Moroney Sue: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Moroney Sue: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:656;Page:5628] 
SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 When the economy is in recession I think a Government’s priorities become incredibly important and this Government’s priorities are out there to be seen. Vote Education is the vote that had the largest cuts. It was the biggest loser under this Government’s Budget. That tells us a lot about where this Government’s priorities are and where they are not. But even within Vote Education one can see the priorities that this Government has out there for New Zealanders to see. Not many of the Government’s speakers have chosen to say that even in the time of economic recession they felt it was important and a spending priority to increase funding to private schools by $35 million. It is almost like the evil whose name they do not want to speak! 
The previous speaker Colin King asked the Opposition where it would fund the $13 million that was cut from adult education. That was an extremely short-sighted cut. It has meant that all the night classes have closed down in schools like Fraser High School in Hamilton and in all the other schools that have had to cut their night classes and hundreds and thousands of New Zealanders have had that learning opportunity taken away from them. 
The Government has cut $13 million from adult and community education. I tell Mr King that the $13 million should be taken out of the $35 million extra for private schools. That is where that funding should come from and it should be going to the people who are looking at second-chance education—the masses not the elite in this country. That is where this Government has its priorities absolutely upside down and those figures demonstrate it very well. 
Why do I talk about education having the largest cuts in this Budget? It is because the single largest cut I believe came out of early childhood education. An amount of $275 million was carved out of early childhood education which this Government would have us believe is an area it is prioritising. The Government is prioritising early childhood education so highly that the sector suffered the largest single cut and that largest single cut was to reduce a plan that was there for staff—for teacher-child ratios to be improved so that the quality of early childhood education could be improved in this country. That Government and that Minister the Minister of Education decided to can that plan and in the process in one decision carved $275 million out of early childhood education. 
The Minister would have us believe that early childhood education is a top priority and that increasing participation would be the priority in early childhood education. Well then she is failing by her own goal; she is failing miserably. When she came to the select committee’s estimates hearing I asked her what her plan was to increase participation in this sector. She said it was the funding—as her colleague before has just argued as well—to extend the 20 free hours to Playcentre to te kohanga reo and to children aged 5 and over. When I asked her whether that would add more children to the early childhood education experience than there are now she said no. So that money is not adding one additional child to the system; it is paying for children who already access early childhood education and it is extending the 20 free hours to those children. It is doing that but it is not extending; it is not adding one more child into the early childhood education sector. 
What are the Minister’s plans? A few weeks ago she announced a plan which had actually been brought forward by Labour that will add an additional 400 places. Well I have news for the Minister. The Ministry of Education tells us that we have to add 19000 new early childhood places to our current system by 2011 just to stand still in terms of participation rates—not the measly 400 that the Minister was parading in the House 2 weeks ago but 19000. There is no plan. The Minister has no plan to add those 19000 positions. But it is even worse than that because Labour had in place a plan to go forward which would have already delivered by now nine new early childhood education services on school grounds in South Auckland where the participation rates for early childhood education desperately need to be improved. What has the new Minister done with that? She has cut the services down to three; it was nine it is now three.