Williams ArenaARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): The Government's priorities here could not be more wrong. Today they are using the House's urgency to pass through a bill which is deeply ideologically driven. It is not evidence based and its budgetary impact and the reasons why we are here having urgency related to the Budget documents in the first place are all out of kilter. The evidence shows here as my colleagues have said that this will cost New Zealanders more. It does not result in efficient spending in our education system and I'll come back to that later.I wanted to talk a little bit about why we have a public education system in the first place and what my colleague Camila Belich has raised here as being an attack on that public education system. Because on this side of the House we believe in an education system which everyone has access to which we consider to be you know a privilege that all New Zealanders can go to their public school down the road in their local neighbourhood and get the same kind of education everywhere. That education needs to be of a high quality. And we all agree in this House that there are things that we need to improve but that is the thing that we should all be debating: how we improve people's access to their local education and take pride in their local schools and back their local teachers. Not this chimera of a bill which basically puts the politics of the ACT Party ahead of all of the evidence that we know works and that backs our local teachers to do the best they can.Public education can be something that we're really proud of in New Zealand. We're really lucky in this country to have basically everyone being able to go to their local school. It's something that not only brings out the best in our young people in New Zealand but also is really important for those neighbourhoods. Local schools can be this cornerstone in our local neighbourhoods in our cities in our rural towns which enable people to meet each other to have a connection to one another and for young people to be able to engage in a touch point for the public system.Hon David Seymour: This is a fantasy—defending the indefensible.ARENA WILLIAMS: And I hear the member David Seymour criticising that goal but that is actually what we have in New Zealand. It's a decade's worth of a public education system which people are proud of and which we need to back more strongly.The transformative power of education is something that we can all be proud of in this country. My dad's story he grew up on the shores of the Ōhiwa Harbour only speaking te reo Māori and his parents weren't in the picture. He grew up with his grandparents who didn't have any kind of contact with the European world but were able to send their grandchild to the public school and it was something they were really proud of. He went through primary school. He started when he was nine and he got to go to high school because Peter Fraser's Government put school buses on the roads to let rural Maōri kids go to school. That kind of interaction with the State was this family's first interaction. It was a really positive one because it transformed his life; the ability and the skills to read to write to be a part of that community then let him go on to teachers' college to become a teacher and then a journalist.It's that transformative power of education that we want for every New Zealander. Only by investing in our public education system through things like buses to get kids to school things that enable parents to be able to send their kids to school with no barriers like school lunches and an end to school donations that's the kind of priority we should be making because it's only through those measures that we allow everyone to have the same kind of access that my dad did.And when I talk about a social elevator it is truly something it is the only thing really that we have baked into our system which allows people no matter what they are born into no matter what conditions they grow up in to get ahead in life. We need that public education system so that we are a thriving society which also is fair for people and allows people to get ahead. So when we introduce something like charter schools into the system which is directly competing for the same funding that our public education system desperately needs that is taking away from the kids that otherwise rely on it. That is taking away from Maōri kids that is taking away from those kids who would otherwise not be able to get ahead. We should see this for what it is which is an ideology focused on giving those who already have more of a leg up in an education system because they can pay for it. We should be focusing on funding our public schools well. We should be focusing on removing the barriers to success in education like making sure kids are fed. But this Government's priorities are backwards. They are not only taking away those things like free school lunches which we know principals and schools are telling us improve educational outcomes but it is further entrenching those inequities that exist in the system. That is why we should vote against this bill.