Halbert Shanan; O'Connor GregSHANAN HALBERT (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. Whāia te iti kahurangi; ki te tūohu koe me he maunga teitei.[Pursue excellence; if you should bow let it be to a lofty mountain.]We have a right in this country to an equitable free public education. In this House we all stand for the best achievement of our rangatahi in this country the best outcomes and the best opportunities to live a good life with their whānau.Charter schools are an experiment. They are ideological and they are being put forward in this country without the evidence without the expertise that our good public education system currently has. The question here is: how do we fund it? How do we fund success? If we have issues with attendance then fund it. If we need to raise achievement then fund it adequately.This Government their track record in just six months—it's contradictory to the idea that David Seymour puts forward as the Associate Minister of Education. This week we've seen them put forward punitive youth justice policies that will harm our rangatahi in this country and will put them in youth justice facilities and prisons. They've put forward boot camps as the best idea that they can possibly pull out to put young people on the right pathway. They've removed cellphones. They've enforced one hour of reading maths and arithmetic in schools. They're removing the sexuality guidelines that were put in place to keep young people safe in their schools and they've cut funding to school lunches in a cost of living crisis. We cannot trust this Government on a charter school experiment.The Minister in his speech talked about tino rangatiratanga. In his view this is his example of what tino rangatiratanga achieves. Tino rangatiratanga doesn't come from the USA. It doesn't come from the USA. It comes intrinsically from a Māori world view. It starts with our whānau. It starts with our reo. It's the emancipation of our people our families and our communities to be able to self-determine their education system for themselves to have sovereignty and decision making over their lives to have the independence and the autonomy—that is tino rangatiratanga from Aotearoa.I acknowledge the work of all of our public schools but I also today want to acknowledge kura kaupapa Māori—people that have transformed our education system in the closest example that we have in this country to tino rangatiratanga.But I come back to the question around funding. If we want to raise achievement particularly for Māori in this sense then kura kaupapa Māori is also our best example. But if we want to raise achievement for everyone in our public school system then fund it in the same way that this Government is funding charter schools.The National and ACT experiment with charter schools that ran from 2014 to 2018 cost up to $48000 per student annually. That's more than six times the average funding spent on students in State care. I talked about how if we want to improve attendance outcomes in this country then fund them. If we want to raise achievement of our rangatahi then fund it. But there is inequitable investment in each of our rangatahi in what is being proposed in this House today and that is why I say that charter schools are not a quality way forward because they're inequitable purely by the funding investment per student in this country and it is not acceptable that this child gets a different investment than that child.My final point here today is that this is an experiment. It's not tino rangatiratanga and we must come back to—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O'Connor): The member's time has expired.