Rurawhe Adrian: Education Legislation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRurawhe Adrian: Education Legislation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 08 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8673. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ADRIAN RURAWHE (Labour—Te Tai Hauāuru): Ā tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare otirā tēnā tātou katoa. Can I just start off by saying that the Education Act 1989 was actually brought in by a Labour Government. This is the Act that we are speaking about and there are other Acts as well.Can I start off there because to be fair I want to say that the amendments to the Ngarimu VC and 28th (Maori) Battalion Memorial Scholarship Fund Act are necessary. I want to acknowledge what has been put into this part of the bill. The problem that I have though is that this is an omnibus bill and quite frankly there are a number of things that have been widely canvassed that are not good. That is why we cannot support this bill.From my view of the world what is actually going on with this Education Legislation Bill the way I see it is that the National Government has a policy agenda. The policy agenda is around providing a commercial model for our free education system. It is also about partially privatising or even moving towards fully privatising some parts of education. That is my view of what this is all about. It is not a policy that the Government has announced; it is a policy that it does by stealth. It brings in certain things in a bill like this that make incremental steps towards where it really wants to take this country where it really wants to take the education system in our country and that is to partially privatise education.Let us talk about charter schools. Schools or other entities can choose to apply to start a charter school. These charter schools are unfair in this respect: each child at those schools get funded up to five times more than a child in other schools. I have a big problem with that. The Minister spoke about how students in those schools are performing much better. Well I would think so—I would hope so. I would hope that if you were getting five times more funding than other schools—you would expect those schools to be performing better. But the reality of it is that they hardly do better overall than State-funded schools.So why would the Government do it? I put forward that the argument as to why it is doing it is that it wants to make incremental steps towards a different kind of education system for our country and we will not agree to that. That is why we are standing up here to say no to this bill. The shame of it is that there are some things in other parts of the bill that are necessary but I go back to my key point around charter schools: we do not agree with it.The previous speaker Mr Seymour said that the bill was enabling. From my view of the world it enables the application of a commercial model. A case in point—I will go to that part—are the changes to sections 75 and 76 of the Education Act. Some of us or a number of us actually on this side of the House and probably on the other side as well have had a lot to do with school boards of trustees. Some of us like myself did our training in governance in that arena. I can tell that you just making a change and adding in this new section 75A in clause 9 does not automatically mean that schools are going to have the capacity to be able to unite in a way that that commercial model suggests that it can do. I know that from where I come from all of the rural schools are actually the central points the hubs of those communities. It is where those communities go to. I would be very surprised if any of the schools that I know of that are involved in a rural setting would put forward a proposal to have one principal to cover all of those communities. Some of those communities are unique. Some of them have a large Māori population; others are mainly non-Māori. They have different interests. All of these things supposedly are able to be handled by one principal. Well I would be very surprised if that happened in a rural setting.I also want to address some of the actually quite mean and nasty comments that have been made in this debate. In particular I would suggest that the member from ACT David Seymour go and have a good think about what he said in the House tonight. In respect of the issue around the Official Information Act I suspect and would probably go so far as to say that he has probably turned down a ministerial post so that he does not have to be subject to the Official Information Act. If you have a look at it in this bill issues around charter schools are not subject to the Official Information Act and if you are about having an open and transparent Government then I would say that it is a shocking situation that we find ourselves in. If charter schools are so good—if they are so good—then why is it that both charter schools and the Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Minister of Education are not subject to the Official Information Act? I think that he does a great disservice to this House on the issues that he talked about.I think also that allowing tertiary education providers to operate charter schools as my colleague Jenny Salesa pointed out does raise a number of issues. It raises the question of exactly why there is a need to have tertiary institutes starting up charter schools. Well I suspect that has got a lot to do with the fact that there are not enough schools showing interest in becoming charter schools. I think that the whole notion around that scares them off—and so it should do purely and simply on the basis that it is an unfair system that treats some schools a lot better than others. I believe that if that funding was equally distributed amongst all schools then we would get far better outcomes for our children who attend those schools.Just on the other matters that are within this bill it provides a new schedule too for the Pacific Islands Polynesian Education Foundation Act. It is equally a shame that this part of this bill is part of an omnibus bill of which the principal part fundamentally we cannot agree with. My contribution tonight is purely and simply on that—that we will not support this bill at its first reading. Thank you.