Kirkpatrick DanaDANA KIRKPATRICK (National—East Coast): Thank you Mr Speaker. It is with great pride that I stand and do my first speech in the general debate in this House. And look just in a very short period of time it will be a year since we were elected and what a massive year it has been so far. The amount of incredible hard work done by the Ministers and MPs on the side of the House is quite extraordinary.And just this week we heard about the travesty that is our educational achievement in maths and literacy once more being sheeted home to us that in New Zealand we have been failing our children. Only 22 percent of our year 8 students are achieving at year 8 level. And you know we need now an approach that works. So it's with great pride that our wonderful Minister of Education Erica Stanford has made the incredible announcements this week to bring forward the focus on numeracy to get our kids back on track.I want to applaud the statement made by the Prime Minister Christopher Luxon at the weekend where he said This issue is bigger than politics." because I think that this is simply one of the most important things we have to sort out because our future in this country depends on it. We have the smartest kids in the world and currently we're doing them a disservice.In my electorate the mighty East Coast the most beautiful electorate in the country our educational achievement has been slipping over the past few years and so has the area of our regular attendance at school. It's slightly on the improve now but some of the towns in my electorate still struggle to get their children to school. Regular attendance ranges from 29 percent in some towns to 59 percent which is the highest across thousands of students in our electorate. We must do better than this.One way to keep kids coming back day after day is to make sure they're engaged which is where our structured literacy and numeracy comes in. Education is the game-changer. It's one of the very important pieces of work we need to nail to break down our intergenerational cycles of poverty our benefit dependency and truancy. This issue was one of the biggest facing the communities I represent.Now those folks on the other side of the House will find every reason to oppose this and to rail against this and they'll say that the curriculum won't be right or that it was National's fault or whatever other rebuttal they'll come up with. But I say it's time to stand up. For once just understand that six years of nothing has not helped. It is time to take the politics out of this and find a way to get in behind it.I met a young fella the other day in my electorate who'd been in a gang all his life. He left school at 12. He couldn't read or write so secondary school was a bit of a disaster. He left home. He lived on the street. There's a lot to unpack in his story but he told me that he'd learnt to read so he could get his driver's licence. It was the proudest thing he'd ever done. Finally he'd achieved something and now he looked in the rear-vision mirror for safety not a cop. He changed his life because the downward spiral of getting into trouble for him started from not being able to read and not getting a licence. Now imagine what else he could do now with a bit of self-esteem and mana restored. I repeat: it's the game-changer it's how people get a job it's how they make a contribution to society and the community they live in and it's leadership for change.It's time to get New Zealand back on track. We are in a very challenging period of New Zealand's modern history. Our country is at a turning point. We are working hard to bring recovery from woeful fiscal management from ideological rhetoric—and let me just give you an example. Let me draw to your attention last week when I listened to the debate on the very fine work from Minister Simeon Brown on roadside drug testing. And what I can't help but shake my head at is a member of the Green Party a former Minister of Transport no less who in speaking against the bill said of the evidence that deaths and serious road accidents caused by drugs was only 7 percent and therefore in her terms weren't that serious. Well tell that to the parents and friends and family of people who died because people took drugs and drove their vehicles. I just can't let that go. Any death in my book is one too many. It's just another example I think of the ideological rhetoric that we have heard time after time from that side of the House.We cannot gamble with the education of our children in this country for one minute longer and I'm delighted that we will now focus on teaching the basics brilliantly for the sake of our children. I just want to say too to the good hard-working taxpaying people of New Zealand who are now enjoying tax relief for the first time in 14 years we won't be taking advice from an Opposition who overtaxed overspent and now is over there. Let's get New Zealand back on track."