King Colin: General Debate 
King Colin: General Debate 
[Volume:640;Page:10042] 
COLIN KING (National—Kaikoura) 
: 
 18 June will go down as a “blue-letter day” from the point of view of National and for all those people who will gain enormously from skills and trades being reintroduced into our curriculum. Only a National Government will be able to achieve this because effectively we have witnessed over the last 8 years successive Labour Ministers of Education presiding over this portfolio standing by watching and wringing their hands as the technology curriculum has descended into an abyss of confusion and theory. It has become the subject where one can actually draw a scone but can never get to bake it and is described as being able to write how to make a cart but never being able to build it. The rhetoric of this Government around its educational aims its glib answers is overwhelming and it gives me pleasure to inform the Government that New Zealanders are no longer prepared to swallow that level of rubbish. 
It amazes me how a Government can deny New Zealanders and rob them of confidence and self-belief. We do not have to look too far afield to see just what a positive Government can achieve in Australia for instance. Yet on this side of the Tasman we can see clearly that this Government prides itself on denying people their self-reliance and self-belief. 
On that basis I wish to congratulate the leader of the National Party John Key on the form and measure in which he articulated the comments about introducing trades back into schools. It is very pertinent because we have seen such an abysmal performance from this Government. What did John Key the leader of the National Party say? He said: “It’s time to put hands-on trades and industry training back into the heart of our [education] system. 
The National Part has a vision of doing this and of achieving this.” Let us contrast this sort of thing with the shameful legacy of Labour. Each week 30000 youth are absent from schools. 
Anne Tolley 
: How many? 
COLIN KING 
: There are 30000 children not attending schools. It is very interesting when we ask questions of the Minister as to the Government’s solutions for that. Those members say: “We’re implementing a range of policies.” It is a bit like saying the cheque is in the mail. When we look at the granting of exemptions from school before the official leaving-age we see there were 4000 last year. One in five children is not achieving level 1 of the National Certificate in Educational Achievement (NCEA). But probably the most disappointing performance from Labour and horrifying fact for all New Zealanders is that 53 percent of Maori boys do not achieve level 1 in NCEA. So Labour’s legacy around education is quite shameful. It has forgotten about an enormous part of New Zealand’s young. 
What was John Key’s message about this urgently needed change? It was this: “We need to do a better job of exposing students early on to some of the hands-on industries that might fire up their appetite for education.” I can assure members that the message going around and the message given to us at meetings with various educational experts is that teachers are crying out for methods to engage children. I would just like to make the point that we should not think that because somebody is interested in  
Macbeth 
 he or she will not be equally stimulated by trades and hands-on skills at school. 
So what will National do? National will make it clear that schools must provide students with opportunities to learn practical hands-on skills. It is as simple as that. After all this blather around the edges—social conversations and so on—what have we got? We have a disaster. Principals at these secondary schools are telling us to get the feel of the size of the resulting crisis. These are some of the ways they describe the shortage of technology teachers: “a nightmare” “a major problem” “almost impossible” “a significant problem that will get worse not better” “dire” and “the death knell for the technology learning area”.