Carter Chris: Address in Reply 
Carter Chris: Address in Reply 
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Hon CHRIS CARTER (Labour—Te Atatu) 
: 
 I intend to spend most of my speech talking about education but I cannot pass up the opportunity to comment on the previous speaker Phil Heatley. For 2 years I had the privilege of being Labour’s Minister of Housing. I have to say while listening to the nonsense we have just heard from Phil Heatley National’s Minister of Housing I noticed that he did not mention to members in this Chamber that National when it was last in office sold off 13000 State houses. He used to bleat at me in this Chamber day after day at question time about waiting lists. He had the cheek to talk about waiting lists when his party when it was last in office sold off 13000 State houses. 
Hon Phil Heatley 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I would like to point out to the House that no one would buy Chris Carter’s State houses— 
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: That is not a point of order. Sit down. That is not a point of order; that is a debating point. 
Hon CHRIS CARTER 
: The Labour Government spent $2 billion on State housing. That included six remarkable urban renewal projects in places such as Glen Innes Northcote Porirua Rotorua and Hamilton. The projects were about lifting up the condition of houses that we inherited from National. The houses it could not hock off were left in the most deplorable condition. So when we had that member in this House talking about State housing I was surprised that we did not hear a cock crow and see him struck by lightning. 
He told us that he has an amazing infrastructure project—which is part of the great package we have been presented with today—for 69 houses. The Labour Government added 9000 houses to State housing stock to make up for the 13000 he and his mates hocked off in their previous term of office. 
Let us talk about education. We had the new Minister of Education Mrs Tolley in here before. I switched on my television in my office and I heard her talking about there being a whirlwind of activity in 100 days. Let us see what has happened in education during this whirlwind of activity. First of all we got her broken promise in the first week of the new Government. She signed up for the 90-day rule in business enterprises of 20 or fewer workers. She told the education sector before the election that the 90-day rule would not apply to it. She then came into this Chamber and said she had never said that. Luckily the New Zealand Educational Institute put on its blog site which TV3 then ran an image of Mrs Tolley saying: “No the 90-day rule won’t apply to schools and early childhood centres.” Of course she was not telling the truth; we saw that in the Chamber. 
Her next whirlwind of activity was in the so-called national standards in literacy and numeracy. These were greeted by the education sector like a cup of cold sick so Mrs Tolley got a bit of a fright as did her Government about this promise it had to keep as a result of the legislation it rammed through this House before Christmas. Then we were told that the national standards in literacy and numeracy were actually the progressions that all primary schools are currently using. It was a complete sham. It was not a whirlwind; it was a mirage. That was the second example of activity. 
The third example was the changes to the Education Review Office. I heard her talking about the Education Review Office and about how she had changed the review period from 3 years to 5 years for schools that are perceived as doing their job properly. That sounds fine does it not? But there could be a child in a primary school for 5 years and under Mrs Tolley’s change to the rules that school will not be assessed. I am not sure yet whether 3 months into the job she knows what is happening and what the Education Review Office does when it assesses a school. It goes in assesses the teaching standards of the school gives advice and checks that the school is a safe place and that the school and its board of trustees are following the National Education Guidelines and the National Administration Guidelines—the NEGs and the NAGs. I am sure that if we asked her she would not even know what they are. 
The Government checks that the Education Review Office is doing that assessment and that it is published online and available to the public so that parents can know exactly what is going on— 
Nathan Guy 
: What about the “Wassup!” badges? 
Hon CHRIS CARTER 
: We have a question about “Wassup!”. I will tell members what is up. It is about accountability and about looking after the interests of what really counts—the children in schools. 
We had an example just recently of a primary school in one of the very highest-income areas in Auckland: Remuera which is Mr Peachey’s electorate. It had had a glowing Education Review Office report. Three months later the staff walked out because the situation at the school had become totally intolerable. That school under the new rules might not be assessed for 5 more years. We have to ask ourselves whether that is a good thing. 
The next thing Mrs Tolley talked about was truancy. She talked about the fact that she was going to take up a totally discredited sampling system that I had been told when I was Minister of Education was a complete waste of time. It was a snapshot of 1 week in June 2 years ago and that somehow told Mrs Tolley and the rest of New Zealand how bad truancy was. 
Let us talk about what actually happened in June. As all of us know June is just about the coldest month of the year—it is certainly one of them. It is when every parent knows that lots of kids get influenza and get sick. It is also a time when quite a few parents decide that Queensland or Fiji is a nice place to visit. They can get discount fares in the winter and a bit of sun. The week being assessed was the week when the Maori Queen died. It was also the week when Dunedin had a snow event and virtually every school in the central part of Dunedin was closed. 
Any school pupil who was away that week was counted as truanting if he or she had not brought a note from home. If pupils were on holiday had been at the dentist or the doctor or had been sick during that particular week and they brought their note the following week they were counted as being truant. Somehow Mrs Tolley sees this as a valid statistical way of finding out how many truants we have. 
A much better system would be to take a range of decile schools around the country and sample them over a very long period—say a 3-month period. We could then get some sort of analysis about the truanting situation. That is how it should have been done and that is what I was working towards when I was Minister of Education. 
But finding out how many pupils are away is not the real issue; the real issue is what we do with that data. What do we do to help schools address truancy? That is why I am very proud of the work the Labour-led Government did. We put an additional $2 million into individual schools to help them address truancy. We put $4.5 million extra into regional truancy services. We had an electronic enrolment system called ENROL so that for the first time ever we would know what was going on in schools. We had the Student Engagement Initiative which was about making schools a more attractive place for kids to go. In other words they were practical sensible things that actually addressed the issue not spins and not mirages such as Mrs Tolley’s contribution to truancy. 
She also talked about the previous Government being food police. I was laughing to myself when I heard this because I was thinking of a rather interesting letter that was in the  
Dominion Post  
this morning. It is very short so I will just quickly read it. The headline states “Despite all the evidence” and the letter continues “Education Minister Anne Tolley thinks it’s a good idea for junk food to be sold in school canteens again does she? Despite all the unequivocal evidence proving that junk food isn’t good for kids? Okay how about allowing cigarettes to be smoked on school grounds then? Clearly”—the letter from Mr Shaw in Te Horo finishes—“the new education Minister is an idiot.” Those were a few words in the  
Dominion Post  
this morning by someone who had just heard Anne Tolley’s reaction to junk food. 
I would have thought that Anne Tolley would be the last person in this House to be encouraging people to eat junk food. She herself—as we all know and as she has said very publicly—has undergone some really radical solutions to her weight problem. The only way we can really address the growing obesity in our schools and in our society is by giving messages about healthy food. What sort of message is it to say to young children and their parents that junk foods are OK and that schools can sell Coke pies and lollies and confectionary in the school canteen and that it is OK? Actually it is not OK. It is not OK for the kids and it is not OK for our country. Type 2 diabetes is already a major cost to the health system. The health issues associated with obesity which we are all very aware of are not just the impact on the individual—that is tragic enough—but also on society and that is a cost we all bear. 
The message that the new Minister of Education Anne Tolley sends out to New Zealand kids and their parents is that junk food is OK. I have had a flood of emails from principals around New Zealand who are outraged by this ridiculous stuff and I would be happy to table them. 
Today we had the spin about school property. It is a bit like Mr Heatley’s 69 extra State houses. Mrs Tolley has come up with $216 million in extra funding for property. We are not sure whether it is extra funding because she had great difficulty in being pinned down on whether it was new money or whether it was for projects that Labour had already paid for. Under the previous Labour Government $3.4 billion was committed to school property. Indeed one of the last things I did as Minister of Education in October was to sign out $69 million to build Albany Senior High School—and we built 41 other schools as well. Thank you very much.