Kaye NikkiHon NIKKI KAYE (National—Auckland Central): Can I just take a moment today of all days to acknowledge several previous Ministers of Education particularly as it's the 125th anniversary of women getting the vote. I want to acknowledge that we heard from Anne Tolley earlier today the first female Minister of Education and I also acknowledge the Hon Hekia Parata—two outstanding women. But while I also stand here I see that Minister Chris Hipkins and his partner Jade have given birth to a beautiful baby girl Isabel. Can I just take a moment in this House to say what brilliant and beautiful timing. I wish her all of the best and also to Chris and Jade at this incredibly special time. So can I just acknowledge that in the House this evening.I've got several points that I would like to make around this piece of legislation. My first point which we said at the outset is that of course we believe in having a strong united vision for education in New Zealand. I have reached out as have my colleagues around our education system to say If at all possible can we work together with Government MPs to have as much cross-party agreement as possible?" because when I get out there in New Zealand the number of educators and parents who say to me that it is too important in many areas to be a political football. We have seen the swing back between particular administrations around our education system. That is why I have reached out in the area for instance of NCEA.Also I am deeply hopeful—and I really speak to the Labour and Green and New Zealand First members at this juncture—around that second languages bill that I have had drawn out of the ballot because I think there's a huge opportunity to have cross-party agreement—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Order! We can come back to the second reading now.Hon NIKKI KAYE: Yes and I will come back to the second reading of Jan Tinetti's bill but my point is that no more important part of our law around education could be the National Education and Learning Priorities or NELPs. So when we saw this piece of legislation the natural instinct was to say "Can we possibly agree on this?" but the reason that we have been concerned is that we do think that to be in this House and to be debating that statement the first thing that you've got to do is get your timing right Madam Assistant Speaker—and I do not mean you in particular; you've got excellent timing but that we get the timing right. We do not think—and actually there are some Ministers who agreed with us when we went through this legislative process—that this is the right time to be amending the NELPs when we have 16 reviews under way in education.I want to give some really classic examples of that. We are going through a number of reviews and there are a number of people—without dropping some people in it—who have said to me that they don't understand how Tomorrow's Schools fits with the education conversations or how that fits with the NCEA review and that is incredibly important when people look at the backdrop of National's position on this piece of legislation. Our point is that when the Minister and the Government are spending millions and millions of dollars on 16-odd reviews and they haven't been worked out how could this Parliament possibly think that now is the time to amend that national education vision statement? It puts the cart before the horse. Submitters made that point and we think the timing is terrible at a juncture when National and Labour and the Greens are trying to come together to have some discussions about our education system and where we can agree. So that is the first point: we do not agree with the timing and we share the concerns of the submitters throughout this process.The reason we know that Government members agree with us on this issue—the reason that we know this—is that during the consideration of this bill a very unusual thing occurred. Basically it was gutted. So the member herself—and I do want to acknowledge Jan Tinetti; she's a new member of Parliament and this is more just about acknowledging as a Parliament that this was a very unusual thing to occur—withdrew a lot of the bill from our perspective.So instead of saying "Look it's terrible timing and we want to come together and it sort of isn't really that good faith in terms of the sector but also the Opposition." we then have the situation that the bill was gutted and really became a set of minor amendments. Previously in this House I have walked the House through the types of amendments in terms of minor wording changes that have occurred. Now we have this situation that not only do we think the timing is bad but the substantive content of the bill was gutted by the member and then also in our view it is a little bit of a waste of the Parliament's time to be making these amendments. As I say that was acknowledged by many submitters and it is as I said before contrary to the 16-odd reviews that are under way.I want to spend the remainder of my speech though talking about—given that the substantive nature of this bill is around our vision for education what I can tell you is that I have visited hundreds of schools in my time in this Parliament. I have met with incredible principals and teachers and I have sat down and had a drink with members of Parliament on different sides of this House and I can say to you that the good news is that there are some very common themes that occur in terms of our education system. So when we get down to business in my view—hopefully—through the Minister engaging in a meaningful way through the education conversation dialogues or the other reviews that are occurring with the Opposition then I think there are some common themes that are going to come up. There is reform that needs to happen in terms of our learning support system. There are parents out there who need greater support. They need greater wraparound support.There is a need—and that's why I was so gutted with the communities of online learning being effectively scrapped through legislation before this House—to continually update our education system around the disruption of technology and we are very focused on that. In fact in my short time as Minister of Education I did put through changes around the digital technologies curriculum. That is an area where there can be cross-party agreement.There can be cross-party agreement in languages. When you look at the different positions of different political parties—and it does come back Madam Assistant Speaker to the content of this bill because it is around the vision of our education system—there is cross-party agreement. We all want to strengthen Te Reo but we all don't want to deny people access to their heritage languages. So again that's another area where there's cross-party agreement.Actually while we did not agree with the process around scrapping national standards I was the Minister who put the Cabinet paper through and who said "Let's move to a system of progress." But where we differ is around that accountability and ensuring that we have that nationwide benchmark of achievement.There is agreement around the fact that we have major issues in terms of teacher shortages and that we need to do more to incentivise people to come into teaching. That is a conversation. It is a conversation about class sizes. It is a conversation about workload. It is a conversation about pay and can I acknowledge all of those people who have been involved in the collective bargaining and negotiations around our workforce.There is in my view the possibility for huge agreement but the problem with this legislation is that it goes ahead of those processes. It says "We know better than the Opposition. We are not prepared to engage in good faith. We're going to put forward a piece of legislation that initially would substantially change really the vision and priorities of our education system." That's what the Government member decided to do with the support of Chris Hipkins and unfortunately we thought that was the process we were then going into and then the bill was gutted in the select committee.From our perspective what is needed more than anything is not this bill—because it is a little bit of a waste of Parliament's time and it has disrupted our equilibrium in terms of relationships because it put the cart before the horse—but actually to sit down to talk through those issues to acknowledge that there is agreement in a number of areas and to stop the continuous conversations. Yes we want to have the conversations. Yes there is a role for the reviews. Yes there is a role for a conversation about our national vision and learning and priorities. But in terms of this bill this has got ahead of those conversations and it has disrupted the good faith of this Parliament on such an important issue as the future of our education system and that is why National opposes this bill."