Donnelly Brian: Financial Review Debate 
Donnelly Brian: Financial Review Debate 
[Volume:607;Page:4143] 
Hon BRIAN DONNELLY (NZ First) 
: 
 I want to refer to a couple of the comments made by previous speakers. The Hon Paul Swain claims that the House should be congratulating the Government for its positive good work during the 2001-02 year which is the period of this review. I remind the Hon Paul Swain that during the period of this review New Zealand experienced the turmoil of the most bitter and destructive industrial action that has ever been seen in education in the history of this country. The ongoing legacy of that bitter dispute is still around today. The issues that have been raised are part of the infrastructural tensions that exist in our educational system today and they have certainly not been resolved. 
I also refer to a point made by the Hon Tony Ryall who said the National Party is to go back to a policy of choice for parents—it will abolish zoning. It is worthwhile pointing out that it was the previous National Government that reintroduced school zoning in 1998. Zoning had been got rid of in 1993 and it had been recognised that it was an absolute shambles. But legislation introduced by the previous National Government supported by ACT put back school zoning in 1998. We really have to start questioning where the National Party is coming from if that is the best that it can come up with in terms of its educational policy. 
No party in this House would deny the importance of education. Therefore I will be focusing upon education in my speech. Possibly—and certainly in the view of New Zealand First—the Education vote is amongst the most important expenditure in any Budget. There is one party that whilst it believes in education certainly does not believe that State expenditure should be used for it. But I need to remind that party that even Adam Smith the father of the philosophy espoused by that party believed that we need to have State funding in education because individuals would not value education enough to meet the needs of the State itself. 
I now go on to some of the other elements that I believe commenced during the period of time that is under review. We are now seeing some of the aftermath of those elements. It is not a question of the degree of funding of education. The National and Labour parties will throw that at each other but in fact the amount of funding during this review period was approximately the same as under the previous Government. Labour has introduced a wonderful spin on its policy—for example including the bulk-funding money which was already there. That money has been put into the operational funding which by the way is bulk funded anyhow. Labour just took bulk funding from one thing and bulk funded it in another way and then claimed it had put a whole lot more money into education. It basically robbed Peter to pay Paul. 
At the beginning of this review period the Minister of Education was the darling of the educational fraternity. The members of that fraternity all thought he was wonderful. At this particular point in time with the possible exception of Merv Wellington he is the Minister of Education who is most detested by the educational fraternity in my time in the House and we have to ask why that has come about. I say it has come about as a result of not approaching the infrastructural tensions that exist within our education system and of just reacting and responding to union demands instead of having a vision of how we can move forward in a constructive fashion into the 21st century. 
The first thing which I have already referred to is the secondary teachers claim. The secondary teachers claim was about breaking pay parity. The best way to do that was to introduce a whole pile of arguments around qualifications. What has happened as a result of the Alternative Disputes Resolution Panel’s decision to put people on certain qualifications on to an additional step is that a whole pile of other angst pressures and tensions has been created around the sector. People are extremely disappointed. They feel that they are not receiving fair treatment and that a social contract made with them by a previous Government has been broken. The whole profession is feeling under attack and unloved because the critical issues have not been approached. Those issues have not been looked at. 
I will give members an example of that. I went to a secondary school the other day. There were six teachers working in the technology department of whom two had degrees and the other four had advanced diplomas in the areas of technology that they were teaching—the highest qualifications that they were able to get in those areas. One of those degrees was in economics although that person was not teaching economics. The other degree was a Bachelor of Teaching which had to do with pedagogy etc. Only one of those six people receives the G3+ salary step: the one with the degree in economics. In other words we are paying people purely and simply on the basis of having a degree regardless of the connectedness of that to the job that they are doing. 
We have now put pay parity in for kindergarten teachers and all the incentives are there for kindergarten teachers to go off and get degrees. They can get degrees in anything—theology or anything they like—and then they will be paid plenty. The degree may have nothing at all to do with the job those teachers are doing but that is what we will be paying them for. Until we resolve that particular issue we will be pouring a huge amount of money down the gurgler we will have a whole lot of people who feel extremely unhappy within the system—and one certainly cannot run a good education system if the prime deliverers of that system are feeling unhappy about things—and that will not benefit education as such. Until the Minister is prepared to front up to the particular issue of connecting the actual qualifications and the learning that people have with the pay scale in a way that reflects the needs of the system we will be pouring literally hundreds of millions of dollars down the gurgler every year. 
It is ironic that one of the bright points in education that has occurred under this Government has been the Tertiary Education Commission. It has been a long time in coming and there was certainly a problem in the system in that the previous National Government’s policies in the 1990s had increased participation rates but had not created a connectedness between what people were doing and what society and the economy needed. So the Government put together the Tertiary Education Commission. That is probably the most important education reform to have come about in the last 10 years. I make a plea to all parties to give that body time. The Tertiary Education Commission has a hugely important and complex task to do in bringing all tertiary education under one umbrella. It has a very large amount of money at its disposal—we are talking about around $1 billion—and if we play political football with the commission from day one it will not be able to get on with its task. We should give the commission a bit of time and then if it is not starting to work it will be appropriate for the Opposition parties to get stuck in. But I do ask that the parties give the commission a little breathing space. 
The early childhood situation is in a precarious state at the moment and that is because of something that may have seemed to be a very good idea: pay parity for kindergarten teachers. But we need to recognise that only one-third of early childhood education is delivered by kindergarten teachers. What we have done is to overlay a secondary staffing structure and pay structure and in putting that on to kindergartens we now have all the incentives completely wrong. The incentives are in fact for people to get degrees and not necessarily to study or to develop skills in the particular field that they need. But that structure will also cause difficulty for those who are providing the other two-thirds of early childhood education that does not involve kindergartens. Where will those other forms of early childhood education get their teachers from? The teachers will all be drafted into kindergartens with what I consider to be very poor staffing ratios. 
I want to mention one other element in this period of review and that is the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA). What this Government has done in terms of putting up fees in the way that it has is absolutely scandalous behaviour on the part of a Labour Government. It locks out the very people that former Labour Governments and the Labour Party have in the past purported to represent. In this case we are saying to people that they can have their qualification if their parents can afford to pay for it. The cost has gone up sixfold since the year 2000 and there is no justification for that. The reason it has gone up is that the money has not been put in through the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to enable it to afford to administer the qualification. The NCEA could be the best qualification in the world and it could certainly open up opportunities for young people who have been locked out of the system because of the qualifications systems that were in place before. Instead along came this Government with a Minister of Education—who is also an Associate Minister of Finance—who says the Government has to make sure that it keeps control of things and it has put up the fees.