Lubeck MarjaMARJA LUBECK (Labour): Tēnā koe Madam Deputy Speaker. It's a pleasure for me to take a call on the Education (Social Investment Funding and Abolition of Decile System) Amendment Bill.First of all it's really great to see so many of our new MPs having the good fortune to get their members' bills drawn out of the ballot but unfortunately it won't be any surprise to Erica Stanford that we won't be supporting this bill because it's fundamentally flawed.The member Denise Lee previously asked why we don't support so many of the members' bills. I have to disagree because we just went through a member's bill from the National Party member Scott Simpson that we supported. So that's absolutely not right. But we don't support bills that are fundamentally flawed like her bill unfortunately which was a bill that would have kept women in low-paid employment and that's why we couldn't support it. It was not a bill that was a good bill even though it was as she said served on a silver platter. If you put a turd on it and rolled it in glitter on a silver platter nobody would still want to have a bar of it.So basically the previous National Government announced its intention back in June 2017 to replace the decile system with a needs index. But what they didn't do was they didn't work out the details. They didn't put the funding aside. In fact they had no money at all put aside for this policy despite the advice that the Opposition received at the time that it was likely to need an extra $100 million a year to implement this policy properly.I did refresh my knowledge of this bill by reading the member Jan Tinetti's Hansard speech again because Jan Tinetti obviously is a subject matter expert on this material having worked in schools ranging from decile one to 10. She made a very good point that it really doesn't make much of a difference to the issue—for example removing a tag like decile 1 from Merivale School in Tauranga—because the issue is about poverty and the effects of poverty on children and on our schools.So what I'm trying to say is that this bill really is missing the point it's trying to make and that's to address stigmatisation. In fact what it likely would end up doing is actually stigmatising children by labelling them as likely to underachieve once they meet certain criteria. The bill as has already been mentioned is also in complete contradiction to the Education Act because under the current decile funding system as per that Act the Minister is empowered to work out the details of allocation of the grants and with that flexibility we don't need to amend the statute every time that we need the funding system adjusted. So that flexibility would be completely lost if we put this proposed needs index in place.The other rather bizarre aspect of this bill is that it takes the very unorthodox step of first of all having to define what the decile system is and then banning it. Surely having to do such a step in legislation is a sign of badly drafted legislation. Another comment I would like to make is that a member's bill as has been mentioned by Chlöe Swarbrick previously as well is not really the correct way to review a decile system to see if it needs to be replaced with something different. The proposed needs index doesn't serve as a new mechanism for targeted funding. That's because only around 3 percent of operational funding for schools is decided by the decile rating system. It would be kind of absurd if 3 percent of the funding would be decided by legislation and the rest 97 percent of the funding were to be decided by the Minister of Education and the Ministry of Education.The Child Poverty Action Group published a statement. They said that if this bill were to pass it could put schools serving income-poor and materially deprived communities at the risk of losing funding they desperately need and put students at an increased risk of bias and stigma. So we're taking heed of that statement.All children should have access to quality education. This Government is committed to creating a high-quality fair and inclusive education system to produce equitable and excellent outcomes for all New Zealanders. Deciles might be a blunt measure and something needs to be done about them. We do agree about that. But as we have heard previously from the Minister that work is currently being done and this bill would actually override all that work that's being done. So therefore I don't support this bill. Thank you.