Hekia Parata really does not believe in this policy. Sometimes I think more and more that she is being bullied into promoting this policy because of a $19 million cup of tea that John Key had with John Banks 18 months ago. I do think that Hekia Parata does know what works for Māori. She has certainly been told by her own people by her advisers. She has been told. She knows that kura kaupapa Māori are excellent and enormously successful for Māori kids because they are a kaupapa Māori solution that is developed by the very families that this policy is supposed to be directed at—Māori and Pacific learners. She knows that Te Kotahitanga works and she has been told that Ka Hikitia—Managing for Success needs more resources to be even more effective than it is but she has had to cut the funding to Te Kotahitanga in order to feed public funds into John Banks’ ridiculous ACT policy and his experiment on our kids. So the successful programmes are being cut and experiments that have a history of failure are being promoted.I think that she too is nervous about the financial side. During the Committee stage of this debate last week I asked the Minister very specifically to guarantee that if there is an Official Information Act request to her and her ministry about financial matters to do with charter schools she would never use the commercial sensitivity clause. She sat here and said that it was OK that the Official Information Act did not apply to charter schools because all of their financial information would be made public. But she would not guarantee that she herself would not hide that information from the public. It does beg the question of why that is the case. I think that the whole reason why the Official Information Act does not apply to charter schools and why the Minister will not guarantee that she will not hide financial information herself using the commercial sensitivity rule is that John Banks knows all about the importance of hiding financial information. John Banks actually is right in the middle of a serious debate a serious issue where he has been accused of hiding financial information from the public.You know this is the man who cannot remember how much money he was given by Kim Dotcom for his mayoral campaign. This is a man who took a cheque from Skycity—who took a cheque from Skycity—I understand with his very hand and still does not remember how much it was for. So this is a man who has deliberately hidden information about his public financial affairs from the public. He is now facing serious action elsewhere about this issue and because John Banks thinks that he is such a master at keeping financial information secret and clearly is unhappy to have it revealed here in the House he is making sure that all those charter school cowboys that he is promoting through his party membership—all those charter school cowboys—also get the chance to hide their financial information from the public. They will be funnelled funds and funds and funds—millions of dollars; at least $19 million in this first tranche—of public money and John Banks will make sure that they do not have to reveal the information. John Banks the master at keeping financial information secret will make sure that so can charter schools.So not only do we have all of the evidence about how charter schools fail these kids the most fail the most vulnerable children—overseas only 17 percent of them do better than in the public system; it is less than one in five—but the information about how public education money taken from our State schools will be used is being kept secret because John Banks wants to protect those cowboys so they can continue to make a public profit. There can be no other excuse for keeping those charter schools out of the Official Information Act. There can be no other excuse for the Minister of Education failing to guarantee that she will reveal all the financial information that is useful that is critical for the public to see. She would do that only if she is being bullied by this $19 million cup of tea that forces an exploitative experiment on our most vulnerable learners. We oppose the Education Amendment Bill. Thank you.