Luxon ChristopherCHRISTOPHER LUXON (National—Botany): Look it is a real pleasure to arise and take a short call on this bill which is the Education and Training Amendment Bill. I think as we've been talking today it is obvious that we've got a series of very straightforward very practical quite common-sense amendments as we try and fix up and enhance the Education and Training Act from 2020. There's some pretty practical things in here like keeping the schedules in the principal Act around matters like the national student numbers the school enrolment schemes and the school boards. There's some very good things around police vetting requirements just so that we make sure that our children are safe. There's also things around specifying the actual five education agencies which of course are the Tertiary Education Commission the New Zealand Qualifications Authority Education New Zealand the Education Review Office and the Ministry of Education and just making sure that those ministerial statements of expectations are very clear as we try and hold those organisations to account for delivering better outcomes for our children in education. There's a number of other I guess minor and technical drafting amendments that are there as well. We are looking forward to supporting this bill into the select committee and importantly I think my colleague Penny Simmonds highlighted the sort of core issue that we do want to discuss further in that select committee which is really the prohibition on tertiary education providers charging trainees a compulsory student services fee. That's around clause 12 and that is important because as Penny quite rightly highlighted that fee is actually used and it allows providers to be able to charge that fee so that they can use it—in addition to the fees they charge students—to support services around the students. As we have been talking about there's no doubt about it that we've a mental health crisis in this country. When we think about youth and adolescents and their ability to access mental health services it's blown out from 16 to 17 days to up to 23 days. I can tell you that in Counties Manukau and where I come from in Botany it's very much an extra week for parents and young people and adolescents to be able to access our mental health services. We want to make sure that obviously we are working together on outcomes and making sure that people who need help and support can actually get it easily and I think that that would be an important thing for us all to pick up and debate within the select committee process. Can I also just say that it's going to be really important—and I think we've expressed it here in this House—that we are all together very fixated on educational outcomes. We have some big challenges to deal with around education in this country. When we have a truancy crisis like we're experiencing we should probably make a declaration around our truancy crisis—it might be a novel thing to do—and actually do something about it. But when you think that 60 percent of our kids are going to school only 90 percent of the time that's something that I thought we had solved in our generation of coming through and being students ourselves. I thought we had fixed truancy—the basics of getting someone from home to school so that they could actually attend is actually important. The other alarming thing for me and probably one of the most alarming statistics since I've come into this House has been seeing how we have had a massive deterioration of our maths our reading and our science scores at year 5 and year 9 and how we have slipped tremendously when you look at other developed countries from around the world. You know we are in the bottom three in the OECD on many of those metrics and at the same time we're seeing countries like Britain actually enhance its reading science and maths by making sure that the curriculum is centred around a curriculum rather than around what we'd call student-centred learning. It's actually instructed learning and that's not important just because of league tables and where we stand relative to other countries; it's actually important because when you achieve educational attainment that ultimately is what drives into the higher salaries and wages and that's ultimately what creates choices for families about how they choose to live their lives. So it is really important stuff that we're able to really focus on that. Ultimately for this country its problem is that we work all together incredibly hard but we don't generate enough value from what we do because we can't get ourselves up the value chain to generate higher-value products and services which in turn drives our salaries and wages which in turn drives the choices that families have as a result. So it is a pretty perfunctory straightforward sort of bill. It's a thin band-aid bill to fix up a number of issues which we're all in support of. We do support this bill through to select committee stage. But we really do need to get cracking on making sure we fundamentally deliver a system that delivers outcomes so that our young people have the best chance to be able to compete in a world out there of 195 other countries and 7.8 billion people and where no one owes us a living. It's going to be important that we have the education skills and support in order to be able to realise those opportunities for our country and for our people. Thank you.