Delahunty Catherine: Supplementary Estimates — Imprest Supply Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Delahunty Catherine: Supplementary Estimates — Imprest Supply Debate 
[Sitting date: 26 June 2012. Volume:681;Page:3378. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Speaker. Tena koutou e te Whare. I found it interesting to hear the previous speaker Cam Calder say that the first duty of the State is to provide security when it has just sold our assets and made us all feel a lot more insecure. 
I want to talk about what I think the duty of the State is with regard to education in terms of this appropriation debate. I will start with targets because we have heard a lot of rhetoric about targets this morning. Target No. 1 was to sell assets. Target No. 2 was to sell them to pay for tax cuts for the top 10 percent of people in the country. One of the other targets is to privatise the education system and another target is to bash beneficiaries. All of these targets are well on track but they are not working for the people on the streets. I spent 5 hours yesterday on the streets of the Kapiti Coast listening to citizens talking about their experience of the current Government what they believe about asset sales and what they think about education. It is very educational to spend time on the streets listening to what people have got to say. 
I want to talk first about the appropriations because the figures do not tell the real story. The figures are fairly opaque and you can do what you like with them. Every Government tends to spend more on education simply because the population grows and we have more children to educate. It has got very little to do with a real investment in it and that is why I say that one of the targets is a privatisation agenda for the education system. 
We will start with early childhood education which is one area where there is a great claim that we have spent more money. At a recent forum in Waikato David Bennett Sue Moroney and I met with early childhood teachers and with early childhood teaching students who were doing their practicums in early childhood centres. In fact both Sue Moroney and I did not really need to say anything because those people told the Government very clearly that they were being undercut by Government policy on early childhood education. No longer can they go through an education process and be guaranteed they will get a job in an early childhood centre because the target for qualified staff has gone from 100 percent to 80 percent. Early childhood education centres which are all feeling the pinch due to the freeze on their funding are not able to actually hire people with qualifications. It is a perverse educational incentive when the less qualified you are the more likely you are to get a job in your chosen passion which is early childhood education. 
 In all the rhetoric around the importance of children the first concept we need to sort out is universalism and then targeting. If we do not provide universal access to early childhood education we will never meet the need because we can never know where all those children are and it is not possible to do an effective target without universalism. So the early childhood education experience is very bitter and anyone who was at that forum would have heard exactly what those people are saying—that they were very disappointed that they were having to put up fees meaning that people could not access early childhood education. 
Let us move on to primary schools because I have got only 5 minutes to talk about this subject. Again if you look at the appropriations the professional development budget has been narrowed into one form of professional development and that is to ensure that schools are rolling out the Government’s agenda and it is not an agenda that they chose. That agenda is the agenda to roll out national standards. National standards according to the teachers and parents I have talked to are not even properly moderated which means you do not have them as a standard across the country nor can they be said to be national. Apparently a whole lot more money is about to be spent on expensive software—a programme where you can punch in some numbers and then those numbers will print out a result and that will tell you what league table your school is going to end up in. That is not proper moderation and it is not going to make sure that we have any kind of assessment that works. I would just like to point out that the target to increase national standards is actually a target to cut arts advisers and science advisers and whole child education. 
I was outside Parliament the other day and met two American teachers who are over here looking at our system. They said: “The reason we’re here is because you have some fantastic principles that run your education system. Of course it can be better.” But one of the things they said was: “We have lost it in the United States with education. We are assessing assessing assessing and we are no longer teaching. We are not teaching the whole child. This is about whole child learning. We have seen in your schools that your teachers are committed to whole child learning.” They said to me: “If you are a politician don’t let this happen.” Therefore in terms of the appropriations debate it is really important that the money gets spent on broad professional development and on supporting the curriculum. Otherwise the targets are a complete waste of time. Thank you.