Hipkins ChrisHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): I thoroughly enjoyed the select committee scrutiny of the education Estimates this year and I have to say I was concerned because the Opposition members on the committee wanted me to be there for longer than I was willing to make myself available for. They demanded I be there for about 2½ hours and I only had an hour and a half available but at the end of that time they were banging their fists on the table about how outrageous it was that I wasn't giving them more time. So I said All right. Well I'll stay a bit longer." And they ran out of puff; they didn't have any more questions that they wanted to ask me. But anyway I thought I'd come to the House and I sat here with my pen and paper at the ready ready to answer any questions that they had. Well that's what I got from their contributions today. [Holds up blank sheet of paper] They didn't ask any questions for me to answer in the House. What we did see was a lot of desperate misinformation which seems to be the trend from the current Opposition—I remember those days: when you're in Opposition everything's a crisis—but they didn't actually raise any new issues or any substantial issues.I do want to respond to one or two things though because there were some concerns raised about the review of vocational education and in particular some quoting from the business case. I have to say I'm staggered that for a party that prides itself on its commercial and business acumen there don't seem to be any members on the other side of the Chamber that actually know how to read a business case. When a business case is put together you start with the unmitigated risk—so you identify all of the risks and what the potential consequences of those could be. And then you look at the mitigations for those risks. So when the members are rattling off the risks assessment which they have done just then they are talking about the unmitigated risks; what they don't talk about is that the business case then goes through and talks about how the risks will be managed so that they don't have the impact that could happen if they weren't being properly managed. But the members opposite don't bother to read that far through the business case which staggers me really seeing as they seem to pride themselves on having such a high degree of commercial acumen.There is a lot in this Budget that our Government is very proud of: the largest injection of funding into new school property that New Zealand has ever seen—over a billion dollars extra in school property funding so that we can get ahead of the growth curve. In the next 10 years we're going to need around 100000 more places in our schools to cope with population growth. The funding that we have set aside now including from this year's Budget last year's Budget and the money that was there gets us at about halfway to funding that population growth all the way out to 2030. On the other hand what did we inherit when we came into Government? The Opposition had the temerity to say "That's not enough because you still haven't funded half of it." Well under them they'd barely funded any of it at all. They weren't planning for the population growth which our Government is actually doing.They're complaining about learning support coordinators and the fact that we've funded only 600 of them. Well they funded none of the learning support coordinators and yes I don't think 600 are enough; we'll be coming back with more. But 600 are a heck of a lot better than the none they got under the last Government. To schools that don't ask for parental donations: $150 per student; better than the nothing they were going to get under the last Government. As for teacher salaries they were decrying the fact that we weren't giving teachers more money. They had the choice to give teachers a bigger pay packet not once not twice but three separate times and they did not do that. They chose tax cuts instead. They had the opportunity the year before the election to give teachers the pay bump that they are now saying they deserve and they did not deliver it. Teacher supply was something that you won't hear the Opposition mentioning because their record on that is absolutely shameful: a 40 percent reduction in the number of people training to be teachers and we inherited a teacher shortage. We had the temerity again of the Opposition banging their fists on the desks and saying "Why do we have this critical teacher shortage?" Well they should look in the mirror. They created the teacher shortage that our Government is going to deal with.Then we had the outrageous claims about how there could be fewer people in vocational education and training as a result of the reforms. There are fewer people in vocational education and training now. There were 40000 fewer people in on-job training and apprenticeships when National left office than when they came into office. So what National did was drive a knife through that system. We're trying to put things back together because we've got critical skill shortages and unlike them—unlike the previous Government who were happy to coast along and say "Nothing to see here. Don't really want to know."—we actually take business and industry seriously when they come to us and say "We need better skills. We need better skilled workers to up our productivity and to make sure we're delivering what our industries need." We're taking them seriously where the last Government simply shut the door in their face and did not listen."