Hipkins Chris: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hipkins Chris: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 12 September 2012. Volume:683;Page:5147. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 It has not escaped anybody’s attention that Bill English refused to back the Prime Minister today and refused to defend the Prime Minister’s comments on Reading Recovery. He would not go anywhere near it. When a question was put to the Acting Prime Minister he went out of his way to get it off his desk because he did not want to back the Prime Minister on Reading Recovery. Why did he not want to do that? Because the comments and the commitments that the Labour Party has made with regard to Reading Recovery are the same sentiments that Bill English was expressing when he was in Opposition. And has National done it? After 4 years has it delivered on it? No it has not. 
In fact the problem has got worse. There are fewer decile 1 2 and 3 schools delivering Reading Recovery today than there were when Bill English was lamenting the fact that not enough schools were delivering it. It is no wonder Bill English was ducking for cover and was refusing to back John Key on Reading Recovery because it would simply have shown once again that what Bill English said in Opposition is not what he has been doing in Government. Nothing that the National Party said when it was in Opposition can be relied upon as a guide for what it has been doing in Government. For 4 years New Zealanders have been waiting for the brighter future the National Party promised them and they are still going to be waiting at the next election when they turf National out and introduce a Labour Government because then they will actually see the brighter future that New Zealanders hunger for and want to see. 
New Zealanders know that education is a core part a core way that we can deliver the brighter future and it is not going to come from this National Government. This National Government is destroying the most positive aspects of our New Zealand education system which is one of the best in the world. National is tinkering with it experimenting with it and turning our kids into guinea pigs. It is turning to the countries in the world that are way down the ladder and have a worse education system than us and it is copying the things they do. It is copying the things they do and it is hoping that that is going to improve our education system. Well it will not. 
The National Party tells parents that they cannot trust teachers. The National Party at its core hates teachers. They really do not like teachers over there in the National Party and they keep telling parents they cannot trust teachers. Their solution to improving the quality of teaching was to make classes bigger and when that failed they resorted to a new plan to introduce charter schools without having qualified teachers in them. That was National’s solution to the fact that parents overwhelmingly rejected its plan for bigger class sizes. So what did National members do? They went back to the drawing board and said: “Let’s just not have qualified teachers. Let’s just reduce the number of qualified teachers in charter schools.” That is not going to be the solution to the problem. We have a very efficient education system when it comes to building schools. What is the National Party’s solution to that? “Oh” National says “we better get the for-profit private sector involved. We are going to build some public-private partnership schools that cost more than the regular public schools are going to cost.” That is the bright future the National Party is promising to New Zealanders. 
We should know of course that National is not committed to qualified teachers because one of the very first things it did was to lower the standards for early childhood education by reducing the number of qualified teachers that an early childhood education centre is expected to have. 
Katrina Shanks 
: That’s rubbish. 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: That was one of the first things Anne Tolley did when she became the Minister of Education and I agree with Katrina Shanks—it was a rubbish decision that Anne Tolley made when she lowered the standards for early childhood education. 
This is a Government that does not have a clear agenda for education. It does not have any idea what it is trying to achieve. It has the charter schools idea—the silver bullet. So now we are going to have the “Merrill Lynch School for Ethical Investment”. We are going to have the “KFC School for Nutritional Studies”. We will have the “Monsanto School of Organic Agriculture” and the “Rothmans School for Health Studies”. That is fundamentally what the National Party believes—that running schools is a business that someone should be able to make a profit out of and they do not even have to deliver on quality. They do not even have to deliver on quality. It does not matter whether they have qualified teachers in the classrooms of these new charter schools. That does not matter to the National Party because fundamentally it does not know what it is trying to achieve in education. It does not have a programme that will improve our education system. 
What we need to be focused on is how we go from having one of the best education systems in the world to having the best education system in the world. That is what the Labour Party under David Shearer’s leadership is committed to. That is what we are going to deliver when we win the next general election.