Martin Tracey: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMartin Tracey: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 28 January 2014. Volume:696;Page:15561. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]TRACEY MARTIN (NZ First): Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. Just to take up a point from Minister Joyce’s contribution to the debate on the Prime Minister’s statement. He criticised certain Opposition parties namely the Greens and the Labour Party for putting forward policies valued at according to him around three-quarters of a billion dollars. Of course Mr Joyce has completely ignored the fact that his Government has just stood in this House and promised over a billion dollars in new spending and that the Prime Minister has gone on record as saying that this will grow in subsequent years. So I am not quite sure how Mr Joyce can throw stones when he is living in a particular glass house.I also pick up the fact from the Minister who has just resumed her seat Hekia Parata with regard to the suggestion that the new ideas that are being put forward by the Opposition parties are not new—possibly. I am not sure whether the Minister of Education is aware that lead teachers already exist and that lead teachers have actually been in schools for a good number of years opening their classrooms for new practice. This might be another situation where the Government is going to have to change the name in the same way that it changed the name of charter schools because unfortunately the Government was not aware that every school had a charter as well. So the Government may need to change the name on that policy.I am going to spend my time talking particularly about the education announcements and the $359 million worth of new money going into New Zealand schools. Nobody will criticise more money being placed inside education as long as it is appropriately targeted and well spent and it can actually have proven outcomes. I need to compliment the National Party spin doctors on the brilliant job they have done on spinning this announcement in the last week. I liken it to a cupcake with brilliant icing on it which makes you just want to bite into it. But the moment that you do you realise that somebody has substituted salt for sugar. This looks great but when you get down to the nitty-gritty of this spend you can see that there is issue upon issue upon issue and the New Zealand public and the teachers unions particularly the New Zealand Post Primary Teachers Association and the New Zealand Principals’ Federation need to continue to have a really close look and conversation about what is being announced in these policies.It looks to New Zealand First like another opportunity for divide and rule and even within the week since this announcement has been made—or the days since this announcement has been made—it has caused a wedge between the teachers unions. We cannot afford as a nation to have the teachers unions the teachers the parents of New Zealand the boards of trustees and all those who care for true free and wide success criteria in education be manipulated in this way by spin doctors from this Government. This is a very similar spin and it is possibly the same company that came up with the spin that national standards were going to be good for our children and that creating a single line in the sand that every single New Zealand child had to jump over at the same moment in the same year and in the same way was going to be good for our young people.This is another cynical attempt by this Government to portray itself as the party that cares about public education in New Zealand and its quality delivery for our kids. In reality these latest announcements are—and they have been identified as such by the Quality Public Education Coalition—nothing more than a banker’s solution providing additional top-down expertise and very highly paid at that rather than a workforce development approach. These policies create another level of middle managers such as in a corporate environment whose job it is to tell other people what to do. And how will these executives be identified as using best practice? Why they are going to be based on their national standards results of course. Even the Prime Minister has gone on record as saying that the national standards results are ropy at the least.But we will fix that says Minister Parata. We will introduce a computer program where you can enter test and assessment scores for each child and the computer will spit you out a result for that child. You are either at above or below the national standards. That is called the PaCT tool. The PaCT tool was included inside the announcement that went out with the Minister’s press release. How convenient is that—how convenient is that? We now do not need teachers who can actually think for themselves. We do not need teachers who actually have a relationship with their children. We do not need teachers who can use their personal judgment. It is so annoying when teachers invest themselves personally inside their children inside their students and inside their classrooms! It is so annoying when those people will not do as they are told! So we need to develop a way by which we can force those people to do as they are told. I mean after all they are public servants. There is a very good reason why in most dictatorships the first people that are got rid of are the teachers. The first people a dictator removes are the teachers because they are the people who think and who truly care about their young people and provide knowledge and will not back away from a confrontation.This is a trickle-down theory. This is a trickle-down policy. This Government has just repackaged its educational policies from the 1990s. It has possibly got in some new spin doctors and put a different label on it but this is trickle-down. It is going to put bonus payments on to a certain number—6700-odd—of our thousands of teaching professionals and it is going to make them compete for those positions. It is going to put bonus payments on top of them. It is going to shoot them into other schools to tell them what to do and it is going to hope that that trickles down to the 5-year-olds 6-year-olds and 7-year-olds inside those schools.This new money could have been used to employ the large number of teaching graduates who cannot find teaching places inside this country. It was only in October 2012 that the Ministry of Education went and told three-quarters of the teaching graduates to go overseas to find work. The ministry said that it might need them in 20 years’ time or it might need them in 10 years’ time but it said that unfortunately they needed to go overseas then. We could have put 9000 beginning teachers into classrooms being mentored right now today by experienced senior teachers. We could have cut those classes—basically the class size would have been cut in half—giving that experienced teacher the opportunity to take those students who require extra support and leave the beginning teacher who is under their supervision with the majority of the class to run those rote or basic lessons or classes and actually expand that experience base.We would have futureproofed our education environment and we know that we need to. We know that we have an ageing population inside our classes. What is the solution that this Government is going to come up with—import teachers because we have sent all our young ones away? There was an opportunity here to use this money to take away those barriers. Current graduates cannot get the time in the classroom that they requireto then become registered which means that they cannot then go on and actually fully participate.This new money could have funded mandatory professional development in every staffroom in New Zealand in the delivery of Te Kotahitanga. The Minister took issue with the teachers of New Zealand and said that they did not know how to show respect to Māori students because they could not pronounce their names. Yet there is no solution here. There is no support being offered. Resource teachers of Māori are out there in New Zealand and nobody knows anything about them. They are on the payroll. They are out there wanting to help and they want to support the delivery of Te Reo and tikanga Māori inside our classrooms. Here was an opportunity to actually bring the resource teachers of Māori on board with some more money to go and professionally develop Te Kotahitanga throughout the country—a programme that we know does not just benefit Māori students; it benefits every student. It is based on principles of respect and understanding on individual education programmes and on being the best you can be—not on meeting that line but on being the best you can be.This money could have been used to review Tomorrow’s Schools. Twenty-five years on we have ripped bits away and we have chucked in something else. The Minister says that she values the parental voice. Not a single time in any of these statements is there any parental voice. Not a single in time in any of these statements has there been any student voice mentioned. Where are the voices of the young people who are actually inside these institutions? Where is the student voice? Where is the collaboration with those parents and those students? Where is the widening of the success criteria not the narrowing of them? Lorde actually came to school and recognised at 5 years old as she has been quoted that she loved singing and music. That was inside a State school. At 13 she won Belmont Idol—inside a State school supported by State teachers and with a wide curriculum. This money was squandered.