Carter Chris: General Debate 
Carter Chris: General Debate 
[Volume:652;Page:1852] 
Hon CHRIS CARTER (Labour—Te Atatu) 
: 
 I would like to talk about something very important today and that is education. When I came back into the House after question time I heard Tony Ryall the Minister of Health boasting about what the new National Government is doing and he mentioned Mrs Anne Tolley the Minister of Education. I was thinking about that comment and I remembered a press release that I had read just today on the Internet from the New Zealand Principals Federation put out on 8 March. It says “Minister of Education missing in action”. This is from a press release of the New Zealand Principals Federation. I will read a little bit of it because I guess it contradicts what Mr Ryall said a few minutes ago in this House: “The New Zealand Principals’ Federation is disappointed and angry that Education Minister Anne Tolley failed to appear at its annual Presidents Moot held on Friday. The meeting held in Wellington brought together representatives from local and regional principal associations throughout the country as well as sector heads from the Ministry of Education Teachers’ Council Education Review Office NZEI and directors of the Ariki Project. … The theme of the Moot was ‘Moving Forward Together’.” but the principals have made the point of asking where the Minister of Education was. She was supposed to turn up but she failed to show. 
She has also just told the Auckland Primary Principals Association that she is not going to their meeting in early April in Auckland. Earlier today Plains FM a popular radio station in Christchurch rang me to ask whether I as the former Minister of Education was prepared to talk on their radio station today about school funding. I was delighted to and they said they had been trying for weeks and weeks to get the Minister of Education Mrs Tolley but she just would not go on. Why is she in the words of the New Zealand Principals Federation “missing in action”? 
Mrs Tolley is missing in action because of the very points that my colleague Annette King made earlier. She is embarrassed and ashamed because during the election campaign she and her party went out to New Zealand and said they would not change anything; they would keep all the policies that Labour had put in place and that were popular. In education Labour doubled education funding from over $5 billion to over $10 billion. We brought in 20 free hours we put in 7000 teachers above roll growth we built 42 schools and we removed interest on student loans. We did lots and lots of things that were incredibly popular; Mrs Tolley said “Oh no—we’re not going to change any of those.” 
By the way when she was asked a question about the 90-day rule at New Zealand Educational Institute meetings she said “Oh that is not going to impact on education on teachers and support workers in schools and early childhood centres. They are not going to be affected by that.” Well we discovered the untruth of that statement very soon in the new National administration the new Government. We saw before Christmas that Mrs Tolley had been very untruthful on the 90-day rule in the period before the election. 
She has also gone to ground because of a few other issues that are coming to the fore. One is pay negotiations. The kindergarten teachers’ collective agreement—now expired—has to be negotiated. We have had pay parity as an absolute principle in education; indeed it was brought in by a National Government in the early 1990s—parity between secondary and primary teachers and between primary and kindergarten teachers. When people have the same qualifications and the same experience they get the same pay. We in the Labour Party think that educating small children is just as important—in fact some could argue more important—as educating older adolescents because it is about the educational journey that children are set on right at the beginning. The kindergarten teachers’ collective agreement and the agreement on support staff have now expired. Mrs Tolley the new education Minister who was described by the New Zealand Principals Federation as “missing in action” has not yet even given an instruction to the Ministry of Education to begin negotiations. In the so-called 104 days of action there has been very little action indeed. 
Throughout the education sector at the moment there is enormous anxiety about some of the fantastic programmes that have taken place under the Innovations Pool funding programme. I see Paula Bennett my colleague from west Auckland over on the other side of the House. She knows of two projects in west Auckland because local principals have been to see her. There is a truancy initiative of $80000 which was signed out by me as education Minister last year and the Waitakere learning plan which had another $100000 signed out by me. That money already appropriated has been frozen by Mrs Tolley in her role as the Minister of Education; those are just two small examples of what is happening all over the country.