Hipkins Chris: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hipkins Chris: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 05 December 2012. Volume:686;Page:7151. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 If that is the best defence the National Government can mount after another shocker of a year for New Zealand under its stewardship it is no wonder the soon-to-be-unemployed National Government backbenchers are looking so depressed going into the Christmas break because you can see it in their faces that they know the game is up. They know that they have failed to deliver the brighter future that they promised New Zealanders 4 long years ago. 
They know that John Key promised to stem the exodus to Australia when he stood in Westpac Stadium talked about the number of people going to Australia and said he was going to do something about it and they know that New Zealanders have realised that it was a hoax because in fact now Westpac Stadium is not big enough. Now it would actually require Eden Park to accommodate the number of people who are leaving to go to Australia every year under John Key’s stewardship. The game is up. New Zealanders know that they were duped by National not once but twice. National members will feel the consequences of that next year when they get to the ballot box because New Zealanders are feeling it. New Zealanders are feeling it and particularly they are feeling it in relation to employment. 
Today we are seeing the highest unemployment rate in 13 years under John Key’s National Government. Whatever happened to the Job Summit? That was John Key’s major focus when he became Prime Minister getting people back into work and creating jobs yet we now have 175000 New Zealanders out of work. What is the Government’s response? It is that the numbers bounce around a little bit. Actually if you are one of the people who has lost their job you do not feel particularly bouncy about it. I know that you are about to lose yours Mr Speaker but I will not go into that in any greater detail. 
What else has happened this year? We have had the Government Communications Security Bureau debacle—John Key failing to read the reports and failing to take any responsibility for his own actions. Then of course we have had the ongoing series of debacles in education where three Ministers—Craig Foss Hekia Parata and Bill English—all signed off on the implementation of a new payroll system without thinking to ask anybody: “Will it actually work? Will it work? Has somebody checked to see that when we hit this button it’s actually going to work?”. All three Ministers including the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance signed it off without bothering to ask whether it was going to work. What was the result? Thousands of people up and down the country did not get paid and thousands and thousands more got paid the wrong amounts because the Government did not do its job. 
That is not surprising though when we look at the Government’s track record in education. It is a Government that has well and truly taken its eye off the ball in education. Its one solution this year to make things better for the education system was to make class sizes bigger. Every parent up and down the country knows that having more kids in front of every teacher is not going to improve the quality of the education that their kids receive. Yet John Key even now even after backing down on it in the Budget still thinks it is a good idea. He just thinks they did not sell it well enough. He still thinks it is a good idea. 
It is no wonder the New Zealand public does not have any faith in this Government when it comes to education because this Government’s educational policies are all about ideology. They are about unregistered and unqualified teachers in charter schools charter schools that do not have to adhere to all the rules that every other school in the country has to adhere to and of course the Government thinks that education is a great place for people who want to make a profit as we have seen with its public-private partnerships in schools which have not saved the taxpayer any money. In fact the one public-private partnership that it has tried to implement in the education sector has cost more than if it had just built the school using the good old-fashioned traditional method of getting the Ministry of Education to oversee its construction. It has been a disaster and it has all been so that the National Government can create a profit-making opportunity for someone rather than actually looking at what the best outcome for education is going to be. It has been based on ideology. 
It has been a shocker of a year for the Government on so many other fronts as well. Let us not forget Nick Smith thinking it was all OK—[ 
Interruption 
] Grant Robertson will never forget Nick Smith thinking it was all OK for him on ministerial letterhead to write a letter for one of his friends arguing for ACC cover for them when he was the Minister for ACC. He does not have the judgment to be a Minister. Now John Key is trying to jack it up so that he can be back in the ministry after Christmas. That is a disgrace. That is a telling commentary on John Key’s standards.