Martin TraceyTRACEY MARTIN (NZ First): Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. In the last term of Parliament I sat on the Education and Science Committee for the digital literacy inquiry and that is where the genus of the communities of online learning came from really. I sat on there with a member of the National Government by the name of Simon Bridges. He has gone a little bit further than I have at the moment. However it was interesting when we were discussing the concept of 100 percent online learning Mr Bridges who has some small children shook his head when we were listening to the evidence and he said—because it was about providing choice. The Khan Academy came to present to us people from companies like Google came to present to us and they told us This is an opportunity you need to give to your young people. This is an amazing opportunity. Yes our company will get a whole lot of downstream benefits from that but that is not our interest here. Our interest is 100 percent child-focused."Now Mr Bridges at that time shook his head on that select committee and he said "I'm struggling to understand how you say that parents will be able to make a choice or students will be able to make a choice when they don't know what they don't know." What Mr Bridges was trying to say—because in that moment he was right. He has been somewhat wrong since but he was right in that moment. What he was trying to explain or trying to understand—and we were trying to get his peers to understand it as that—is that choice is only truly available to people who are fully informed. Education is a complicated business.I want to pick up on—Mr Brett Hudson was saying things quietly during Ms Delahunty's contribution and one of the things he said was that children are consumers. I think that in a nutshell epitomises how the National Government looks at education: that it is a consumer body that children are consumers and therefore it will place a business lens over the top of it. So what is wrong with charter schools making a profit from the public purse? What is wrong with communities of learning with private providers who can make a profit from our 5-year-olds through to our 18-year-olds? Somewhere in there the Government has convinced itself that our parental body and our student body is so fully informed about the pedagogical way that learning takes place that they have choice.The other thing that is actually required for choice is often income. Let us go back to why the schools—and what the greatest challenge is for the Opposition on the Education and Science Committee in this term of Parliament is the unfortunate ignorance of the members of the Government side of that select committee. And you can hear it in the conversations that they have. Let us take for example the contribution by the member who resumed his seat before Ms Delahunty. He talked about this wonderful opportunity through communities of online learning for our young people to embrace the digital environment—and so on and so forth. What that shows is a complete lack of understanding of the decade or more in which our schools have already been working with Virtual Learning Networks actually doing e-learning and blended learning inside their schools. The reason why the piece of legislation needed to change was that a few years ago this Government removed the funding for the current State schools to be supported to belong to those Virtual Learning Networks. Now they have to use part of their operations grant and part of their teacher time to supplement that ability for their students to Skype out into other courses.The Opposition at no time opposed the concept of Virtual Learning Networks. At no time—at no time—did we actually oppose communities of online learning. What we opposed was expanding it into the private sector. That is what we opposed. What we opposed was taking Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu—and having been under this Government in the last decade this Government has allowed Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu to expand to the point where it now has 24000 students. It has more students than any other school in this country. It is the largest education provider in the compulsory sector. Let us just make a point of Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu. Last year it put NCEA level 1 100 percent online. It has had a significant drop in achievement from placing NCEA level 1 100 percent online. That has been reported in the press and in other statements but has this Government taken it into account before it decided to open this industry up to the private sector? No it has not because it has been blinded by the opportunity of money.I say that Mr Hudson and you scoff not knowing what you are talking about—but you scoff. One of the other pieces of this bill is to allow boards of trustees—Brett Hudson: Providers don't pay the Government.TRACEY MARTIN: —no listen Mr Hudson you might learn something. This other part in this bill allows boards of trustees to sell their services—Brett Hudson: They can vote for the Opposition because they're getting too much funding.TRACEY MARTIN: Mr Hudson. Mr Hudson—over here. Why would boards of trustees need to sell their services Mr Hudson? Is it because they are underfunded and this is another way to take pressure off the Government which says it is with its $11 billion supporting education more than before? Most of that is being spent on leaky buildings which I think was actually created—I think one needs to go and talk with Mr Maurice Williamson about how we ended up in the leaky building situation. But let us be clear: it is not being spent on students—these dollars.Let us just touch on cohorts because that is also about money. Cohort entry which schools have been able to do since Tomorrow's Schools was introduced—boards of trustees have always had the capacity to do it. It has been identified in the regulatory impact statement that cohort entry will save the Government a predicted $11.3 million in early childhood education funding. Please do not tell me that that is not important to this Government because it seems to know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.The other thing that is really interesting is that cohort entry which we are talking about now aligns to the quarterly funding returns that schools have to put in. I am not sure whether the National Government members are aware that their Government put in quarterly funding returns but this is the driver: cohort entry is connected to quarterly funding returns for the schools so it is actually about money and administration. If it was not why did this Government not allow the Supplementary Order Paper to go through that said you can go into school in the cohort because the Opposition has not opposed cohorts. The Opposition put in a Supplementary Order Paper and all it said was that we are going to change the word to say you can go into a cohort entry—the closest one—after you turn 5. So why did the Government decide—and this is the difference between this Education and Science Committee and the last Education and Science Committee.When Nikki Kaye was actually the chair of the last Education and Science Committee she would invite us into her office to say "What are the sticking points? Where can we collegially organise and come to a place for the benefit of the country?". Cam Calder did the same thing. Cam Calder would reach out to members of the Opposition. We would meet we would discuss it and we would say "Sorry Cam we can't go on that." and he would say "That's fine but I think we can work out some stuff here." We created legislation in that Education and Science Committee that has stood the test of time. None of us has tried to overturn it.Brett Hudson: You've been in Opposition.TRACEY MARTIN: That is not—Mr Hudson please stop interrupting. You know nothing about what you are talking about.That is—and has been—the strength of the select committee process in this Parliament that other people around the world come to see. Unfortunately it is being destroyed by the arrogance of the National Government. Just because it has the majority numbers its members think they do not have to listen to the submitters. Some of them think they do not even have to be polite to the submitters. They do not even have to look up from their iPad or their phone to engage with the submitters. That is unfortunate because we should be proud of the select committee process. It is because these backbenchers have decided that they will just follow the party line and even Ms Parata—finally—at the Committee stage of this bill finally stood up and said "At the end of the day we just disagree." That is OK. It is the respectful way one interacts. National members heard but they did not listen to the people of New Zealand. This is not a start; this is the end of a piece of puzzle for that Government. But the start of a complete rework—the Opposition when it is sitting on the Government benches after 23 September will reach back out to the sector. We will fix it. We will make it so that we do actually put our children first and we take this whole financial concept that the National Government has placed into education out of it."