SpeechHon NIKKI KAYE (National—Auckland Central): Look I rise to speak on this piece of legislation. At the outset I do want to say that National really does believe we need to do everything possible to ensure that we have better fairness and equity in our education system. We believe passionately that there are parents out there that struggle in terms of costs of living. But we also do believe that unfortunately this bill has been so shambolic that it's going to actually lead to a lot more inequity for disadvantaged kids and we do not believe in entrenching that type of system. It's been a shocking and appalling process; actually undemocratic—and I'm going to talk through that. And also it is very complicated and there are a whole lot of things that haven't been determined and I'm going to talk to that.But I do want to take a moment just to acknowledge one thing that occurred before the Hon Chris Hipkins and I got up to speak. There were a group of young people here that were just taken out and banned from Parliament for a year. I accept that in this House we cannot have disorder. But a year-ban from Parliament for having their voice heard I think is excessive—and I want to put that on the record.So from my perspective the first—DEPUTY SPEAKER: I just remind the member that she is actually herself breaking the rules of the House by making comments about a ruling that the Speaker has made. So she—Hon NIKKI KAYE: I take on board the comments. DEPUTY SPEAKER: —will have to take the consequences of that.Hon NIKKI KAYE: Thank you.So from our perspective the process has been atrocious. What we know is that this bill was rushed through in a truncated way when the Government has had—and committed to this in the election campaign—a whole lot of time and what we had was a truncated select committee process. As a result we didn't get the amount of schools being able to engage with this as we could. We raised this at the outset but they barged on through with a truncated process that affects 800000 students but also more than a million parents.The second issue that I want to raise around the process is again in my time at Parliament I have never seen this before but we had issues with access to information. And again this was referenced in the Minister's speech but we had real issues with the officials saying Well actually this bill is not necessarily about the detail of the donation scheme." The reality is that if we had taken that approach then 90 percent of the submissions would have been knocked out because what people were raising is the approach that Labour has taken—which is breaking their promise to only provide this for decile 1 to 7 schools—is hugely inequitable given that you have disadvantaged children and families in many decile 8 9 and 10 schools. So again this issue of process of access to information I've never seen in my time in Parliament and we had to go through a process to actually get decent information about donation schemes—and I was very disappointed with that.The final issue regarding those issues of process is that we're on a truncated time frame we've had issues of access to information and then thirdly instead of the Minister putting very substantive amendments to—because they've realised they haven't thought through the policy and you've got a whole lot of people submitting about the future of school camps and what that means in terms of take up—the Education and Workforce Committee which he could have done he's chosen to completely bypass the select committee. And I've said it before: on this particular issue it's very undemocratic and we completely disagree with it.So the next issue is around that substantive point: how do we ensure that we have funding equity? How do we ensure actually in my view that donations are voluntary? It is true that some parents have felt that this is more of a fee.I do believe we could have strengthened the law to make it absolutely clear that a donation is voluntary but we haven't been able to do that. Instead we've got a scheme whereby we've even had to go to the extent of defining "parent" in the law. Again we have a whole lot of unanswered questions about what schools can and cannot charge for. Again I would argue that that stems from the fact that at the very outset the Minister didn't clearly define "donation" and that was a fundamental flaw in terms of the approach that he has taken.The other issue as I say that I've raised is we've now heard from the Minister that he's going to exempt school camps. Again it may be a generic Supplementary Order Paper. People have raised with me the issue of "How do you define a school camp?" An outdoor education trip is that covered? What about music education? Is there a difference between certain types of music education and that being core curriculum or not? But these are really serious issues because at the board level and the principal level they're trying to determine whether they take this $150 payment or whether they're better to actually be able to ask parents for those costs.The other thing that I would say is that the reason that National is opposing this is we had a very fundamental view around funding. We said we need to do an absolute review and look at some of the inequity that exists. We said we need to scrap the decile system and put more funding into schools to enable us to have equity so that no school loses. That is a very equitable process that enables schools to be able to deal with the social challenges that they've got. We know the decile system is crude. We know that it's complex. We know that it's not targeting those kids it needs. We're now nearly two years in and the Government stalled that decision. So National's view is that rather than going and spending $200 million and entrenching more inequity we should have gone on with scrapping the decile system and provided more equitable funding into schools rather than doing this.I think the other thing that I would absolutely raise is that 95 out of 139 submissions in this process raised this issue of eligibility. I've had principals upset I've had parents upset where they have pointed out to me the tens of thousands of dollars of disadvantage that they will be at because basically Chris Hipkins didn't get the money in the Budget and he broke this promise to New Zealanders.I think the other point that I'd raise that I'm really concerned about is there are a whole lot of parents out there that heard from Labour that we will scrap school donations. So their expectation about what they're getting—and there's a whole lot of people that are waking up to the fact that a third of the schools potentially in New Zealand are not going to have access to this. They're upset. They feel really let down not only because it's hugely inequitable but also because they feel that this is a broken promise.So look from National's perspective we are upset with the process. We think it's completely undemocratic. We think this is aligned with a number of other education policies whereby they're not well thought through and they're bypassing the public and principals. We also know that there is significant inequity in the system. From our perspective we would have proceeded to scrap the decile system and provide more equitable funding. We also believe it would've been better to spend time making it absolutely clear that donations in New Zealand are voluntary because we do want to enable schools to be able to do fundraisers if they want to be able to do that. And we would have taken that approach.So we're really really gutted and disappointed to be in a situation where at a principled level we can't support this bill because it's complicated it's inequitable and there are a whole lot of disadvantaged kids that are going to miss out. We've got upset board chairs and principals because they're not clear about whether they should take up this policy but also because it is another broken promise alongside 37 other broken promises in education from this Government."