Kaye NikkiHon NIKKI KAYE (National—Auckland Central): I am pleased to take a call on the Education (School Donations) Amendment Bill. Firstly can I just acknowledge that at the heart of this bill we are having a conversation about how we reduce costs to parents but I do want to acknowledge the irony that we are in urgency and we have been rushing through a range of taxes that are going to increase the cost of living for many New Zealanders. I take the fuel tax that will increase the cost for particularly disadvantaged New Zealanders and those people on fixed incomes. National will support this bill through its first reading. However we have massive concerns and I want to look to Andrew Little in part of those concerns. If you look at the history around this issue Labour previously promised that they would scrap school donations. Under Andrew Little as leader they said that school donations would be gone. What we know is that then Chris Hipkins effectively came in and said No we're not going to scrap school donations. We're actually going to try and incentivise them to be gone." So they dialled back their policy and it became a $150 incentive to try and incentivise people to not charge donations. The reality is there still is a group of parents out there that believe that because of Labour Party press releases where they said "We're going to end donations." that that's exactly what they would do; instead we got the watered-down version on the eve of the election. However when they came into Government just like everything else we know they've had bad priorities—they spent money on planes and trees and a whole lot of other things—and so education has missed out. We know that there are at least 50 broken promises in education and we know that they've got bad priorities.So again what happens? We have the Budget read and it is dialled back again. I am getting emails in my in-box from principals who are saying "I want Labour Party members to tell me why they have tens of thousands of dollars less than they expected." Some schools said to me that they actually relied on those promises. I've got schools that are tens of thousands of dollars short. I've got a school in a town area that is literally the only school that will not apply to this policy.So National will support this bill through to its first reading but we will certainly be pointing out the inequities—the huge inequities—that this Minister of Education is creating with this bill. One of them as I've mentioned is around these decile 8 decile 9 and decile 10 schools that are excluded. Also it's really important to understand that this is on the backdrop of Labour stalling the policy around scrapping deciles and investing additional money into deciles. So I have examples of schools that again expected to have a much more fair funding system because National had put in the funding review but it also argued to scrap decile systems and put additional funding in. So you've got schools that are now losing twice. They're losing because they don't have that fairness of a new equity funding system with additional cash and now they're losing because they're excluded from a policy where they don't have to charge donations for an incentive payment. So you've got huge inequity that National will be talking to.The next part is that I've just been on the phone to the integrated schools; that is 90000 children in New Zealand—330 schools. This is typical of the Minister of Education. He doesn't care about partnership schools. He doesn't care about integrated schools. He doesn't care about private schools. He tries to get rid of partnership schools which he pretty much successfully did. Integrated schools—you'd think that the Minister's office would have made a basic phone call to the integrated schools to say "Hey you're in." or "You're out." So there are 90000 children and 330 schools that don't know whether they will be part of this policy.So National will not only be raising the 600-odd schools that have been excluded because Labour ran out of money and spent it on bad things but we will also be raising the 330 schools that have no clue no idea as to whether this legislation applies to them. There are disadvantaged children in decile 8 schools decile 9 schools decile 10 schools and also in integrated schools. So we have some serious serious issues of equity to deal with. And I do want to acknowledge that this is absolutely on the backdrop of National doing a funding review that said we've already got huge inequity in our school system and we need to make changes to the decile system but to then put on top of that a new donations-type system—that's going to exclude a whole lot of people.I want to talk about some very individual stories. So one principal has said to me that their school will be the only school in their town that misses out on this. It is in the order of $100000. That is so much money. We will certainly be hoping that the select committee process will be robust so that those hundreds of schools can turn up to the Education and Workforce Committee and talk us through their operational grants their decile funding and also now this inequitable policy that the Minister has put up.I want to make some other comments about the cost of education. National has obviously said "Where we can we want to work across the House on reasonable policy to reduce the cost to parents." A great example of that was in reducing the NCEA fees. National previously had a different position; we changed our position and we said "We should scrap NCEA fees." I want to acknowledge the work of the Minister on that. All political parties are supportive of that policy.We certainly believe that there are a number of other areas where we do need greater clarity. My message to the Minister is that it's all very well to have a policy around donations but he knows as well as I do that there is a lot of grey and there are a lot of conversations going on about what exactly schools can charge for. This issue of whether schools can be charging around curriculum-related activities—there are going to be schools that are going to come to the Education and Workforce Committee and ask those questions. We know that the ministry has really had sort of what I would call inequitable treatment around some schools in New Zealand about what they can and can't charge for. So my other plea to the Minister is to say not only have we got an inequitable policy but there are some really serious issues that we need to deal with generally about what parents should or should not be paying for in terms of our school system. So National will certainly be raising a number of those issues.The other issue that I want to raise in terms of the bill—and again I've had a range of people contact me in the last 24 hours about this—is that there is a clause in there and again we've got to dig deeper to find out what the Minister's thinking is. It basically indicates that the Minister has maximum discretion to change the payment. So what does that mean? Does that mean that if he sees a board that ends up potentially asking for donations he can obviously say no he's not going to enable them to get that grant or does it mean something else? What some schools are saying to me is that they are deeply concerned that someone could be sitting in the Beehive or you could have other officials that could somehow make a decision that schools would get less depending on their whim of a judgment. So National will certainly be saying "We need greater clarity in law around exactly what the Minister's powers are." Of course we want to reduce costs to parents; that's why we're supporting this bill through the first reading. But we absolutely need to have clarity about exactly what the Minister's powers are.So finally I just want to raise a few wider issues around education that are very relevant to this bill. The first is that we had the largest education industrial action in our nation's history and people have been asking why—and it's very relevant to this bill around school donations. It cuts to the heart of how much money is left in the pot in terms of education and that is relevant for a bill that has a price tag of $265 million. We know that there are about 50 promises that haven't been delivered in education. We know that we've got additional strikes coming. So people are asking "What are the priorities in terms of this Government around education funding?" As I said before we think that the Government has prioritised planes and trees over education but we will support this bill to the Education and Workforce Committee because at the heart of our desire which we think we share with the Government is to reduce costs to parents. That's why we supported the $50 million around getting rid of NCEA fees and that's why we fundamentally want to reduce costs to parents.However we are only supporting it through this first reading at this stage because of the hundreds of schools that have inequitable treatment and the major issues of clarity that we need to get around schools like integrated schools that represent 90000 children in New Zealand. So National supports this to the first reading because we support reducing costs to parents but the Minister needs to resolve all of the holes that are in this bill. I support this bill to the House."