Moroney Sue: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Moroney Sue: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 12 September 2012. Volume:683;Page:5152. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 That last speech by Katrina Shanks was an example of just how much the National Government lacks in ambition for this country. Apparently we are supposed to feel that it is doing a good job because the unemployment rate is not at 24 percent. That is what we are told. We are supposed to be thankful and grateful to that Government because we are not at 24 percent unemployment. Well when Labour was the Government it boasted the lowest unemployment rate in the OECD—not just saying: “Well gosh you know Spain and Portugal and Ireland are ahead of us and Greece is ahead of us.” Actually unemployment was the lowest in the OECD under Labour. That is because we actually had a plan and we knew what we were doing. 
If you want to look for vision these days on the political scene in New Zealand then you need to look no further than David Shearer’s speech on education. He was not prepared to sit back and say: “Well as long as we’re just a little bit below Spain and Portugal and Ireland and Greece we’re fine.” He was not prepared to say that. What David Shearer said was that Labour will ensure the world’s best education—the best education in the world—is available at every school. We want every child and every community to have access to world-class education. We are not satisfied with the situation where parents have to drive often past four or five school gates to get to a school that they feel is the right one for their child. We do not agree with this idea of charter schools of actually giving public money over to the private sector to make a profit out of education. 
In fact what David Shearer said—he was the one coming up with the fresh new ideas—was: “We’re going to actually deal with the real issues there in the community. We’re going to work with community agencies to put food in low-decile schools.”—the very thing that the National Government is in complete denial over. Labour knows what is going on out in the community and we have a plan to fix it. We will also extend Reading Recovery to all schools because we just cannot afford to have kids dropping out without basic skills. We are also going to introduce clear and easy-to-understand school report cards to parents so they know what is going on in their schools. The Education Review Office produces reports now but for most parents it is actually like reading gobbledegook. I think it is going to be great for parents to get an easy-to-understand report on how their school is actually doing. Those are the commitments from Labour and that is where a vision is coming from on the political scene in New Zealand at the moment. 
Contrast that with the National Party. What has it got to say about education? Well the only plans it has for education are to increase class sizes so that teachers have many more children to try to interact with and of course we all know and all the parents throughout this country know that the quality of education will go down. Well what are its other plans? Charter schools as I said before without qualified teachers. It wants to dumb down the quality of teaching by introducing charter schools. That is the vision that the National Government has and league tables. Today we learn about possible exams for 3 and 4-year-olds. That is where it is heading next. That is where it is heading next because Hekia Parata had plenty of opportunity in question time today to deny that she was going down that path. She absolutely would not deny that work is being done on introducing national standards for our preschool children. Three and 4-year-olds being under exam pressure is not the vision for New Zealand. It is not the vision that Labour has. 
But it is not only with regard to the threat of exams for 3 and 4-year-olds that the National Government is in trouble with early childhood education. Yesterday the Minister for Social Development Paula Bennett was actually announcing a whole series of compulsions but compulsions only for the children of beneficiaries to have to take part in early childhood education at ages 3 and 4. But here is the strange thing: costs for early childhood education under this Government have risen four times the rate of wages since 2010. This Government has been busily putting fees up in early childhood education and now it is going to punish beneficiaries because they cannot afford to send their children to early childhood education. It is going to punish not only the beneficiaries but the children of those beneficiaries because they cannot afford to send their children to early childhood education.