Hipkins ChrisBUDGET DEBATEDebate resumed from 18 June on the Appropriation (2019/20 Estimates) Bill.Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): This Government's Budget the 2019 Budget is all about wellbeing.Hon Gerry Brownlee: Failed to deliver.Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: But there is one group whose wellbeing I'm afraid we cannot guarantee and that is the wellbeing of the members opposite. We did our best. We introduced—in this year's Budget—digital literacy for seniors Mr Brownlee but there is still a concern around the wellbeing of the members opposite.The most insightful interjection during question time today actually came from Amy Adams when she yelled very loudly There's nothing to be happy about." I think that sums up the mood of the National Party at the moment. Of course there is something for Ms Adams to be happy about today. She at least didn't have to sit next to Judith Collins who is still in purgatory after appearing on Q+A on Monday night to talk about the National Party leadership despite being forbidden to do so by her leader Simon Bridges.Of course we know that the deal's been done. The Judith Collins - Mark Mitchell ticket is on the way. Chris Bishop is busy doing the numbers as we speak. And I hear that there are some other members who have been ringing around the press gallery. They gave me some names but I don't know who they are because I don't think I've ever heard of them but I understand that they're National Party backbench MPs.But the good news is that there's a lot in this Budget to be happy about. This is a Budget that gets serious about mental health—something New Zealanders have been saying for a very very long time they want a Government to get serious about and we have delivered on that. We are also getting serious about investing in infrastructure and I'm going to talk more about that very shortly but we know we've inherited a big infrastructural deficit and that's something that we are tackling and we are getting on top of.We also know that New Zealanders want us to get serious about child wellbeing about making sure that kids get the very best possible start in life and that is something that this Budget delivers on. As Minister of Education I am very proud to say this year's Budget contains the largest increase in education spending in over a decade. Of course there was another big increase over the last decade; that was last year's Budget which was the second-largest increase in over a decade—both under this coalition Government. This year's Budget contains the largest investment in school property by a New Zealand Government. We know that the schooling infrastructure in New Zealand is not keeping up with population growth. It has not been keeping up with population growth and we need to do better. This year's Budget brings forward four years' worth of schooling expansion funding for new classrooms and new schools so that we can make sure that we've got the school infrastructure we need to keep up with a growing population. For the first time in over five years the funding rates for industry training adult and community education literacy and numeracy Youth Guarantee and Gateway are all being increased. That's good news for those working in those areas. A policy that I am very proud of is that all decile 1-7 schools from the beginning of next year will get an extra $150 per student if they don't ask parents for donations. New Zealanders have been telling us for some time that schools are too reliant on income from parents to make ends meet and that has to end. We know that those lower decile schools in particular raise a fraction of the money that higher decile schools are able to raise from parents and from community sources and we want to ensure that they are no longer disadvantaged by that. So decile 1-7 schools will get that extra money from 1 January next year and that's something to celebrate. There are cost adjustments for early childhood education schooling and tertiary education. This Government will not allow the expenditure on a per-child per-student basis to go backwards in all of those areas as it did under the last Government. We want to make sure they are properly funded so that they can keep up with increasing costs. We have $1.2 billion being pumped into school property and that's new money extra money that will build more new classrooms more new schools in areas of population growth and will certainly provide a pipeline of projects for the building and construction industry something that they have been frustrated about. It will mean that those projects can be delivered in a much more timely way.We're also getting serious about putting more resource into the kids who most need extra support in our schools. Last year's Budget gave about $280 million extra into special needs support learning support more Ongoing Resourcing Scheme funding and so on. This year's Budget builds on that again with another $217 million going into learning support coordinators as the first tranche of our commitment to put learning support coordinators in every school around the country. That will employ the first 600 of this new workforce.We're increasing funding for early childhood education to cope with population growth and we're putting more money into vocational education and training an area where we know reform is desperately needed at a time when we need more people going into vocational education into trades training. It has been going backwards for several years. We have to turn that around and we know that the current system is not going to do that. It is an unsustainable system and it needs to be reformed and that is what this Government is in the process of doing. We know we need more teachers in classrooms and we put $95 million in this year's Budget alone into recruiting and training more teachers. That's more money than was spent over the last decade—$135 million in total that this Government is spending on recruiting and training more teachers. We know that the cost of education is something that we've got to get on top of. I mentioned before the $150 instead of donations for decile 1-7 schools but another policy that I am particularly proud of funded in this year's Budget is the abolition of fees for NCEA. It is simply wrong that some of the kids who most need access to their qualifications having successfully completed them have been unable to get them because they couldn't afford to pay the fee. I think it's time we dealt with that and we have dealt with it and we dealt with it in this year's Budget and I am very very pleased to be the Minister in charge of that. There is more money for computers in homes. There is more money for the School Leavers' Toolkit so that we can make sure kids as they leave school are prepared for life beyond school. There is more money for the Christchurch rebuild—something the previous Government talked a lot about but didn't actually stump up with the cash to do. This Government is making sure that the Christchurch rebuild can be completed. There is more money to improve the condition of existing school property. I mentioned before the money we're putting into growing the school property portfolio to keep up with growth but we know that we've got a lot of run-down buildings that need to be upgraded and we need to do a better job. We need to get better value for money from the very significant hundreds of millions of dollars a year we spend on existing school property. An initiative that the colleague sitting to my left Kelvin Davis is responsible for is the restarting of Te Kotahitanga a programme that makes an enormous difference for some of the kids in our schools who most need additional support. I do want to acknowledge you Mr Speaker as the person who first introduced that; I'm not allowed to but I'm going to do it anyway. We're putting more money into data and analytics capability so that we can better identify disadvantage. It's all very well to talk about equity and the equity index—we talk about an equity index; the last Government saw it as a risk index because they see kids as risks. We want a better system of equity in our system and that means we need better data and we're investing in getting that better data. It's about also having the screening tools in place to identify those kids who have got additional learning needs so we can get in earlier and give them that additional support that they need and we are going to be doing all of that.There's more money for early intervention under this Budget and under the last Budget because we know that we've got to get in earlier and give those kids a better start. We are not happy with the growing waiting times for those sorts of supports that were starting to grow under the last Government. Early intervention was growing in the last year of the last National Government as were so many of the waiting times for other forms of learning support and we are simply not happy with that and that's why we're putting more money into dealing with those. We're putting more money into home-based early childhood education so that we can ensure that those kids who are in that home-based environment—something many parents really value—are getting the right quality of education and the right experience through that.This is a Budget that really delivers for education. It continues our three-year commitments in this area. We said right at the beginning that it wasn't all going to happen overnight. Last year's Budget delivered the first lot this year's Budget delivers some more and there'll be more in next year's Budget. This is a Budget that I am very very proud to be a part of. It delivers for New Zealanders and it definitely lives up to its name of being the Wellbeing Budget."