Street Maryan: Supplementary Estimates — Imprest Supply Debate 
Street Maryan: Supplementary Estimates — Imprest Supply Debate 
[Volume:655;Page:4533] 
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 I speak in this debate to draw attention to a number of things the National Government has done that work in exactly the opposite way to its stated aims. National members have said repeatedly their aim is to protect Kiwis from the worst effects of the recession yet where do they go to in order to make some of their most trenchant cuts in this Budget? They turn to education. At just the moment when a Government should be investing in its people this Government has chosen to prioritise school buildings. Although school buildings will always require maintenance and development a time when we are seeing redundancies forced lay-offs and the contraction of the economy is the moment when any thinking Government that had a commitment to New Zealanders would be investing in people by allowing them to have cheap access to programmes where they can upskill and retrain in order to fit themselves to meet the demands of this recession. What this Government has been doing denies New Zealanders access to some of the lowest-cost and most universally available courses in the country for training retraining and upskilling themselves. 
I will start with adult and community education because one of the things that members opposite keep saying is that they are investing and are investing more in literacy and numeracy skills. The figures do not bear that out; the figures in fact demonstrate that in this Budget there has been a substantial cut to the provision for literacy and numeracy projects over the term of the Budget. Apart from that it is also clear that this Government has no awareness of the number of jobs that are being adversely affected. 
Let us just take the adult and community education sector to begin with. There are other things that I wish to talk about in the course of my 10 minutes and I will get to them. But I say that in the adult and community education sector this Government is realising only now because of the petitions and the postcard campaign that the adult and community education sector is spearheading around the country that 400000 New Zealanders access quality accessible community-based education programmes on an annual basis. 
The Minister of Education Anne Tolley seeks to denigrate and ridicule courses that hundreds of people are writing to me about. I refer to all the emails and letters that are pouring in to me about the cuts to adult and community education and about how those cuts will impede people’s ability to access formal education and skills programmes that give them the confidence having been made redundant to re-enter the workforce. After having been made to feel worthless by a forced redundancy people’s entry back into the paid workforce has typically been through skills training and the courses that have been offered at a grassroots level through school programmes. We commonly think of those as night classes although they are frequently run at other times of the day as well. But beyond that people forget and clearly this Government has forgotten that 9.5 percent of the funding that goes to secondary schools to run adult and community education programmes has to go forward to other community organisations to enable them to run other programmes. 
That brings me to one of the things that I wanted to talk about. The Minister for Social Development and Employment Paula Bennett talked earlier this year about the need to have parenting education orders in place to compel the parents of problematic and troubled children who are presenting in our justice system to attend parenting courses. Those parenting courses are run by a range of providers but quite frequently they are run as secondary school night classes by adult community education programmes and by community organisations. The money given to the secondary schools is passed on to those organisations to fund those programmes. On the one hand the Prime Minister and the Minister for Social Development and Employment say we should enhance and expand the programme of parenting courses and on the other hand the Minister of Education is taking away the wherewithal to provide those courses. 
I also mention something that really makes no sense in the context of this recession and that is the cutting of funding for industry training. The Minister of Education proceeds with her offensive and insulting denigration of what she deems to be a “hobby” course when in fact learning Italian at Wellington High School was of enormous benefit to a man who fixes European cars. He specialises in European cars and wanted to learn Italian because the manuals for some of those cars are written in Italian. Why should he not go and learn Italian? But the Minister would have us believe that is a hobby course. It is clearly imperative to that man’s business for him to understand Italian. If I had an Italian car I would quite like it to be repaired by somebody who understood the manual as opposed to somebody who had taken a guess at it. 
The cuts to the funding for industry training make less sense than anything else that this Government has cut in education. The Minister of Education has chopped $15.1 million from industry training funding and that includes cutting the CPI adjustment for 2010—that is $9 million. It means reducing the growth in funding for embedded literacy programmes. I am sorry but the rhetoric does not match the practice. The rhetoric is all about the need to improve literacy and numeracy skills yet exactly that kind of programme—an embedded literacy programme—is being cut with the reduced industry training funding. If people cannot retrain and upskill themselves in their workplace or if they have lost their jobs retrain and upskill themselves through additional industry training available through apprenticeships and through employer-assisted programmes then how will we manage to pull New Zealand out of this recession with a better-skilled more literate and more numerate labour force? 
The Minister of Education needs to answer those charges because at best there has been an under-investment at every turn in education just at the time when investment is important and at worst there have been drastic and Draconian cuts. Members opposite know that because they are beginning to get petitions and they are beginning to get postcards like the ones I am holding up—and these do not even reflect the number of email communications I have sitting in an email folder in my parliamentary computer. The lack of foresight and lack of thought in this Budget simply beggar belief. This Government does New Zealanders a disservice in the way it is approaching education. This is the moment in time when education should be the priority not the poor relation. This is the moment in time when the Government’s Budget ought to reflect education as being a priority for this nation. The Budget is a shame.