Salesa JennyJENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): New Zealanders are entitled to a free accessible education system. We believe that education gives our young people the opportunities to be the very best that they can be to contribute and to make New Zealand a fantastic place to live.After 9 very long years this National Government's approach to education in Budget 2017 is just more of the same. Has it invested to ensure that the teacher supply crisis is addressed? No this Government has failed to do that. This Government has also failed to address overcrowding in schools. We have heard from many of our colleagues talking about the fact that we have schools that are overcrowded already and have many hundreds of other schools that are at risk of overcrowding. This Government has also failed to keep tertiary education fees down for students and thousands of our students are now facing a lifetime of student debt. The best educational systems make teaching as a profession an attractive career. They also do their very best to try to retain teachers in the profession but we know from a survey that was announced about 2 days ago I think that in Auckland in particular two-thirds of the young teachers—primary and intermediate school teachers—are either already leaving the largest city that we have or are planning to leave Auckland. Why? Because they can no longer afford to live in our largest city.Schools are telling us that they are actually finding it really hard to recruit teachers into their schools. Schools are telling us that as they start term 3—which was yesterday—more than half of their schools are short by two or three teachers. This is an issue that we must absolutely address because it affects all of our children from all levels—from early childhood and primary as well as at high school. When we have schools in Auckland that are stepping up and proposing innovative ways of addressing this issue by saying that they are looking at building places of accommodation—residences at their schools to house teachers—you have to actually ask why it is that schools are beginning to do that and then the other question you have to ask is which schools actually have the resources to be able to do that. I can tell you that it is the schools in rural communities and in South Auckland that are absolutely not in any position to be able to build places to accommodate their teachers because the teachers can no longer afford to live in our largest city.Getting back to Budget 2017 one of the things proposed under this Government is that it will have a Budget initiative for children in early childhood education services who are disadvantaged kids but the issue that we have on this side of the House is how these kids are going to be identified. The really blunt tool that this Government is going to use is it is going to look at kids who are in benefit-dependent households—kids from benefit places. But more than half of the families that come to our offices out in South Auckland asking for assistance are working families. They have either a father who is working full-time or both parents who are working full-time and yet they live in cars garages tents and caravans. We cannot say that these children are not at risk because when you are a child and you should be attending early childhood education services but you do not have a house to live in absolutely you are at risk.I have one other question to ask of this Government. It actually made an announcement that it will be building many more new schools out in Auckland but the question is that the announcement that this Government made over 3 years ago now that there was going to be an allocation of $350 million promised to build nine new schools in Auckland—where are those schools? To have re-announced $240 million in this Budget way back in June was a rehashing of policies and Government funding that was announced several years ago but just because it has not actually built those schools does not actually give this Government the licence to give us National trickery—announcing funding that it has already announced but has failed to spend.It is time for a completely fresh approach. Labour in Government will implement what is really needed—a comprehensive education system. Thank you.