English Bill: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
English Bill: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:623;Page:18193] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 That Minister Ruth Dyson for all her political experience had one of her major decisions of last year overturned by the National candidate for East Coast Anne Tolley. Despite the fact that the Minister has hundreds of bureaucrats she flaked in front of a little bit of pressure from a National candidate from the East Coast. 
Jill Pettis 
: Why wasn’t she higher on the list? Oh that’s right she’s a woman. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: It is market day is it? [ 
Interruption 
] 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: There is to be no interjection between individuals who do not have the floor. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Last year at this time the Prime Minister spent some time before her address telling the media that she did not want to do it that she did it only because she had to that it was boring and that because she gave it to the Opposition it was easily attacked. This year she changed her story. This year was the opportunity to present a vision. The problem is that she did not change the speech. It was pretty much the same one—yesterday’s clichés dressed up in tomorrow’s spending. 
John Key 
: Plagiarising her own speech. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: She plagiarised her own speech and that should be banned. As Dr Brash said her speech smacked of the view that every solution is a Government solution and that every answer has to be the answer that Ministers and the Labour Government come up with. I noticed how often the Prime Minister tried to emulate Martin Luther King. We had a somewhat smaller crowd and I have to say that it was to somewhat less effect. I think she mentioned the word “dream” six times in the first three pages. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: No good without a tambourine. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: It was no good without a tambourine. The Prime Minister is now going on a “dream” trip. I would have to say that when it comes to education she is retreating into dreams because the reality is getting so messy. 
Education used to be the centrepiece of Labour’s economic strategy. If we go back through the Budgets from 2000 2001 and 2002 they talked extensively about just how important the high-minded tertiary education strategy was about how the Government was going to make dramatic changes to schooling essentially because of Labour’s moral superiority on this issue and all of it was focused on increasing skills and productivity. Today the Prime Minister was saying pretty much the same things about productivity but she certainly did not point to the central importance of education. 
I want to talk a bit about why that is. One of Labour’s dreams has been free State education and if there is any man who is meant to believe in free State education it is the new Associate Minister for schools David Benson-Pope whose previous responsibility was for fish. That seems to have qualified him to be now responsible for children. That is the man who when he became an Associate Minister of Education was interviewed by the media because they wanted to know what it was that drove his passion about education. He said: “There are no issues on the table.” 
Opposition Members 
: What! 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Well he might be right. They are not on the table but man they are on the front page of yesterday’s  
New Zealand Herald 
! 
The headline reads: “Parents’ school fee burden”. Why does that matter? It matters because it tells us of the yawning chasm between Labour’s dreams and what happens when it tries to implement a policy. The paper has an excellent example of “free” State education. The table in the  
New Zealand Herald  
outlines what fees parents are asked to pay. When we look down the list we cannot tell the difference between fee-charging integrated schools and no-fee State schools. What does the Associate Minister say about this? Mr Benson-Pope says—actually he whines—that free education is enshrined in law and therefore it is free so it is wrong to claim otherwise. He said that free education is enshrined in law and therefore this does not exist—these parents are not paying these fees. Labour still believes in free State education. 
That is the dream the Prime Minister has and she sent her little Brownshirt bovver boy off to the media to pretend that the dream is happening. But it is not. For parents it is a nightmare. 
Hon Harry Duynhoven 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I hesitate to interrupt the member’s speech but I do not think that that was appropriate language to be used in Parliament. The connotations of “Brownshirt” are fairly well known and not really acceptable in any sort of democratic Parliament. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Speaking to the point of order I am advised through the media that “Brownshirt” is a term the Labour caucus has affectionately used for the Associate Minister. So if it is good enough for them it is good enough for Parliament. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: I must say I had reflected on the term the member used and I would ask him to withdraw. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: There are all sorts of things that could be said in this Parliament in a way that someone might take offence to and you would require the person to withdraw. If that were to become the norm it would be a very simple matter for any member to decide that he or she was going to disrupt the proceedings on any given day by simply waiting for the description to come from one member or another and that would give the person an opportunity to engage in that disruptive behaviour. I think you have to be very very careful about ruling in this way. It is well known that your caucus colleagues refer to Mr Benson-Pope in this way and for Mr English to simply refer to a person having someone else operate on his behalf surely cannot be as offensive as all that. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: I thank the member for his explanation. I myself am not aware of the term in that respect. I had thought seriously about pulling Mr English up at the time but I tested the will of the House and did not do so. The reality is that exception has been taken and on reflection I ask the member to withdraw. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: I withdraw. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: Probably brown trousers now. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Well that is how the Minister will be feeling because he has discovered there are issues. When he said there were no issues in education what he actually meant was that there were no issues for him and the New Zealand Educational Institute. That is what he meant. There may be issues for parents and students but they do not count. They are not issues. 
Labour was going to close the gap on underachievement. The Minister says there are no issues. We have Third World achievement levels in literacy and numeracy in our schools—that is for the bottom 20 percent of our students. There is no sign that that gap is closing and no sign it ever will certainly from a Minister who says there are no issues in education. Imagine if one is a student—is the National Certificate of Educational Achievement not likely to be an issue? 
The new Minister is completely ignoring what is going on with that qualification. The problem is that it depends on public confidence not on the theological beliefs of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority or how robustly the Minister thinks he should defend it at all costs. I tell the Minister that that pool of public confidence is draining away and if he does nothing the students will be left stranded. We know it is draining away because his own public agency—the New Zealand Qualifications Authority—has done a survey that shows exactly that. 
While it is draining away the Minister is sunning himself beside the pool bathing in self-congratulation and chosen ignorance of any issues in education. It is a disgrace. That is why the Prime Minister did not mention education much at all in her speech. Because she has put a second-rate halfwitted politician in charge of it who is too clever for his own good that shows that the Government is not taking our school students and their parents seriously. The Government will pay a price for that in election year. The Minister’s attitude towards underachievement is an absolute disgrace. 
But this is just part of a track record. For two or three Budgets we heard all about the tertiary education strategy hatched up by the most brilliant second-rate lecturers who left university because they could not make it and came into politics but it was the revenge of the middle management. They were going to run the universities the way they should be run! It has been a total failure and that is why Steve Maharey got sacked. It was so bad that in a good-news speech today the Prime Minister even mentioned the bad news about tertiary education. The bad news is that for the expenditure of billions of dollars and millions of words and half a million workshops and conferences and seminars the tertiary strategy has absolutely and utterly failed. It was the centrepiece of the drive for productivity and it has turned into a quagmire of failed low-quality courses that no one completes but that cost literally billions—a number so big that people cannot get their heads around it. 
That is why we cannot take the Prime Minister’s address seriously. Because for all the dreaming the track record in education which is meant to be Labour’s moral practical and policy strong point is dismal; it is a failure. They have underlined that by sacking their tertiary spokesman by sacking their school spokesman Trevor Mallard moving a second-rate “Minister of Fish” in to take his position and leaving Steve Maharey in welfare where more dreaming about a single benefit will come to the same dreaded end as the tertiary strategy. I look forward to the education debate in election year because Labour is losing it. Labour is losing the education debate and it is on all the things one would expect it to lose it—that is: waste incompetence over-centralisation no faith in parents little faith in teachers and not a care in the world for students. The new Associate Minister summed it up: Labour believes there are no issues in education. The Opposition believes it is the biggest issue for New Zealand.