Hipkins ChrisHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): Nikki Kaye claims that the removal of national standards would make us the laughing stock of the world. I think what the world potentially is laughing at is the fact that subsequent to introducing national standards the achievement of New Zealand children declined in international studies because they clearly didn't work. They weren't national and they weren't standard.Nikki Kaye then claims that we didn't consult about the removal of national standards. I can give her an absolute guarantee that there was a lot more consultation about the removal of national standards than there was about the introduction of them because they were introduced under urgency without any select committee process at all. We at least had the decency to put it through a full six-month select committee process in order to remove those national standards.Basically Nicola Willis and Nikki Kaye both repeated many messages that we've already heard repeatedly through this debate which effectively trash the schools that are going to be replacing charter schools. I think they should take care because if they do care about the children who attend those then trashing the reputation of the schools that will open at the beginning of next year and saying that they are not going to be the same and they're not going to be able to deliver quality education for the kids in the way they have been in the past isn't going to be in the best interests of those kids and of those schools. So I'd encourage them to think again about that particular approach.With regard to Nicola Willis' claim that the Supplementary Order Paper was not given to the select committee in time for there to be adequate consideration that's simply not true. What the committee chooses to do with that and the fact that they chose whether or not to hear submissions is a matter for the committee.With regard to the claim both Nicola Willis and Nikki Kaye made that removing national standards will mean no system-wide monitoring again that's a complete fiction. There was system-wide monitoring for national standards and there'll be system-wide monitoring after national standards. In fact it will be genuinely reliable and it will be robust unlike national standards which study after study showed was neither national nor standard. So trying to say that there was a comparison between school A and school B using national standards was nonsense because we know that the subjective judgments that school A and B were using in order to assess national standards were often different and so the same child would be assessed differently by different schools. National standards were a fiction. They didn't live up to the label on the tin and that is one of the reasons why we removed those.Finally the other point—which again I've already made several times—is that there has been no evidence of fraud with regard to the implementation of fees-free. Most of the arguments being raised by the opposition are about the fees-free policy itself. That is not what this bill deals with; it deals quite narrowly with the offence provision for fraud. There is no evidence of fraud; this is a precautionary measure. The measure is here first of all to make it easier to comply with the fees-free requirements for a declaration and second of all to introduce an offence if there was any evidence of fraud—and as I've indicated there hasn't been. So it's about simply safeguarding the public's interest.