Martin TraceyTRACEY MARTIN (NZ First): Kia ora Mr Deputy Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to oppose the Education (Update) Amendment Bill. Can I start by saying how much I miss Nikki Kaye as the chair of the Education and Science Committee. There was a woman who actually knew collaboration. There was a woman who should have been the Minister of Education because she knew how to listen. She knew how to work with the sector. She knew how to actually be a visionary and take people with her. Mr Muller's contribution was condescending and paternalistic. Basically it laid out the way that the Education and Science Committee is working at the moment after what the Government did with regard to the Education Legislation Bill and after what happened at the select committee. The Government made sure it loaded that select committee so that regardless of the conversation that took place regardless of the openmindedness of the Opposition and the attempts to work across it the Government has the numbers and the Government knows it. I also want to say how much I miss Cam Calder. He was a gentleman who was the chair of the Education and Science Committee and he also knew how to reach out to Opposition parties to politely and respectfully have discussions about something that is incredibly important to our nation and that is the education of our young people. If we get back to this bill I just make a couple of things clear. It has been mentioned this evening that one of the things this bill does is allow cohorts of 5-year-olds or children 8 weeks before they turn 5 to enter the school system. They have always for the last 27 years been able to do it. Every board of trustees has had the opportunity to make that decision for its community. This bill does not do that I say to Government members. What this bill does do means that if a school decides to have cohorts begin at the beginning of a term then once those children are signed into the school they must attend every single day or they will be part of the truancy problem. So be clear please Government members with what it is that you are actually talking about. Go and read the 13 regulatory impact statements before we end up in the Education and Science Committee and the Opposition has to explain it to you and then you condescendingly just vote past it. Secondly the Minister of Education has mentioned—and other members have taken her at her word—that consultation took place and 1800 people submitted. I was part of that consultation process as the chair of the board of Mahurangi College. Let me describe it to you. It was a 1-hour consultation meeting called at regular places around the country. The first 30 minutes was when the Ministry of Education official explained to us what the Minister wanted and what was out of scope—governance was out of scope other things were out of scope. Once they had finished they broke us into small groups of three or four people with the bullet points that the Minister had given us and we had 20 minutes to write it on a large A3 sheet of paper before they were collected up. Then it was: Thank you very much. There's a scone over there and off you go." So it is all very well and good to say that there were 1800 people who participated and that there were 120 meetings throughout the country but it is the quality of consultation that actually makes the difference not the fact that you have marked it off on a book or ticked it off on some sort of check sheet. This bill is the largest update to the Education Act 1989 in 27 years and it is a terrible one. It is one of the most terrible updates that could have happened to education in this country and New Zealand First will fight it every step of the way. We want to make sure that not only the public understand what is going on here but that the members of the Government understand—maybe; just maybe—even though Mr Muller has already outlined the fact that if the Opposition objects it is apparently because we are closed-minded. So Mr Muller—or Mueller; I am not quite sure of the pronunciation—has already decided and already laid out the fact that if the Opposition objects then apparently the Opposition is closed-minded. Let us also be a little bit clear that online learning is not blended learning. This bill makes it 100 percent clear that you can replace face-to-face or blended learning with 100 percent online learning for 5-year-olds through to 18-year-olds. Let us be very very clear. This is not home schooling. Home schooling will still remain. This is not blended learning which we currently have going on in our school system. This is 100 percent online learning and it opens the door up to bodies corporate and corporates. This is why you need to know your history. Where did this come from? In the last Parliament there was a digital literacy inquiry that Google and Microsoft presented at. Read their submissions. Go back and look at your history and see where this came from. The Khan Academy for example also presented.David Seymour: Oh no.TRACEY MARTIN: Oh yes. Mr Seymour knows all about it because Mr Seymour works for those corporates. Mr Seymour understands those corporates. Mr Seymour is confident that those corporates will get his vote. He believes that business is everything. He has absolutely no regard for the young people involved here. And even with regard to the parents of children with special needs he has basically said: "Vote with your feet. If you don't like this school we'll give you a voucher and vote with your feet." He has complete disregard for the communities of learning that actually take place. But let us be clear that that is where this came from—from the digital literacy inquiry in the last Parliament. One of the other things that this bill does is it repeals the Private Schools Conditional Integration Act 1975. Why have we not heard anything about this from the integrated schools? Has anybody actually read the regulatory impact statement? Are they aware of what this does with regard to the taxpayers' property dollar for those private assets? Has anybody over the other side of the House read it? No—right. So that is what it does. It repeals the Act and it gives more taxpayers' money away and it ties the hand of any future Government with regard to any amendment to how education will be delivered. It will have to pay the integrated school providers for their private assets from the taxpayer fund. But did anybody read that regulatory impact statement? It does not appear to be so. The other thing that we have got going on here is "strengthening collaborative governance". What this does is actually set out a process by which boards of trustees somehow can sell their services to other schools other corporates other trusts and goodness knows whom. These are individual people who have got elected on to school boards of trustees—there is nothing to stop them now individually contracting out their skills but this creates the opportunity for a board of trustees to sell its services except that if you keep the principal on those boards of trustees and the staff trustee on the boards of trustees they become too big and unwieldy. So the suggestion is that when you have an amalgamation of a couple of school boards or whatever you remove the staff trustee and you remove the principal because they are too unwieldy. So let us take the voice of those people away amalgamate some boards of trustees and allow them to sell their services but make sure that the principals' and the staff's voices are not inside that process. Interesting is it not? Did anybody read that? There are another 11 regulatory impact statements and each one of them does something very very very interesting but the Government is hoping that you will be distracted by the communities of online learning (COOLs). The Government is hoping that everybody else will be distracted by the COOLs. The fact that the COOLs do not go anywhere near actually providing the digital literacy or the digital understanding comprehension and coding background that we require of our 21st century students appears to have been lost. The Government has given Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu (Te Kura) as the reason why we must have these online learning facilities these COOLs. It is because apparently Te Kura has become too unmanageable. It is too big. There are too many students in it—23000 students. Can we just make sure that we know the data here—11000 of those 23000 students are currently in New Zealand schools usually taking around one subject and the problem is that the Government cannot charge for it because they are in a State school. This is about money. Do not make any mistake. This is about the ability to set fees and charge. The other thing is that there are 7400 young adults who are over 16-years and adult learners. Why are we putting through legislation to change everything inside the State system when those 7400 young people could be with private providers somewhere else under a different system? There are 800 early childhood education students who are actually part of Te Kura. How about we just fund playcentres? How about we just fund playcentres or kindergartens or playgroups or something like that rather than changing the whole of the education system to allow privatisation? So New Zealand First will oppose and continue to oppose this bill. That is the start. There are another 11 regulatory impact statements for further speeches. Kia ora."