Delahunty CatherineCATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare ko tēnei pō. This Estimates debate is always worth participating in because there is such a huge gap between the rhetoric in what we say and all the numbers we throw around in this House and then what happens when you go out and talk to people. There is such a big credibility gap. In the education Estimates debate a number of speeches from the Government members have talked about all this money that it is giving and how fantastic it is.Since the Budget I have been to visit a number of schools networks of principals—all kinds of people who work in the education sector—waiting to see the big happy smiles on their faces. What I saw was that in freezing early childhood education and in freezing the operations grant in a way that does not account for inflation beyond 1.3 percent people out in the sector are really not very happy. I think it is important to take that 1.3 percent inflation figure—or apparently-related-to-inflation figure—for the operations grant for schools and track it through to reality. The reality is I went to both a high school and a primary school where we were talking about this and what people and principals in particular described was that the current education Estimates with the way that the operations grant has been treated which barely takes account of the increase in rolls because we have a growing population mean that it is actually—surprise—a cut.What the schools told me—and this is from people who are deeply concerned to be even saying this out loud—is that school support staff are going to have to go. Saying that school support staff are going to have to go because of the Estimates is not like saying: I'm going to give up smashed avocado and have one less latte." It is saying that the children in our schools will not have some support that they need for them to participate in their learning and that the person who is a school support staff worker at barely above minimum wage is going to lose their job. So surprisingly principals were not very happy about being the bearers of the Government's failed Estimates commitment! They were not very happy about that at all.The reason this is so serious is that the school support staff—obviously their role is invisible to many people or otherwise they would be properly funded. They should be centrally funded which is the Green Party's position. But the children are the ones who miss out. We are talking about neurodiverse and disabled children who cannot participate in school without a school support person doing those hours and many of them cannot get enough hours to go to school for more than a few hours a week which is a breach of their human rights. So the Estimates giving a little bit more money for autism programmes is not going to deal with the fact that a child needs with them not only a school support staff person but actually someone who has had some professional development who has some status and who is paid some reasonable wages.When we go out for the meetings that we are starting to have all over the country—I Tracey Martin and Chris Hipkins—we are not hearing: "Yay the Budget has delivered." We are hearing that it is a cut and that it is cutting where it hurts the most. The Green Party will not stand by silently about the cuts to school support staff because of the frozen operations grant. We will not stand by and say that a failure to have a goal of 100 percent qualified staff in early childhood education—and a failure to fund that—will lead to quality early childhood education. The Estimates have failed to do the most critical things and all the window dressing and all the pretty new buildings you have to build because there are more children—ignoring the buildings that have not been fixed which my colleague Chris Hipkins mentioned—will not make up for the fundamental fact that if the operations grant has to be divided into a million cruel pieces it will be death by a thousand cuts. That is not OK in the education system.The Estimates have not been received by the sector and by the parents and children with delight and smiles. It has been disturbing to see the inequalities growing. Again we are dependent on school donations to make up for shortfalls that this Government has perpetuated in this Budget. The Green Party cannot support that. We are voting against the Estimates because we stand for education and we will be standing proudly this election for a better-quality public education system."