Tuiono TeanauTEANAU TUIONO (Green): Kia ora Mr Speaker. It's great to take a call on the Education and Training (Grants—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill and I acknowledge that this is a first step. It's a first step in what needs to be many steps. For me the call for pay parity has been around for a while and so the processes can be truncated but the conversation and the discussion around the really important needs out there in the early childhood education (ECE) sector have been with the sector for quite some time. I do want to acknowledge and join everyone else with acknowledging the incredible work that our ECE sector does. They do an incredible job teaching our tamariki. The first years in a child's life are so important and set our children up for educational success. The future of our physical cognitive emotional and social development is profoundly affected by our early experiences. At the heart of those experiences are the relationships children form with their parents and of course with their teachers and ensuring that those teachers are paid properly is really really important. The Green Party believes that every child deserves a high-quality free accessible public education that gives them the best possible start in life and we want all children to reach their full potential. But unfortunately not all learners get equal opportunities and recognition. This is particularly so in early childhood education which is a sector dominated by private providers. There are serious institutional inequities of which pay parity is one issue impacting the whole ECE sector. We support this bill but would also welcome action on concerns expressed by submitters about the implementation of pay parity and the possible missed opportunities of this bill. The bill is a clarification of the Minister of Education's powers but it is not sufficient to deliver pay parity itself—for example any funding can be opted out by private providers. Further work would follow so that fair pay and working conditions for teachers can be delivered no matter who their employer is. For me I have friends and relatives who work in the ECE sector and when this was announced I asked them if they were going to get a pay bump. But because they had been working where they were for a while that wasn't for them. So it's really important that we recognise this as a first step and I look forward to all those additional steps to make sure that we are on the pathway to achieve pay parity because the gap is massive in terms of that. I'd just like to reference a press release actually that just came out from the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI). It starts with A $100K difference in pay over ten years—union says ECE pay parity needs to be accelerated … The pay differential between ECE and other teachers is a key contributor to the shortage. NZEI Te Riu Roa estimates that within ten years an ECE teacher starting their career today will on average have been paid more than $100000 less than their colleagues in kindergarten unless the Government accelerates pay parity." So that is the size of the gap and the gap has been there for a while. This bill is a small technical bill and it is a mechanism to help to actually direct some of that funding where it needs to go but it really needs to be ramped up and connected in with that broader vision of ensuring they have pay parity across the ECE sector. At the end of the day it's going to be money it's going to be funding and I'm sure that those of us who have worked in the education sector are aware of the pressing needs of the education sector. I was just out at Hutt Valley High School where they're fixing up their mouldy buildings but there are a number of schools whose buildings are going to need significant repairs and that is another big-dollar item. So I think it's really important that we put down exactly what we need right across the educational sector but especially with the ECE sector so that we've got a fair amount actually so that when we take these next steps—look my expectation is that it needs to be followed up in the next Budget and then the next Budget and then the next Budget if we are going to really get serious about making sure that we are doing what we need to do to support teachers in terms of their claims for pay parity. When we have those numbers then possibly the Minister has got a very clear picture of the sorts of things he'll have to ask the Minister of Finance in terms of the money he needs to shake out of the money tree to actually sort out the issues that we have right across the education sector. So in summarising the Greens support this bill. We see it as a first step of many steps and we look forward to those many steps being: adequately funding and supporting our ECE teachers. Thank you Mr Speaker."