English Bill: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
English Bill: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:630;Page:2430] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 This is an opportunity for the Minister of Education to get up and explain himself to the House. The reason he should explain himself is that no Minister of Education has left a longer trail of policy wreckage than the Hon Steve Maharey. 
Today’s announcements about tertiary education policy are about as vacuous as we all expected but at least they are an attempt to try to clean up his mess. The interesting thing about today’s announcements is that they sound an awful lot like what the Government was saying 6 years ago. But the result of 6 years of strategies reports reviews and bureaucratic expansion has been a total failure by this Minister to achieve any of the objectives that he laid out for himself. Apart from the climate change policy this is the biggest policy mess I have seen in 20 years of watching public policy in New Zealand as it has unravelled. 
The Minister might want to explain why the cost of running the tertiary education system has gone from about $40 million a year when he took over to $140 million this last financial year. What does $140 million worth of bureaucrats and paper achieve for the tertiary education system? The answer is nothing that matters. It makes the Minister feel good. It makes him feel like he has achieved something. But what does it do for the students out there? It does virtually nothing. The result of the sum total of several hundred million dollars spent on running this tertiary education system has been the cancellation of a number of qualifications no one was doing. That is what has happened. That is the result of the big strategic decision he made and he could have done it in a week with half a dozen bureaucrats at a cost of about $140000 instead of $140 million. 
So I ask this Minister to get up to apologise to the taxpayers of New Zealand and to acknowledge that he has wasted the time energy and initiative of so many people with a genuine interest in education by pursuing a dream that could never come to fruition. I have to say that I among others felt some relief when Dr Cullen took over the portfolio although he has been in charge of it for a while now and I am disappointed with what he produced today. He is talking about the plan taking 2 years to implement. The bits of it that make some sense—a common sense to everyone—actually used to be in the system years ago until this Minister came along. 
I would also like the Minister to tell us what initiatives he will take in education because—like the rest of the Government—he thinks he knows it all. He thinks the job has been done. He has got nothing new to offer to children in New Zealand. He will oversee some of the initiatives that Trevor Mallard put in place. Some of those initiatives had some merit such as the literacy and numeracy project. But I want to know what he will do to generate a sense of urgency about what we can do for our young children. 
I also want him to explain the ridiculous answers he has been giving in the House about the SchoolSmart website. The Government is spending millions putting Tana Umaga on TV to try to get parents interested in education. They get to find out what Tana thinks—and that is fine—but they do not get to find out any useful information about what they can do to make decisions for their children. They do not get the information that is available to the Minister about their child’s school. Is that not a disgrace? 
The Minister of Education runs a website containing performance information about schools—information that is well presented and in context. It contains a range of data painting a complex picture about a school. The Minister can see it the ministry can see it and the Education Review Office can see it. They all use that information to make decisions about which schools are at risk. The teachers can see it the principal can see it and the advisory services can see it. In short everyone in education who is a bureaucrat and who has no particular interest in any particular child is allowed to see the information about school performance. But parents are not allowed to see it unless they go to the principal’s office and sit there and watch the principal tap it out on the keyboard because as the Minister said that is the right context. Apparently this information about schools is too dangerous for parents to look at from the safety of their own homes. The whole world is going digital with real-time Internet access to everything. We spend millions teaching our children that that is where the world is going but we will not make a publicly funded publicly owned website available to the parents. 
I would like the Minister to tell us how much he has spent on assembling that information. It is actually a useful initiative. It is not the answer to everything but it does bring together a range of performance information about schools in a way that no Government has been able to before. It does not create league tables. The Minister gets up and rants on about how all we are trying to do is “tear down the social democratic school system”. Was that not a revealing remark? Who says the school system is a social democratic one? That is a Government that believes it now owns runs and defines our school system. It is precisely when we get that kind of arrogance in a Minister who is running our school system that parents need access to the objective data about the performance of their child’s school because I say to the Minister not every parent is a social democrat. Not every parent believes that schools are there as an expression of Labour Party values. In fact almost all parents believe that schools are there to teach our children to become competent citizens based on the values that we have as parents and communities not the values that the Minister has as a component in a Labour Party machine that is getting more and more tired by the day. 
I want the Minister to explain to the Committee why we should appropriate public money so that it can be spent on a social democratic school system. Because that is the first time I have ever heard a Minister claim New Zealand’s school system as an arm of his or her own ideological views. What a disgrace! It is no wonder he does not want parents to know what is going on. The Minister says that access to this website means there will be league tables and that that is privatisation. What a load of nonsense! The website does not create league tables. It presents information about one school measured against anonymous similar schools. What could be more harmless than that? It does not compare one school with another. 
I tell the Minister that what does lead to comparisons of one school with another which he does not like is when he releases public information about school performance—and he has to when I ask him to. I can put that information into league tables if I want to. They will be messy they will be contradictory and they will present data out of context but the media have an endless appetite for them. So he is releasing information that achieves exactly what he does not want—that is league tables—and he is hiding from parents readily accessible good-quality contextual information that is not about league tables but that informs a parent about his or her school compared with a range of similar schools. So the Minister needs to get with it. 
This is the digital age; we are teaching our children about information technology. The Minister can tell us why that information is all there—all public information publicly funded—but parents can get it only if they hop in their horse and cart drive off to school and make an appointment with the principal. Can members imagine if banks said: “You can’t look at your bank statement unless you make an appointment with the bank manager.” Does the Minister not know that parents in the comfort of their own homes can have access to all sorts of information on the Internet? Is he not aware of that? Why does he think he can stand in the way of low-cost high-quality technology that will make that information available? The Minister is trying to hold back the tide. The information exists; it is public information—and parents could access it if he just decided to let them have it.