Moroney Sue: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Moroney Sue: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 14 August 2012. Volume:682;Page:4342. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 In this debate about the budget for education the National Government contribution is that it would have you believe that what it is concerned about is children who are not achieving. That is what those members have said the problem definition is. How come John Key’s solution was to increase class sizes? How on earth could increased class sizes actually help children to achieve better in terms of their education? It is just a ridiculous proposition. The New Zealand public smelt it from a mile away. They did not need official advice. They did not need the spin-doctoring. They understood and New Zealand parents especially got this straight away. It was an absolute nonsense for that Government to try to pretend that increasing class sizes was somehow going to improve education and somehow going to have those children who are not achieving in education now suddenly achieving. Well it was a complete nonsense and everyone knows it. Everyone now knows that that Government does not know what it is doing with regard to education. 
They also know that it is not a priority for this Government. The Government cannot put that genie back in the bottle because even though it backed down because of the pressure that came on from parents every parent in New Zealand now knows that that Government believes that increasing class sizes is the thing to do to improve our children’s education. Well the Government got it badly wrong and it got it so badly wrong that New Zealand families now know that this Government is out of touch with their aims and aspirations. The sorts of aspirations that New Zealand families have are for better quality education. 
I want to focus on early childhood education because that is where it started with this Government. This Government cut the funding back in 2010 to qualified staff in the early childhood education sector. 
Louise Upston 
: Remember your maths! 
SUE MORONEY 
: That is exactly where it started from. Louise Upston is pretending that it did not but the Budget documents show $400 million worth of money cut from early childhood education from qualified staff. It was the funding bands for qualified staff that actually were the first victim of this Government. It happened in early childhood education but it is not going to stop there because that was just the beginning of that Government saying that it does not believe in having qualified teachers in education. It fundamentally does not believe that. The Government got away with it in early childhood education and now it is putting that into our compulsory education sector via the Trojan Horse of charter schools—but it did start in early childhood education. 
It has got even worse for early childhood education in this current Budget that we are debating here today. The Government has not inflation-adjusted the fees for early childhood education. What is that going to mean? It is going to mean that fees are going to increase for families. Parents are going to pay all over again because of that Government’s folly and because the Government cannot see how important quality early childhood education is to New Zealand families. The Government was warned about this; it was given official advice about this. It was told by the ministry that—and I am going to quote now from Budget documents that have been released recently by the ministry—“Not providing a universal cost adjustment may lead to providers taking a further opportunity to increase fees. These fee increases decrease the affordability of ECE for families with the largest impact on priority groups.” By “priority groups” what it meant was Maori Pacific Island and low-income families. The official advice was that this year’s Budget would actually adversely impact on that very group. So I do not want to hear any more from that side of the Chamber from the Government getting up and pretending that that is where it is putting its energy and its efforts because the official advice actually shows it up for what it is. The official advice is that not inflation-proofing fees for early childhood education will impact on those very groups. 
But that is after those groups have already had an 11 percent increase in their costs for early childhood education in just 2011 alone. This is a cumulative effect for families. They have already had a cost increase by the Government—not by the recession not by any other mechanism than a decision of that National Government. The fees for early childhood education increased by an average of 11 percent. Now the Government is going to increase them by more with this year’s Budget. An average of 11 percent by the way means that some families are paying 25 percent more and some families are not. 
Vote agreed to.