Coddington Deborah: Education (Disestablishment of Early Childhood Development Board) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Coddington Deborah: Education (Disestablishment of Early Childhood Development Board) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:611;Page:8560] 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT NZ) 
: 
 It is interesting that we are having the first reading of this bill today because if we look at the recruitment page in today’s  
Dominion Post  
we see that all the positions are already being advertised for this new entity and have already moved into the Ministry of Education. So on the first reading of a piece of legislation we are trying to catch up with what has already happened. The Minister is being specious if he thinks that he has to pass this whole new bill just to cover a gap in the legislation—that is clause 6 which has the new funding mechanism that will enable the Minister to channel funding to the childhood centres that are not bodies corporate. That could have been done without taking the Early Childhood Development Board into the Ministry of Education. 
The Minister Trevor Mallard said on 12 March that public servants should not be frightened for their jobs due to this amalgamation. He said: “This is not a Ruth Richardson let’s-fire-everyone type review.” However a month later the Early Childhood Development Board’s own chairman Michael Morris told the Education and Science Committee during the financial reviews that he did expect some staff redundancies. He also told the New Zealand Press Association that the merger would take place by 30 September 2003. As we know it is now 10 September and we are debating the first reading of this bill and anyway it has already happened. 
The Minister was also incorrect when he said that there had been consultation with stakeholders in the early childhood sector. There has been very little consultation with stakeholders. The New Zealand Educational Institute and the Early Childhood Council have not been consulted. It just shows the complete contempt that this Minister has for the sector. I agree with the member over there who said that there are some experts out there in early childhood education. They are mothers and they are fathers. Why are they experts? They are experts because the Government keeps its clammy hands out of their lives and lets them get on with them. The best thing that this Government or any Government can do for early childhood education is to just leave it alone apart from being there to protect contract and the rule of law. 
We had a situation where parents could choose and we still have a situation to a large extent where parents can choose. This Minister is doing his damnedest to get rid of that. He will create one big bureaucracy in the Ministry of Education rather than allow the sector to develop within local communities and local communities are what can be truly responsive to the needs of communities who use early childhood education. Sure they do not always get it right and do make mistakes but local communities can respond a helluva lot quicker than a great big behemoth of a bureaucracy in Wellington can respond. To take one example members should look at the disastrous result we have of the great experiment of look-say reading. We have a whole generation of children who cannot read or write and we are starting to go back to phonics. If that had been run by parents communities and teachers without a directive from the ministry it would have been corrected very easily. 
The Minister referred to the fact and it is also in the commentary that the decision to do this merger draws on the Government’s decision to increase its involvement in the management of the early childhood education network of services and the 10-year strategic plan for early childhood education  
Pathways to the Future: Nga Huarahi Arataki 
. Let us look at some of the results of this plan. I asked the Minister a number of parliamentary questions a month ago. I wanted to know about the target for increasing Maori participation in early childhood education that the Minister has claimed as a great success. If we look at the results of that we see that the target for increasing it was 4500. It deliberately was not made in percentages so it would be easier to turn round and say that it has been a success. 
Four thousand one hundred and five Maori children were placed with early childhood providers during this time. It sounds good does it not? In fact those children would have been placed with early childhood providers just because of population growth. It would have happened regardless. What has been spent on these contracts? It is $8.2 million; $15555 per child. That would have bought quite a lot of good private early childhood education. 
There is almost no monitoring of this scheme. Some contractors have been paid even though there is no record of their even placing children with early childhood providers. I have some of the lists here. Let us look at some of these amounts of money: Te Whare Akonga Open Learning Centre 
 
 $600000; Te Pua Waitangi Ltd 270000; Manaaki Management Services $202000. How many children have stayed in early childhood education as a result of this $8 million? We do not know. There is no accountability. As the early childhood advisory committee noted at its committee meeting there is no follow-up on duration of participation or monitoring of retention. Fourteen out of the 50 contractors that the education ministry had paid this money to had failed to meet specific performance measures. 
It is just not good enough. What should that come under? That is $8 million that was targeted to get children into early childhood education. We do not know where it has gone. We do not know how long those children have stayed in. They are not monitored after 3 months. We do not know whether it is the same children enrolling and re-enrolling. It is for those reasons that the ACT party is opposing this bill. 
If the Minister were doing his job he would be using taxpayers’ money to ensure that those children were getting an early childhood education and that that taxpayers’ money was being used for the reason for which it was designated and that taxpayers’ money was not being wasted in going ahead with this merger when it is absolutely not necessary. I argue that the Minister is just using this merger as an excuse to cut funding to the sector. We will end up with a single bloated bureaucracy. The bureaucracy will be the inspection and the enforcement agency as Phil Heatley has already pointed out. It will be the funding administrator it will be the provider of advice and support to centres and it will be the researcher and the policy adviser to the Government. 
So it is to advise the Government it will do the research and it will be handing out the funding but it will also do the inspection and the enforcement. It is exactly what Trevor Mallard said he would do to the Education Review Office before he became Minister. He went out and he publicly said he would close down the Education Review Office and take it into the ministry. With pressure on him to his credit he actually did listen that time. He consulted. It was his early days as the Minister of Education— 
Simon Power 
: Those were the days! 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON 
: Those were the days! He listened to people out there who said: “If you get rid of the ERO there will be absolutely nothing for parents to monitor schools.” At least with the Education Review Office they can go on to the web and see reports from the Education Review Office. The Minister is capable of consulting and listening if he really really tries hard—and that does not mean going round to places like Wairoa and Kawakawa and listening and then closing the schools anyway. It means listening to good advice not from his ministry officials but from parents out there and it is the parents and the teachers in the communities who know what is best for their children not the politicians and the bureaucrats.