Willis NicolaNICOLA WILLIS (National): For those watching this at home can I tell you what this is about. This is about the Budget and how people choose to invest the priority of Government spending and what we can see in these Estimates is what is a priority and what is not a priority for Government. Last week I visited a number of primary schools in the Wellington Central electorate and not one of those schools—in fact not one single school in Wellington Central—had been allocated additional funding for a learning support coordinator. They were really disappointed and I'll tell you why they were disappointed: they thought that Labour had promised the world. They were going to wipe every tear from every eye they were going to sort out all the problems and they haven't seen delivery. So you look across the Wellington region. Are there learning support coordinators allocated in the Rongotai electorate? No no. Are there learning support coordinators allocated in Ōhāriu? Yes for a small group of schools in the Newlands cluster but across our city we don't apparently have children who are in need of additional special-needs support via this scheme because the children in our city aren't a priority for this Government. Budgets are about priorities and this Budget has failed to prioritise the things that really matter.Let me turn to early childhood education because this is another area where Chris Hipkins before the election was very happy to go on to the front steps of Parliament sign a pledge wave a banner and promise early childhood teachers that he would do their things—that he would fund 100 percent qualified teachers. He would ensure that there were lower teacher to pupil ratios. He would rain funding upon the sector. And here we are two years in—we've had two Budgets. Have we seen delivery of those promises? No we have not because Mr Hipkins has not prioritised the early childhood educators of our country. He has not prioritised our youngest learners. He has not prioritised the thousands of early childhood teachers in New Zealand.Do you know what makes it worse is that what we learnt during the Estimates hearing from the Minister—he was direct to his credit in answering my question. I said Well did you bid for additional funding to ensure that the Government could deliver on these promises?" and do you know what the Minister said? The Minister said "Oh yes I did." And do you know what happened when he went to his Cabinet colleagues—when he went to you Mr Lees-Galloway when he went to our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern when he went to Grant Robertson—and said "I need more money to deliver on promises for early childhood education." do you know what his colleagues said? "Sorry—not a priority. We've got other things we'd prefer to do. We've got $250 million worth of working groups to run. That's what we'd like to spend our money on because if we can shuffle a few more papers around and defer a few more decisions that would be politically more expedient than delivering for the early childhood education sector. What we'd prefer to prioritise billions of dollars for is free fees for tertiary students because what we've promised is that it will increase participation in tertiary education—oh look never mind that it hasn't achieved that at all; that's where the money will go."Then we learnt in the Estimates hearing—because you'd expect well maybe the reason that the early childhood education sector hasn't had its promises delivered despite having a severe teacher shortage despite centres struggling for months to find teachers to staff their centres—perhaps the reason there isn't funding for the promises is because there's not enough money. There's just not enough money because it's been spent in all of these other areas. Well what we actually learnt at the Estimates hearing was that there had been a significant underspend in early childhood education—it had been estimated that $1.975 billion would be available. That's how much the Government had budgeted would be available but in fact only $1.9 billion was to be spent. So what we learnt is that there was $75 million out there that could've been allocated that could've been invested in early childhood education and the Government chose not to make that investment.So we asked about some of the problems that our early childhood education centres are having across the country—finding teachers finding the people to look after and educate our kids—and the Minister's excuse for not having one single initiative in these Estimates to address that chronic problem? His excuse: "We don't have good reliable data." Well tell that to the early childhood education centres around this country. I have visited dozens of them and I tell you what: they have good data that demonstrates this is a severe problem and this Minister has chosen not to prioritise it.Budgets are about priorities. This Estimates debate is about what this Government's priorities are and they prefer working groups to investing in our children and their potential."